Dr. Joan Casanelles Abella - Urban Ecologist

Biography

Hi there! I’m an ecologist interested on urban ecosystems and conservation biology. Currently, I’m a Postdoctoral researcher TU Munich at the Urban Productive Ecosystems and a guest scientist at the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL. My research is focus on how human-dominated-ecosystems impact biodiversity patterns, ecological processes and people. In that regard, I am particularly interested in the use of functional ecology approaches including (1) dietary and nutritional traits of insect species in novel ecosystems, and (2) social-ecological plant trait determining occurrence and abundance of individual plant species as well as community structure and composition. Furthermore, I am interested in understanding the effects of different global change drivers, specially regarding climate change (e.g., rising temperatures, extreme events) and urban densification, which is the process leading to more compact cities. This includes assessing the effects of current urban density and forecasting future urban densification on animal communities, testing the effects of temperature on floral phenology in cities and rural areas, and evaluating the effect of extreme whether events in traditional orchard meadows. Finally, I am interested in human-biodiversity relationships in urban ecosystems, focusing on specific study systems. In that regard, I investigate ways to reconcile wild bee conservation and urban beekeeping via working with different stakeholders, improving management and ecologically informing habitat restoration in cities, and apply spatial approaches to improve environemntal justice. I combine both field and lab work together with the use of existing databases from my previous projects, and synthesis work.

I have a passion for botany and insect enthomology, as well as for history, cinema and literature.