FOL welcomes Xochitl to the team

FOL wants to welcome Xochitl Édua Elías Ilosvay to the team. She joined as a PhD student to work on CLOCK project this April, although the current circumstances only allow us to meet her virtually. We hope that we can see all together at our headquarters at Campus de Vigo.

A marine ecologist by training, Xochitl started her career as an interdisciplinary marine scientist at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research in the project SOC Pacific where she investigated the current offshore tuna fishery in the South Pacific. There she assessed the fishing vessel activity in the exclusive economic zones (EEZ) of Fiji, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia using Global Fishing Watch. She then continued to work as a research fellow at the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity helping to develop a holistic framework that encompasses ecological, social, economic, and political vulnerability indicators. Together with her colleagues, she analyzed how different levels of connectivity enhance or decrease adaptation capacity in island systems.

In her PhD project, Xochitl will investigate how rapid change due to climate change warming in coastal areas is affecting fisheries and the communities that depend upon them. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, she will study the adaptations of social-ecological systems to climate-driven fish biodiversity changes in a series of case studies and compare the responses of coastal communities in different biogeographical regions such as biogeographical transitions zones and the tropics. Xochitl research will be co-supervised by Elena Ojea (FOL) and Jorge García Molinos (HokkaidoUniversity, Japan).

Welcome and good luck Xochitl!