Catarina Conte Jakovac

My research interest is on the ecology of tropical forests. I am specially interested in forest regeneration and ecological restoration. I have done my MSc in ecological restoration in the Mata Atlantica Forest in São Paulo, Brazil, at the UNICAMP university.

Later on I moved to Manaus, with a fellow scholarship to join the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia-INPA, to collaborated with research on the effects of land use on secondary succession, and on the management of secondary forests. (www.pioneiras.blogspot.com)

In 2011 I started my PhD at Wageningen University. My PhD project had the aim to evaluate the consequences of agricultural intensification for swidden cultivation systems in the Amazon. I evaluated how intensification-driven changes in landscape dynamics, recovery capacity, productivity and management practices can affect the resilience of the system. In 2015 I graduated after defending my PhD thesis entitled "Resilience of Amazonian landscapes to agricultural intensification".

In 2017-2018, I worked at the International Institute for Sustainability, IIS, in Rio de Janeiro, on the spatial planning of restoration and the estimation of carbon gains from ecosystems' restoration.

In 2019 I went back to Wageningen University for a postdoc in the Forest Ecology and Forest Management group, to work on the 2ndFOR network for secondary forests and the PANTROP ERC-project on drivers of succession across the Pantropics.

In 2021 I returned to to my home country to become associate professor at the Centro de Ciências Agrárias of the Federal University of Santa Catarina, where I lead the LEMEF lab (laboratório de ecologia e manejo de ecossistemas florestais) on forest management and restoration of tropical forests.