Dr. Rosa Maria Roman-Cuesta is a tropical ecologist and a guest researcher at the Laboratory of Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing in Wageningen University, The Netherlands. She is also an associate researcher at CIFOR (Centre for International Forest Research). She runs research on how the land use sector can contribute to mitigation and adaptation strategies under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and searches ways for science to support national and regional policies on natural resource management and Risk Reduction Strategies. Her work mainly focuses on forests and wetlands, and in their interface with agriculture, particularly livestock. As a tropical ecologist, Rosa Maria has an interest in landscape restoration and in monitoring ecosystem integrity and resilience in front of extreme events, such as fire and hurricanes. Her latest projects include FIMIDTRO (Fire management mitigation practices in the dry tropics) (2019-2020); CORESCAM (Coastal and marine biodiversity resilience to extreme events in the Caribbean: implications for regional conservation and policy making) (2020-2022) and SEFOCAD (Secondary Forests Carbon Dynamics in Peru) (2020-2022). An Alexander von Humboldt Fellow since 2007 (TUM-Munich), Rosa María began her international career working on an EU-funded project on Sustainable use, conservation and restoration of tropical forests in Mexico and Chile) (1998-2001) (SUCRE), from where she earned her PhD on Forest Sciences (2002), at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. She counts on several postdoctoral research stays (e.g. ECI-Oxford University, TUM-Technical University of Munich, ECOSUR-Mexico). Prior to CIFOR Rosa Maria worked as a consultant for the Norwegian Space Agency and hold a three-year staff position at the UN Agency FAO. As a forest officer in the UN-REDD team, she assisted Latin American Governments to develop and implement their REDD+ forest mitigation activities and MRV systems. She is a guest participant in TSU-IPCC meetings and is fluent in the UNFCCC-IPCC framework. Her work runs at different scales: from plot level to landscape levels through fieldwork, remote sensing and GIS. Spanish is her native language. She is fluent in English and speaks French at an intermediate level.

1. CORESCAM (2020-2022) Coastal and Marine Resilience to Extreme Events in Central America and the Caribbean (corescam.org)
2. SEFOCAD (2020-2022) (Secondary Forests Carbon Dynamics in Peru)
3. FIMIDTRO (2019-2020) Fire management mitigation practices in the dry tropics
4. SWAMP (2018-2020) Sustainable Wetlands Adaptation Mitigation Programme (https://www2.cifor.org/swamp/)
5. Greening Livestock (2017-2019) Incentive-Based Interventions for Reducing the Climate Impact of Livestock in East Africa 

1998-2002 PhD Forest Sciences. Autonomous University of Barcelona (Cum Laudem)

1993-1997 BSc. Environmental Sciences. Autonomous University of Barcelona. Barcelona. Spain.

Postdoctoral research

2000 Doctoral research at University of California Santa Barbara, USA. Radar remote sensing.

2003 Postdoctoral research at ECOSUR-San Cristobal las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico (6 months)

2003-2007 Postdoctoral research at Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University, UK

2007-2009 Postdoctoral research at Technische Universität München (TUM), Munich, Germany.