Borja is a postdoctoral researcher working on the BIOJUST/BIODIVERSA project (https://www.biodiversa.eu/2023/04/19/bio-just/) under the supervision of Miguel Bugalho. His goal is to identify priority areas for biodiversity conservation and the maintenance of essential ecosystem services, such as groundwater recharge, in the Portuguese montado, and to analyze how PES (Payment for Ecosystem Services) schemes can contribute to their conservation.

 

Previous bakcground: During his PhD (“Ecohydrological response of dryland ecosystems to aridification: the role of runoff water redistribution”), Borja focused on understanding the effects of runoff redistribution determining the response of vegetation and soils performance against aridification in drylands. For that, he combined experimental fieldwork with climate and remote sensing data and spatial modelling techniques. This gives him the possibility to explore the response of vegetation spatial structure, composition and diversity and the associated soil activity to aridification and to evaluate the influence of water redistribution processes determining this response at different spatial and temporal scales.

 

As result, he is familiar with the use of TLS, LICOR, different GIS software and programing languages such as PIX4Dmapper, QGIS, SAGA, ArcGIS, CloudCompare, Google Earth Engine Code Editor or R. In addition, he has experience on determining biological and physicochemical soil properties (e.g., soil microbial respiration, soil organic carbon, pH, texture, water holding capacity, hydraulic conductivity...). “