Research interests

My main interest lies in research framework aiming at promoting biodiversity and human activities coexistence. Therefore, I am particularly interested in ecological questions such as species distribution and habitat assessment at the local and global scale, species interactions and communities dynamic in human influenced environment and the role of functional diversity at different trophic levels on overall ecosystem functioning and human related services. I am then interested in transdisciplinary approaches to investigate links and interactions between social systems and ecosystems. 

The project of my PhD focuses on agroforest ecosystems, more specifically the wooded pastures in the Jura mountains of Switzerland. It represents a form of multiple use of natural resources in an extensive sylvopastoral system that also hosts a rich biodiversity. Trees play an important role in such environment, to maintain a high degree of habitat heterogeneity at the local and landscape scale, supporting biodiversity and its related ecosystem functions and services, but also by directly providing ecosystem services to humans. Therefore, using transdisciplinary methods the project aims at assessing the social and ecological values of wooded pastures to suggest the development of relevant conservation strategies.