People

Mar Cabeza is an established PI at the University of Helsinki leading the “Global Change and Conservation” team. After completing her PhD at the University of Helsinki, MC conducted a postdoc at the Biodiversity and Global Change lab in Spain. She then returned to Helsinki to establish her own research team. Most of the research projects that MC currently leads fall under the conservation effectiveness umbrella, by which she attempts to address both ultimate and proximate causes of success and failure of conservation actions. Her current research interests include basic field ecology needed to understand processes at local scales, large scale macroecological studies involving projections of climate change, and the integration of these in conservation assessments and planning. Mar also has passion for education. She is involved in education initiatives at a variety of levels, from school children to advanced PhD students. She is especially interested in capacity building in developing countries. This education passion is also shared by other members of the team.

Tuomas Aivelo is interested in disease ecology and multidisciplinary research. He did his PhD in University of Helsinki on intestinal parasite of mouse lemurs, then a postdoctoral project in University of Zürich on tick-borne pathogens and he returned to Helsinki in January 2018 to work for the Helsinki Urban Rat Project.

Helsinki Urban Rat Project has grown as a thriving team within GCC encompassing ecology, history, social sciences and educational sciences. In addition to all things rats, Tuomas' current research projects include biology education, such as genetics literacy in upper secondary school students and teachers and citizen science in learning.

Tuomas is also active in science outreach, including his popular science book on parasites, Loputtomat loiset, which has been now translated to Japanese, Hungarian and Spanish.

• Disease ecology and parasitology
• Urban ecology
• Biology education
• Science communication
• Multidisciplinary animal studies

Tiago Monteiro-Henriques completed his PhD in native vegetation at the Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, in 2010. He is a postdoctoral researcher since 2017 (FCT grant ref: SFRH/BPD/115057/2016; 2017-2023), based at the Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, but in association with GCC Lab, where he conducts short-term stages. He has a background in native vegetation and landscape research with particular interest in numerical analysis and classification of vegetation data, flora and vegetation mapping, ecological modelling, nature conservation, and ecological restoration.

His current research activities focus on native forests from the Iberian Peninsula and aim to create i) a general systematization of forest types using combinatorics and optimization; ii) spatially explicit models of their potential and actual distributions; iii) an endangerment assessment of those forest types, linked with fire patterns and global changes and iv) disseminate all of the produced information on the web along with specific tools to support management and conservation actions and respective prioritization.



● Native forests conservation

● Vegetation classification

● Vegetation modelling and mapping

Pablo Manzano completed a PhD in Ecology and the Environment in 2015 at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, researching seed dispersal ecology in Spanish sheep-grazed rangelands. Since finishing his MSc in 2004, he has been working first on his PhD field work and then in a series of international development initiatives that took him from the Western Balkans to two global positions in IUCN in Nairobi and in FAO in Rome, both related to pastoralism. In these years he has kept his research agenda on rangeland ecology but expanded into other disciplines of the pastoralist domain, including economics, sociology and anthropology. His research approach aims to integrate the social, economic and environmental livelihood dimensions. He is currently a HELSUS fellow addressing global pastoralism sustainability.

• Rangeland ecology
• Pastoralist systems

Viktor Zöldi joined the Helsinki Urban Rats Project in September 2023 as a Postdoctoral researcher. He graduated from the Eötvös Loránd University (MSc in biology) and as well from the University of Debrecen (MSc in epidemiology). He completed his PhD at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Budapest, investigating a natural tick-borne encephalitis focus in Western Hungary. He completed the two-year European field epidemiology training (EPIET) program at the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) in Helsinki. Besides his scientific work, he has worked in biocidal product authorization for many years. Also, he has developed the current Rat Control Program for the City of Budapest. His research interests:

• Disease ecology
• Epidemiology
• Parasitology
• Integrated Pest Management
• Citizen science
  
   

Karolina Lukasik is a postdoctoral researcher in the Helsinki Urban Rats Project, where she studies the conflicts between the gardeners and non-human animals in urban allotment gardens. She completed her PhD in psychology at Åbo Akademi University and then conducted postdoctoral research at SWPS University of Humanities and Social Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, in the project “Whom to trust? Cognitive determinants of learning from others”. She also graduated from the School of Ecopoetics, where she researched the history of laboratory rats. Karolina is especially passionate about the animals that we label as “pests” and building biocentric, multispecies communities.

• Urban ecology
• Environmental humanities
• Posthumanism
• More-than-human conflicts

Moustapha Itani is a doctoral researcher specializing in interdisciplinary environmental research with a focus on socioecological systems. With a passion for project ideation and development, he thrives in collaborative settings, uniting diverse perspectives to create innovative solutions. His academic journey from Lebanon to Finland reflects his dedication to global and local conservation efforts and fostering cross-cultural dialogue. While his PhD bridges ecological sustainability, biodiversity, and pastoral governance, his broader research explores sustainable living and conflict resolution in multicultural urban as well as rural settings. Beyond his discipline, Moustapha has contributed to research in media studies, mental health and public health highlighting his commitment to addressing complex societal challenges.

• Vegetation Science
• Pastoral Governance
• Functional ecology
• Biodiversity Conservation

Federica Manca is interested in how species interact in coastal marine ecosystems, and in how biotic interactions modulate the response of marine ecosystems to climate change. She completed her MSc in Marine Biology in Italy in 2016 with a thesis on coral-associated fauna in the Maldives, and in the following years worked on different research projects in Japan and Italy. Her PhD research focuses on marine vegetated ecosystems in the Baltic Sea, where she uses ecological network analysis to explore the web of interactions between marine macrophytes (macroalgae and seagrasses) and their associated fauna, and to model how macrophyte-dominated communities will shift under future scenarios of climate change. She is also a member of the Benthic Ecology Team at Tvärminne Zoological Station.

• Marine ecology
• Ecological modeling

Vasco Branco is a doctoral student, working on automation in conservation biology through a variety of methods, including statistics, machine learning, etc. He was a master student at the University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Sciences where his thesis “Red list of Portuguese spiders: spatial patterns and conservation” sought to participate in the the first edition of the national invertebrate Red Book by updating the Iberian Spider Checklist, producing species risk assessments for 32 species of spider endemic to Portugal and analysing their diversity. Vasco is funded by the Kone Foundation.

• spiders
• Araneae
• machine learning
• artificial intelligence
• data extraction

My name is Francisco dos Reis Silva and I have just joined the LUOVA PhD program. I am passionate about conservation biology and herpetofauna and did my master’s thesis on amphibian and reptile diversity across agricultural landscapes in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa. For my PhD, I am building on the same topic, investigating how different types of oil palm plantations—traditional and industrial—affect herpetofauna communities in Liberia, and how these compare to old-growth forests. Furthermore, I will explore the snake-human conflict in these plantations, looking at how snakes are perceived and how that affects snake communities, and whether oil palm plantations increase the risk of snake-bite envenoming, a high-priority tropical disease, as classified by the WHO.

• Conservation biology
• Community Ecology
• Herpetology
• Agroecology

My name is Mihika Sen, and I am a Doctoral Researcher in the Interdisciplinary Environmental Sciences Doctoral Programme at the University of Helsinki. My research primarily focuses on mitigating negative human-elephant interactions across Asia and Africa. I completed my Master's degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Helsinki, conducting my Master's thesis on the social and ecological effectiveness of electric fencing as a mitigation tool against crop-raiding elephants in Laikipia county, Kenya. For my PhD, I will be studying individual-level variations in the crop raiding behaviour of Asian elephants in Assam, Northeast India. I will also investigate shared local knowledge and perceptions of farmers in Assam towards elephant behaviour. The overall aim of the project is to develop an adaptable and sustainable individual-level crop raiding mitigation framework, balancing the needs of both elephants and local communities. 

• Conservation biology
• Elephant behaviour and conservation 
• Human-wildlife interactions
• Community-based conservation 

My name is Cindy Schwenk, I am half German and half Finnish and doing my PhD in the Doctoral Programme in Wildlife Biology as part of the Global Change and Conservation Group (GCC) and in cooperation with the Snowchange Cooperative. I am looking at the breeding site ecology and various conservation challenges related to the Finnish wild forest reindeer. More specifically, I will look at their habitat use, movement and behaviour in relation to predation and land use. I will also try to assess the risks and feasibility of a potential reintroduction of this near-threatened subspecies to a new area in eastern Finland. I have already worked with these animals before during my Master’s in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology here at the University of Helsinki. I am very interested in boreal and arctic ecosystems and species, especially large mammals as well as applied conservation.

• Movement Ecology
• Reintroductions
• Wild Forest Reindeer
• Local and Traditional Knowledge

I am a Conservation Biologist with a M.Sc. in Conservation Biology from the University of Burgundy (2023) and a B.Sc. in Renewable Natural Resources from the University for Development Studies in Ghana (2020). My research experience includes working as a Field Researcher at the Institute for Research in Tropical Ecology and as a Wildlife Genetics Laboratory Technician at the Agency of National Parks in Gabon, where I profiled forest elephants involved in human-elephant conflicts using camera traps, dung metrics, and DNA analysis. Before, I worked in Ghana’s Mole National Park, as an Assistant Wildlife Manager and contributed to management and conservation works, monitoring wildlife population, understanding the dynamics of wildlife populations and their interactions with local communities. Currently, my PhD project investigates the role of forest elephants in climate change mitigation through their impact on carbon sequestration. The research examines how elephant foraging preferences for tree species vary along land-use change gradients, comparing forest elephants, savanna elephants, and their hybrids. Using genetic analysis, camera trapping, vegetation surveys, and remote sensing, I aim to identify demographic and habitat loss thresholds that influence elephants' contribution to carbon storage while exploring potential synergies between climate change mitigation and human-elephant conflict reduction in Ghana. 

• African elephants, Megaherbivores
• Aboveground carbon dynamics
• Human-elephant conflict
• Land-use change

I am Kasper Mickos, a PhD reseacher in the Doctoral Programme in Wildlife Biology (LUOVA). I have always longed to gain comprehensive, multidisciplinary understanding of conservation, which is why I have studied very broadly. I did my MSc studies at the University of Helsinki studying conservation in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology programme. My BSc studies were in Environmental Sciences at the same university. I also completed an exchange semester studying conservation at the Aix-Marseille University in France. In addition, my studies have included e.g. geography, aquatic sciences, and teacher studies.

Using my broad understanding to create new knowledge for conservation, I am currently working on my PhD project. Here, I focus on human-carnivore coexistence, looking to create new knowledge on how the fear of humans affects the behaviour of carnivores. Moreover, my objective is to create new solutions to aid in coexistence, with a focus on novel, automated, and adaptive methods to deter carnivores from feeding on livestock both in Finland and in East Africa.

• Human-carnivore coexistence 
• Human-caused landscape of fear
• Brown bears
• Large African carnivores"

I am a doctoral student in the LUOVA doctoral programme and passionate about mammal behaviour and acoustic communication. Conducting my master thesis research in Bethlehem, South Africa, I was able to show that female lion roars contain information about the individual calling. Building on this foundation, my PhD research continues in the field of bioacoustics, where I am investigating acoustic signalling in mammalian species with a focus on the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx). Going from an individual level to community dynamics, I will look at what vocalisations lynx use in the wild, exploring individual, sex and age differences as well as geographic variation. Additionally, I will focus on investigating how effectively lynx use their habitat for sound propagation, how human modification affects their calling behaviour, and how other species respond to their calls. My PhD research is conducted in close collaboration between the GCC lab and the WILDER group led by Dr. John Loehr

• mammal behaviour
• interspecies communication
• bioacoustics
• Eurasian lynx

Santtu Pentikäinen joined the Helsinki Urban Rat Project in March 2020 to do his PhD on movement and population ecology of city rats. He is interested in how urban environment, group demographics and interactions, and human activities (intended or unintended) influence the behavior and population dynamics of wild rats.  Santtu did his MSc in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in University of Helsinki in 2019. In his thesis, he studied how captive breeding changes the behaviour of endangered steelhead trout, based on his experimental work with wild and hatchery-reared steelhead in Oregon.

• Movement and behavioral ecology 
• Population dynamics 
• Urban rat ecology 

Marketta Vuola has a MSc in Development Geography at the University of Helsinki which she completed in 2015. She did her Master’s Thesis with the GCC research group focusing on the relations between local communities and national park management in Madagascar. Marketta is interested in natural resource politics and passionate about finding out how power relations shape land-uses and landscapes. She has worked as a coordinator of development projects in rural Indonesia and Zambia and as a Senior Officer focusing on land-use planning at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in Finland. Before starting her PhD studies, she worked in a research project examining the Green Economy transitions in Lao PDR and Cambodia at the Finland Futures Research Centre. Returning to her initial interests in Madagascar, Marketta started her PhD studies in 2019, in Development Studies discipline, looking at the confrontations between artisanal and small scale mining and biodiversity conservation in Madagascar.

• political ecology
• artisanal and small scale mining (ASM)
• conservation policy

• Sonja Rapo
• Leire Borge
• Lucas Bogaert
• Hugo Rodrigues Carvalho
• Karl Fetsch

A few former GCC members have remained strongly associated to the group after they have taken up new positions. They are core collaborators particularly for our projects in Kenya and Madagascar, often joining our expeditions and co-supervising our students. 

• Daniel Burgas
• Ricardo Rocha
• Adria Lopez Baucells
• Abhilash Nair
• Sara Fraixedas
• Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares
  
   

Quite a number of researchers, assistants and visitors have shared their time and contributions with GCC, making this group what it is today.

PhD and Licenciate researchers

Postdoctoral Researchers

MSc students

Visiting scholars, research assistants and interns