Leticia Benavalli (2022)
Alumni Diploma Students
I’m a young researcher from the peripherical east zone of São Paulo, Brazil. Since I was a child, I was fascinated with understanding the order of the things that lead our daily life in the city to be exactly how it is. This curiosity and my passion for adventure sports in nature, additionally for biodiversity conversation, led me to take a BSc and Licentiate degree in Biological Sciences, and also a Master Degree in Ecology and Natural Resources Conservation at the Federal University of Uberlândia, Brazil. Throughout these processes, I had a lot of internships in education, extension, and research fields and was a volunteer in several NGOs and other public and private entities in order to achieve a better and full comprehension of not only what is to be a conservation scientist in Brazil, but also how social and economic aspects of my country can affect research within this field. This led me to be the co-founder of two NGOs, as a way to get out of the academic perspective and evolve society as a whole in what I consider good sustainable actions.
An important aspect of my trajectory is my experience in fieldwork with large mammals and, especially, the opportunity to learn, in practice, how to manage and deal with different aspects of these animal’s conservation. For this reason, among others, my current researches evolve landscape ecology and macroecology of medium and large mammals, especially jaguars and their prey in Brazil. In the last years, I contributed to the development of conservation measures aimed to reduce jaguar-human conflicts. Also, I examined the current situation and how different scenarios of future change in agriculture expansion of climate change will affect these measures. Finally, I’m particularly interested in how to address carnivores-human conflict and wildlife conservation.