Cecilia Prada
Cecilia spends ~6 months per year walking in the forest measuring trees, taking leaf, root, and wood samples, and thinking about life. She has much experience with seedlings, including transplantation experiments, and soil sampling and analyses. Before her PhD she worked in projects for a number of foundations and institutions in Colombia, including Ecometrópoli, Guayacanal Station, E-qual Environmental Consulting, and G2-Seismic. During her PhD she worked in Panama and the US as part of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. BSc in Biology (2009), MSc in Biology (2012), PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (2021).
Marcelo Arze
Professional with more than 20 years of experience in the field of conservation, sustainable tourism, and rural community development in Latin America. He has worked with international cooperation, in the private sector, and as a public servant from municipal roles to Vice Minister of Tourism in Bolivia. He knows Bolivian roads, trails, and people, as the back of his hand. Since 2005 he teaches at undergraduate and graduate levels on ecotourism, land use planning, and sustainability in Bolivia and as a visiting professor in the US. Currently, he works as an independent consultant and organizing specialized expeditions to any location in Bolivia.
Raquel Araujo
Raquel has organized and participated of multiple expeditions to remote areas in the Brazilian savanna (Cerrado), Brazilian and Colombian Amazon, and Panamanian forests. She studies landscape dynamics combining her knowledge of forest ecology with GIS and remote sensing tools, including drone piloting and image processing. She has organized and taught more than 14 field courses covering the topics of forest inventory and geotechnology. She has worked in projects for the INCT-Madeiras da Amazônia (Brazil), Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments -Tropics (US) and Forest Global Earth Observatory (US and Panama). BSc in Forest Engineering (2010), MSc in in Tropical Forest Sciences (2013), PhD in Tropical Forest Sciences (2019).
Caique Celes
Caique has worked in the field and analyzing data from Amazonian forests since 2009. He works with remote sensing, GIS, LiDAR data, photogrammetry, and analyzing spectral and spatial image data. He has worked in the estimation of carbon stock and model error propagation for the Brazilian National Forest Inventories and REDD+ projects. He has predoctoral and postdoctoral experience with the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia, the University of Brasilia, the University of California Berkeley, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. BSc in Forest Engineering (2007), MSc in Tropical Forest Science (2011), PhD in Tropical Forest Science (2017), R and Python programmer.
Guillermo Bañares
Guillermo has collaborated with different institutions and worked in academic environments as well as in the private sector (e.g., Sea Turtle Conservancy in Costa Rica, Umeå Universitet in Sweden, Kathmandu University in Nepal, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences). He is a detail-oriented problem-solver who has applied his skills to forest ecology, conservation and sustainability projects. He has conducted field work in Swedish Lapland, Nepal, Costa Rica and, particularly, Ecuador and Peru, where he led several complex expeditions to remote Andean sites only accessible by boat, mules, or 4x4. He has experience arranging field logistics, coordinating with local villagers, and navigating complicated bureaucracy. He has also experience in the lab, training students and technicians, and as an R programmer. BSc in Biology (2010), MSc in Forestry and Plant Biotechnology (2014), PhD in Conservation of Natural Resources (2020).
Gabriel Arellano
Gabriel has fieldwork experience in USA, Spain, Puerto Rico, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Thailand, Taiwan and Malaysia. He has led ~300 field days of expeditions in remote locations (no wi-fi). He has worked in projects for the Royal Botanical Garden (Spain), the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain), the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Smithsonian Institution, the US Department of Energy, the Forest Global Earth Observatory, and the University of Michigan. He has participated in a range of statistical, machine learning, and R development projects. He has collaborated with a broad range of professionals and stakeholders, from Amazonian indigenous communities to NASA. BSc in Biology (2007), MSc in Education (2007), MSc in Ecology (2009), PhD in Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology (2013), certified data analyst, data scientist and data product developer (2013-2014).
Note: People listed here are partners in some initiatives and/or available to contribute on a project-by-project basis. Being listed here does not imply an employer-employee relationship with Oikobit LLC. There is no guarantee that a particular project will be assigned to a particular individual. Oikobit LLC will not assign projects to individuals for which this could cause a violation of his/her immigration or contractual obligations with other employers.
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