Biography

Jaime Martínez-Valderrama holds a PhD in Agricultural Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid and is a specialist in Desertification and Global Change. His research focuses on understanding the complex relationships between land use and its impacts on arid regions. To achieve this, he employs integrated models that analyze the stability of these systems under various scenarios. He has published numerous high-impact papers, and his work has been utilized by several public and private institutions. Notably, he contributed to the development of the Desertification Early Warning System for Spain's Ministry of the Environment and served as an advisor to MITECO in designing the National Strategy for Combating Desertification.

Jaime has carried out his research at CSIC, where he is a tenured scientist, and at the University of Alicante, participating in 25 research projects over his career.

In addition to his research, Jaime is deeply committed to science communication. He is the editor of the blog Arida Cutis and has written numerous posts for various scientific blogs and popular science articles for different magazines. He is also the author of two books on desertification: "Los Desiertos y la Desertificación" published by CSIC in the collection ¿Qué sabemos de?, and "Desertificación, cuando el territorio hace aguas", published by Tirant Lo Blanch as part of a series promoted by the Water Economics Forum.

Currently, Jaime is the Principal Investigator of the ATLAS Project, which aims to create a Desertification Atlas of Spain, and he collaborates with the Xinjiang Institute of Geography and Ecology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences to study desertification in northwest China.