Carlos Vila-Viçosa

I am a geobotanist, specialized in circummediterranean Oak (Quercus L) Taxonomy, Ecology and Evolution and I am currently a Ph.D. researcher in Plant Biogeography, Systematics and Evolution at BIOPOLIS-CIBIO and the Museum of Natural History and Science of the University of Porto. 

I am particularly interested in Oak forests conservation and restoration, and I dedicate my research to unveil its evolutionary and biogeographical history. In my PhD I have solved the Iberian white oak Syngameon (Section Quercus), by binding knowledge on oak taxonomy and ecological niche modelling, then combined it with next generation sequencing (RADSeq). I applied this bulk of tools to analyze species bio and phylogeographic relationships, including hybridization and ultimately to foresee how climatic shift will affect these particular group of oaks in the Mediterranean Basin. 

Now, I aim to bind several sources of metadata and phytogeographic knowledge, gathered and acquired through extensive fieldwork in the Iberian Peninsula, and extend it to all the Mediterranean Basin, in a wide variety of issues, like botanical nomenclature, taxonomy, spatial analysis, community ecology, paleovegetation, enriched by wide genome molecular characterization (Phylogenomics) to unveil species delimitation and solve evolutionary pending questions about Oaks reticulated evolution. Also I intend to extend this bulk of tools and analysis to cover all autochthonous flora and vegetation related with the dynamics of western Mediterranean oak forests in the western Iberian Peninsula and North of Africa. 

Broadly I intend to provide guidelines to explain plant species complexes evolution and analyse how environmental shift and other severe threats, related with anthropogenic activities, will affect the vegetation of the Western Palearctic Realm, by crisscrossing three main avenues: Natural History, Biogeography and Evolution.