Johanna San Pedro

Biography

Johanna San Pedro is a researcher in the Agriculture, Forestry, and Ecosystem Services Research Group of the IIASA Biodiversity and Natural Resources Program. Her current work is focused on developing and applying the wildFire cLimate impacts and Adaptation Model (FLAM), which is best used to reproduce historical wildfire events and project future burned areas. She is working on analyzing trends of European wildfires in different vegetation classes. Her involvement in the IIASA project includes burned area data processing, fire probability modeling, and hotspot mapping. Her most recent research project focused on the economic valuation of ecosystem services in Mediterranean pine forests. As part of this project, she assessed how different ecosystem services perform economically under different management and climate scenarios by calculating prices and future economic values of the selected services. She also assessed the spatial variability of each ecosystem service revenue by using interpolation tools.

San Pedro has two master's degrees, specializing in European Forestry – the first from the University of Eastern Finland and the second in Spatial and Ecological Modeling in European Forest Science from the Universitat de Lleida, Spain. Her enthusiasm for natural resources management, ecosystem services and policy formulation motivated her to learn more about spatial analysis,
models, and tools that could prove useful for combatting climate change and designing improved, field-based policies.

Her professional background is in natural resources management, environmental policy, and international collaboration on forest restoration. In addition, she has hands-on experience working on environmental project operations, project proposal preparation, and forest monitoring. She was actively involved in implementing natural resources management strategies when she worked as the Operations Manager in an integrated environment project in the Philippines. In addition, she has experience working with indigenous people in different regions of the Philippines, which developed her skills in preparing social and environmental safeguards frameworks as well as field-based policy recommendations related to natural resources management, payment for ecosystem services, and some forest conservation strategies.

Outside the workplace, Johanna is a fur mom and foodie with a love of traveling. She is also a shutterbug, an avid reader, and an ukulele-strummer.

Last update: 31 AUG 2023