Ana Márcia Enes Barbosa

Biography

"As an undergrad student at Porto University (Portugal) I did field and lab work on rocky-shore marine benthos and on otter (Lutra lutra) local distribution and feeding ecology in different parts of its Portuguese range. For my graduation thesis I did an internship at the Biogeography, Diversity and Conservation lab of the University of Málaga (Spain), where I set up a geographic information system, digitised a number of environmental variables, and modelled the larger-scale distribution of the otter in the Iberian Peninsula. I was later hired by the Spanish Society for the Study and Conservation of Mammals (SECEM) to do biogeographic analyses of the species included in the Spanish mammal atlas. I proceeded to do my PhD Thesis on biogeographic relationships between predators, prey and parasites in the Iberian Peninsula, focusing on a few mammal and helminth species and including comparative phylogeography. Afterwards, I was hired by the University of Extremadura in Cáceres (Spain) to do research on red deer phylogeography and spatial ecology. I was then awarded a 6-year FCT post-doctoral fellowship, co-hosted by Imperial College London (UK) and the University of Évora (Portugal), in which I studied wide-scale distributional and phylogeographical patterns of terrestrial vertebrates in the Mediterranean Basin. Since January 2014, I have an FCT Investigator contract at CIBIO/InBIO — University of Évora (Portugal), working on maximization of large-scale efficiency in biodiversity management and conservation. My main focus is on terrestrial vertebrates (mammals, amphibians and reptiles), but I also collaborate with a network of international researchers to perform macroecological analyses on a range of other organisms including plants, birds, freshwater microfauna, and insects. I am a member of the International Biogeography Society, the Spanish mammalogical society and the Portuguese herpetological society, and associate editor of Animal Conservation."

Research Interest

My research interests include biogeography, macroecology, distribution modelling, comparative phylogeography, biodiversity patterns, and conservation. So far I have worked mainly on mammals and amphibians, but also on birds, reptiles, insects and other invertebrates, and occasionally on plants. I’m particularly interested in integrating different scientific fields in multidisciplinary approaches and in developing and applying innovative methodologies, or adapting those traditionally used in other fields.