Joana Margarida Dias Ferreira Nogueira
MSc Student
Graduated in Biology from the Faculty of Sciences (University of Porto, Portugal) and currently attending on the second year of the Master’s degree in “Biodiversity, Genetics and Evolution”. My scientific areas of interest are directed to Biodiversity, Biogeography, Ecological Modelling, Conservation (sensus stricto), Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Climate Change. Thus, my master thesis aims to investigate biogeographic patterns in Savannah elephants ( Loxodonta africana ) and giraffes ( Giraffa camelopardalis ), in Africa for predicting the effects of Climate Change taking into account the premise of ecological niche conservatism and the influence of human activities on the species’ range. To do so, I’m mainly using Geographical Information Systems and ecological niche-based models to derive the probability of occurrence of species for three time-periods (present-day, early 20th century, and Holocene), and to project models between time-periods and to predict climate change scenarios.
The quantification of differences between models and projections will allow evaluating the occurrence of changes in the ecological niches between time-periods, taking into account human-induced range regressions or excluding them, and if human-induced range regression has affected adaption capacity.