University Degree :

My general motivation is studying populations of large carnivores living in quite humanized areas, which is the most common situation all over nowadays. I hope that research helps improving the current endangered status of species such as brown bears or wolves in many areas of Europe, for instance, mostly constrained by human attitudes and developments…

PhD Project :

Within my PhD, I am a co-supervisor of a master student thesis at UMB.

Previous fellowships

2004-2005 (10 months) Guest student at UMB, with a fellowship provided by the Research Council of Norway.

I have finished the field work for my PhD, and I already fulfilled the theoretic part of the PhD, both in Spain and Norway. I passed an intermediate, mandatory oral exam in Spain to obtain the so-called “Advanced Studies Diploma” (University of León, July 2006). It implied a public presentation and defense of the topic “Movements of brown bear females with cubs in Europe: application to population monitoring”. That is a required step at Spanish universities to keep advancing in the PhD project.

There are two main topics in my PhD: methods for monitoring brown bear females with cubs-of-the-year, in which monitoring programs often focus because of two main reasons: they are for population viability, and family groups are the easiest segment of bear populations to be distinguished; and human influence on brown bear behavior and conservation.

My major supervisor is Professor Jon Swenson (UMB), leader of the SBBRP, with Dr. Miguel Delibes (EBD-CSIC; leader of the Spanish project) and Dr. Ole-Gunnar Støen (SBBRP) as co-supervisors. 

Brown bear is the study species of my PhD. I am enrolled in the Scandinavian Brown Bear Research Project (SBBRP), and in the research project on brown bears in the Spanish Cantabrian Mountains, carried out by Estación Biológica de Doñana (EBD-Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) and the regional government of Asturias (northwest Spain).

I am currently doing my PhD, in agreement between the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB, Norway) and the University of León (Spain), funded by an NGO, Fundación Oso de Asturias, with funds provided by two private brands, Sato and Hunosa. 

Biologist, specialist in Zoology (University of Oviedo, Asturias, Spain). 1992-1997.