Selected works
This is where I collect the applied side of my work, like facilitation, science communication, capacity building, and knowledge co-creation with practitioners, policymakers, and communities. As a transdisciplinary action researcher, this work isn't separate from my research—it's where it happens.
04.07.26 — Developing place-based collaborative governance models for regional Soil-Health Living Labs
We developed baseline governance models for the five Living Labs anchoring GOV4ALL Project's soil-health work across the Mediterranean—Aegean (Lesvos Island), Alvelal (Altiplano Granadino), Menorca (Menorca Island), Solvi'Terra (Val de Drôme), and Thyrea (Peloponnese). Working from a social-ecological systems perspective, a network governance typology, and the Governance Analytical Framework, we ran a thirteen-stage co-design process—trust-building process, systemic scoping through a modified Iceberg Model, governance roadmapping workshops, and decision-making prototypes—to help each Lab build, rather than have imposed on it, the governance architecture needed to sustain multi-actor collaboration beyond the project's funding cycle. The five resulting models span markedly different institutional logics—science-led, farmer-driven, NGO-coordinated, public-authority-led, entrepreneur-led—and surface shared governance pressure points around trust, participation depth, and financial sustainability that will carry into Phase 2's Formative Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Tool. The related deliverable and other project outputs will be soon available.
21.04.26 — Designing a pan-European instrument for observing power, actors and institutions across eLTER's Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research Platforms
We led the design of eLTER RI's Standard Observation Instrument for governance structure and character. The task was to make something usually treated as too context-bound to standardise—power, institutions, discourse—comparable across multiple Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) Platforms spanning different countries, ecosystems and political cultures. Working with colleagues from CSIC, INRAE, UAB and BOKU, I helped integrate five governance frameworks (the SES Framework, STEER framework, Polycentric Power Typology, Discursive Power, and a minimum-viable social network analysis) into a single tiered, mixed-methods instrument, deployable at different depths depending on a Platform's resources. The result treats governance itself as a long-term socio-ecological variable, observable and re-observable every three to six years. The instrument will soon be available here.
16.12.24 — eLTER RI: Policy support to unlock sustainability transformations
In this deliverable we assess how eLTER—Europe's long-term ecosystem and socio-ecological research infrastructure—can inform European environmental policy. Using lock-in as a bridging concept, I led a narrative review centred on the agri-food system and the Common Agricultural Policy, then synthesised network-scale research across six Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) Platforms into a roadmap for observing, understanding, and averting sustainability lock-ins in social-ecological systems. The report closes with recommendations for eLTER's emerging policy function: a shared vision and mission, a knowledge-synthesis mechanism matched to policy evaluation tools, and a standardised observation framework linking transdisciplinary research to formative, reflexive evaluation. Fourteen colleagues across the eLTER network contributed, listed alphabetically in the original.
14.6.2023 - eLTER WAILS approach workshop for early career
I was invited as a lecturer for this eLTER summer school at Gran Paradiso National Park, teaching early-career researchers the WAILS approach—a whole-system view of ecosystems that integrates bio-geo-hydro processes with social-ecological research, moving beyond siloed disciplinary monitoring. The first days combined lectures on this integrated framework with the long-term research history of the Gran Paradiso LTER site, including a field tour. In the following days, participants split into working groups, each tackling a real research question about the site through the WAILS lens, mixing researchers from different fields, countries and ecosystem types. The format was designed to build genuine cross-disciplinary dialogue rather than parallel presentations.
26.1.22 - MOTION Handbook - Developing a Transformative Theory of Change
I contributed to this handbook as part of the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC), translating two years of co-development work with EIT Climate-KIC partners into a practical methodology. The core innovation combines a traditional Theory of Change with the multi-level perspective. We introduced Transformative Outcomes (such as shielding, networking, upscaling and destabilisation) as concrete leverage points that projects can target, replacing vague transformation rhetoric with a structured way to ask: which specific process am I contributing to, and what am I missing? The handbook was built and tested through three real portfolios—SATURN (urban-rural land use), ACT on NBS (nature-based solutions for cities) and SuSMo (shared mobility)—and paired with formative evaluation tools, including a self-assessment method and MEL surveys, so teams could keep revisiting and revising their theory of change as their projects evolvedYou can download this resource here.
7.10.2021 - Scientific Challenges of the Spanish National Research Council
We contributed to Challenge A of this CSIC white paper, part of a wider effort to map Spain's scientific priorities toward 2030. Our section (3.4, pp. 120-123) argued that global change — climate, biodiversity loss, social transformation — cannot be tackled by treating humans and nature as separate domains: the two are tightly interdependent, and sustainability strategies that ignore this coupling are bound to fail. The chapter called for research agendas and policy frameworks built on that interrelationship from the outset, rather than bolted-on afterward.
21.04.2021 - A Transformative Theory of Change for urban Nature-Based Solutions
For EIT Climate-KIC's ACT on NBS project, I facilitated the building of a narrative reading of its Theory of Change, using a typology of twelve "Transformative Outcomes"—spanning niche-building, niche expansion, and the opening-up of entrenched regimes—to make sense of how nature-based solutions actually spread into city planning. Rather than treat NBS uptake as one smooth process, we traced three distinct pathways: a networking-and-learning pathway that builds civil servants' capacity; a circulation-and-replication pathway turning local networks into cross-city communities of practice; and an upscaling-and-institutionalisation pathway, where city representatives start reshaping the very policy and procurement regimes NBS was once a niche exception to. You can download the narrative and TToC here.
19.2.21 - Blue uncertainty: Warding off systemic risks in the Anthropocene - Lessons from COVID-19
COVID-19 exposed something complexity scientists had long argued and policymakers kept sidestepping: social and ecological systems are inseparably interdependent, and safeguarding nature is itself a defence against future zoonotic pandemics. In this solo paper, I asked why complexity-based approaches to systemic risk still struggle to reach real policy, despite the evidence — and proposed three intermediary concepts to bridge that gap: modulating contingency, adaptive inference, and "blue uncertainty" itself, a way of framing reactive policymaking under radical uncertainty that's rigorous enough for complexity science, yet legible enough for policymakers still thinking in conventional, reductionist terms.
This work is dedicated to the loving memory of my mother, father and brother, lost during the pandemic years.
15.11.19 - ESA's Copernicus Sentinels improve hydroperiod estimations of Mediterranean wetlands
This ESA success story covers work I contributed to within ECOPOTENTIAL: turning satellite imagery into a management tool for Doñana's seasonal wetlands. Colleagues at EBD-CSIC and CERTH combined Landsat, Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 time series to map flooding pixel by pixel, deriving each wetland's "hydroperiod" — how long, and when, it stays wet — a parameter that governs everything from groundwater pressure to grazing capacity. My part was the human side of that pipeline: running participatory workshops with Doñana's own technicians and managers to link these new data streams to the actual conservation questions and decisions they needed them for.
1.12.18 - Continuous improvement of the science-policy interface
This work picks up the Doñana story where my PhD thesis left off. Rather than push for the big top-down transformation the region kept resisting, my colleagues and I borrowed "continuous improvement" from Kaizen: small, cooperative, co-designed changes at the science-policy interface, made cheaply and repeatedly rather than imposed. In a second round of action research (under the H2020 ECOPOTENTIAL project), we applied this to a harder question than restoring one estate—balancing cattle grazing, plant production and wildlife conservation across Doñana's wetlands, using remote-sensing tools (MODIS NDVI) to model the trade-offs. You can download the poster describing this approach here.
14.11.13 - Adaptive management of kelp forests
I co-facilitated this FP7 Biodiversity Knowledge process bringing together kelp researchers from the UK, Spain, Portugal, Norway and Italy to confront a shared problem: European kelp forests—biodiversity engines for fish, invertebrates and epibiota along Atlantic coasts—were declining under harvest, pollution and climate pressure, faster than the science could keep pace. Rather than wait for certainty, we steered the group toward fourteen adaptive-management recommendations: a coordinated monitoring network, standardised harvest tracking, citizen-science outreach, and—the core idea—treating harvest regulation and pilot kelp farms as designed experiments to learn from, not just interventions to defend. You can download our policy brief here.
14.11.10 - Environmental Impact Assessment of mooring facilities over two special protection sites in Formentera Island
At Marexi Ltd, we helped the Consell Insular de Formentera confront a problem written straight into the seabed: hundreds of small boats dropping anchor, unregulated, inside a Natura 2000 park home to Posidonia oceanica meadows and a protected coastal lagoon. Across two sites—the northwest coast (Ses Illetes/Cavall d'en Borràs) and the S'Estany des Peix lagoon—we documented how anchor-drag was ploughing the seafloor season after season, then proposed fixed, low-footprint mooring fields paired with management and monitoring systems.
14.10.10 - Environmental sustainability in organisations - Social Media Day Palma de Mallorca 2010
In this series of interviews, the event's participants told us how they incorporate environment and sustainability criteria in their organisational policies, as well as how they use social media to promote their environmental values, turning them into a competitive advantage.
20.11.09 - Structured Decision Making - Environmental sustainability and climate change for the Playa de Palma Project
At the 2010 EPBRS meeting in Palma de Mallorca, I set out to bridge a persistent gap between evolutionary biology and conservation practice, interviewing participating researchers on camera about why evolutionary processes matter for biodiversity, how they might be built into on-the-ground management, and what research agenda could get us there. The resulting mini-interviews capture a cross-section of expert perspectives on a question policy-makers rarely ask: not just which species or habitats to protect, but which evolutionary potential — the capacity to keep adapting — is worth safeguarding too.
20.11.09 - Structured Decision Making - Environmental sustainability and climate change for the Playa de Palma Project
Commissioned by the Consorci Platja de Palma to help redesign one of Spain's most iconic—and most degraded—tourist beaches, we facilitated a Structured Decision Making process bringing together 12–15 IMEDEA researchers across water quality, coastal biodiversity, and climate adaptation. We built a problem tree through nominal-group technique, then translated it into a shared causal model via group model building—plotting how researchers believed each intervention would ripple through the system. In follow-up interviews, each researcher assigned fuzzy certainty weights to every causal link, letting us calculate both a confidence score and a cross-expert agreement score for each connection. Overlaying the two singled out six well-supported "attack points" in the model, which became five strategic lines of action adopted directly into the Consorci's reform plan. Watch our mini-documentary of the process or watch it at CIENCIATK, the citizen outreach platform of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC). Here a second documentary including more specific policy recommendations.
10.6.09 - Innovative developments in the management of coastal fisheries in Canada and Spain: from participatory management to adaptive management
I helped organize this conference-workshop exploring synergies between Galician participatory fisheries management and Canadian adaptive management in British Columbia. Two Galician initiatives anchored the discussion: the professionalization of shellfisher women ("percebeiras," "mariscadoras") led by Pencha Santasmarinas, who fought to have their work recognized as skilled, salaried labor; and the "Os Miñarzos" Marine Reserve in Lira, led by Anthropologist Antonio García Allut—Spain's first fishery reserve designed bottom-up by fishers themselves, combining local ecological knowledge with co-managed governance (see also Pita et al. 2024 for recent research). Funded through the now-discontinued "Understanding Canada" Program.
14.11.07 - TRANSAM Project
Why hadn't Canada's 40 years of experience with adaptive management taken root in Europe? With colleagues, I set out to answer this through the International Council for Canadian Studies' Canada-Europe Awards, comparing institutional opportunities and constraints for adaptive management across two geographic scales—continental (Canada–EU) and regional (British Columbia–Spain)—using the Clayoquot Sound and Doñana Biosphere Reserves as paired case studies. Documenting the Canadian experience directly informed our subsequent action-research program in Doñana: knowledge and workshop methods transferred from British Columbia helped loosen Doñana's rigid institutional regime and engage decision-makers and stakeholders in a shared learning process—while also showing that adopting adaptive management durably requires organisational, legal, and conceptual factors to align. Download the final report here.
25.5.08 - Action-research and adaptive governance and management in the Doñana region
This line of work traces one continuous inquiry, unfolding over roughly a decade. It began on the ground, with Caracoles Estate in Doñana National Park: reflooding 27 km² of former farmland to restore part of the Doñana marshes, one of Europe's largest wetland restorations. Rather than engineer a single "optimal" flood regime, the team treated restoration as an adaptive management experiment—a mosaic of ponds of varying depths and shapes, designed to learn from rather than presume the answer.
Caracoles worked as a proof of concept. But it also exposed a harder problem: the wider institutions governing Doñana's water and conservation kept reverting to top-down, command-and-control management, even after repeated crises and clear opportunities for change. We traced two centuries of that history to explain why, coining the term "rigid institutional regime" for a system that is resilient to shocks but blind to the adaptive approaches it needs. An action-research program—interviews and workshops with 30+ decision-makers and stakeholders—translated that diagnosis into a concrete roadmap for change.
My PhD thesis draws all three strands together: the historical and institutional analyses, the Caracoles counter-example, and comparative fieldwork on adaptive management in British Columbia, closing with policy recommendations for water management and wetland conservation in Doñana and the Guadalquivir Estuary (see Chapter 9)—a blueprint for unlocking change in systems that mistake rigidity for stability.
11.8.04 - Habitat suitability of the Bewick's Swan in its Dutch wintering grounds
For my Bachelor's thesis at NIOO-KNAW's Centre for Limnology, I used long-term resighting data and GIS to model why Bewick's Swans concentrate in specific Dutch municipalities each winter. Linking swan distributions to agricultural land use, I found sugar beet fields best predicted early-winter presence, while grassland surfaces took over as the key driver by late winter — mirroring the species' known dietary shift from aquatic tubers to farmland forage. Roost proximity to water also seemed to shape where swans fed. A small first step, but it already pointed toward the questions I'd keep chasing: how species navigate landscapes reshaped by people. Available here.
life-long learning = flow + emotion + epistemic humility
"Hishuk ish ts'awalk" :)
