Jóni Vieira

I have a graduation in landscape architecture (Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto, 2007) and a master's degree in organic agriculture (Escola Superior Agrária de Viana do Castelo, 2016). My professional career started as a landscape designer. Since 2013 I have worked with landscape management and ecological restoration projects for Fundação Mata do Bussaco and MONTIS, Associação para a Gestão e Conservação da Natureza. I coordinated several ecological restoration works in abandoned degraded land, totaling almost 400 ha, distributed between the North, Center and South of Portugal. Amongst these areas, I worked with mountain landscapes, riparian ecosystems, forest landscapes, abandoned land, and the Bussaco National Forest. This work included practical restoration techniques in a post-fire scenario. I have also worked with techniques for controlling invasive exotic flora (LIFE10 NAT/PT/000075), prescribed fire, nature-based solutions for ecosystem restoration and natural engineering (LIFE16 PRE/DE/000005, LIFE17 ESC/PT/00003 and LIFE19 PRE/NL/000003). Since 2015 I have worked as a consultant, designing applications for grants in the areas of biodiversity, nature and climate, mostly on LIFE funding applications. The ecological restoration works developed throughout my career have included social participation, either with volunteers and inmates or involving crowd-based instruments such as crowdfunding and citizen science. Between 2013 and 2020 I have networked with several European institutions and was the chair of the Volunteer and Citizen Science working group of the LIFE ENPLC project. My areas of interest are landscape management (especially abandoned land and fire-prone landscapes), ecological restoration (nature-based solutions, rewilding, prescribed fire, and invasive species), and social participation (citizen science and volunteering). Currently, I am a guest assistant lecturer at Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto, and I am developing research in the areas of rewilding and landscape management under the wildE project (HORIZON-CL5-2022-D1-02-05).