Biography

César Capinha is Professor at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning (IGOT), University of Lisbon (UL). His research primarily focuses on understanding biogeographical changes driven by human activities, with an emphasis on biological invasions. He also very interested in the spatial and temporal predictive modelling of ecological and biological phenomena, often through the application of state-of-the-art machine learning approaches and small-to-big data sources.
He earned a Geography degree from UL in 2007, a MSc in GIS from UL in 2009, and a PhD in Environmental Sciences from the University of Évora in 2012. His postdoctoral work included positions at the UL's Centre for Environmental Biology, the Centre for Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Porto, the Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine of the New University of Lisbon, and the Alexander Koenig Zoological Research Museum in Bonn, Germany. He also served as an invited Assistant Professor and later as an Assistant Researcher [‘CEEC’ funded - equiv. to Assist. Professor] at IGOT. Currently, Capinha is an integrated researcher at the Centre of Geographical Studies (CEG-IGOT) and a member of the Risk Assessment and Management of Environmental Risks (RISKam) research group and the Associate Laboratory TERRA, where he coordinates Thematic Line 1 'Natural Capital and Ecosystem Services'.
His publication record includes over 80 scientific papers in Web of Science journals, with contributions to high profile ones like Science, PNAS, Nature Communications, Nature Ecology and Evolution and Science Advances. He was involved in 15 national and international research projects, including four as principal investigator and two as co-principal investigator. He has supervised 9 doctoral and 12 master's students (3 and 10 concluded, respectively). He was also contributing author to the recent 2023 UN’s IPBES assessment on biological invasions. He acted as project reviewer for Swiss, Czech, and Polish R&D institutions. Currently, he also serves as Senior Editor at the editorial board of the journal Diversity and Distributions and Distributions (Wiley, WoS Q1).