Miguel Porto

Miguel Porto holds a PhD in Ecology (2013) from the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon, and is now a researcher at CIBIO-BIOPOLIS. His research has been mainly focused on investigating the impacts of human activity, land abandonment and past land use in biological communities and biodiversity, although he also collaborated in research topics like biodiversity conservation, biogeography and molecular ecology. His main research interests are in plant conservation and in understanding and modelling the joint distribution patterns of species by the use of statistical tools like joint species distribution models, with the aim of improving the predictive models of rare species, and their practical applications. He is also interested in devising workflows to translate this knowledge into practical solutions for the conservation of biodiversity and approaches to best transfer knowledge to society, so that it becomes useful to all kinds of users and stakeholders with different needs. He also uses simulation and optimization tools to solve complex problems involving projecting the biodiversity outcomes of systems with multiple agents involved. He is experienced in software development, including statistical software packages and web apps.

In parallel with the research, he is experienced in the flora of Portugal, being  interested in the practical in situ conservation of rare plant communities and species associated with the increasingly scarce remnants of natural or semi-natural vegetation. He is also involved in the development of biodiversity databases and web-based solutions to analyse, explore, present and share biodiversity data, maximizing its potential.