Virgilio Hermoso López

Asociado

PROGRAMA / Biología de la conservación

Virgilio is currently a senior researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) at the Doñana Biological Station. He is a conservation biologist, especially interested in how to best manage threats to the persistence of biodiversity under dynamic conditions and limited resources. My work involves an interdisciplinary approach, from ecology to mathematics and computing science, to understand the ecological and socio-economic problems behind the decline of biodiversity and ecosystem services and provide novel methods and tools to address them.
He finished my PhD in 2008, focused on the assessment of the ecological health of Mediterranean rivers and the spatial allocation of conservation efforts. During his 6 years of Postdoctoral experience in Australia (2009-2014, University of Queensland and Griffith University) he contributed to the implementation of systematic approaches to conservation planning in freshwater ecosystems. He focused on demonstrating new ways of addressing the special needs of freshwater ecosystems and led the development of novel approaches to enhance the capacity of systematic conservation planning to identify priority areas that protect freshwater biodiversity. In 2015 he started as a Ramon y Cajal researcher at the Forest Science Centre of Catalonia. During 2015-2021 he continued my work on freshwater conservation planning, and also worked on assessing the adequacy of European conservation policies. I explored how to distribute the scarce resources available for conservation and designing networks of Green Infrastructure.
He has co-authored more than 140 publications in peer reviewed journals (>90% of these in the first quartile of their respective fields), like Nature, Science, Science Advances, Global Change Biology, Conservation Letters, Journal of Applied Ecology or Conservation Biology, and first-authored 48 of them. He has also authored 11 book chapters, leading 4 of them. His research has received 6790 citations resulting in a H-index of 47 and an i-10 index of 113 (google scholar, October 2024).
He is a board member of the Key Biodiversity Area Standards and Appeals Committee, Birdlife International and FW BON – Freshwater Biodiversity Observation Network. I was also a board member of the Freshwater Working Group of the Society for Conservation Biology during 2011-2018.