Yanina V. Sica

I am a spatial ecologist interested in biodiversity conservation, and in finding ways to contribute to sustainable management.

My research background focused on understanding how human related landscape alterations affect the persistence of species and the maintenance of ecological processes. This search led me to study species response to land use in amazingly diverse places from the Atlantic forest, to temperate wetlands in central Argentina, to the southwest corners of the Antarctic Peninsula. I addressed this question by integrating field-based and remotely sensed data with statistical modeling approaches to provide insights into ways in which landscapes can be manipulated to achieve conservation goals.

Now at Map of Life I am working with species distributions globally focusing on the integration of different types of geospatial data to help understand global biodiversity status and trends. This involves curating our ever-growing biodiversity database, developing biodiversity data sharing standards, modeling species distributions, and developing open-access tools to provide researchers, conservation partners and land managers with actionable information about the biodiversity in the places they work. I also have fun trying to understand taxonomy!