Research Faculty
Center for Latin American Studies
E-mail: aalmeyda@ufl.edu
Research Interests
Nature tourism in highly biodiverse areas, ecosystem-based approaches to land management, land-use and land cover-change.
Geographic Expertise
Amazon, Costa Rica, Caribbean
Background
Angélica M. Almeyda Zambrano, is Research Faculty at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida (UF). She is also co-director of the Spatial Ecology and Conservation Lab at UF. Her research centers on human-environment interactions, focusing on social and ecological feedback loops with consideration to sustainability in the present and into the future. In particular, she looks at land use and land cover change dynamics in the tropics and its relation to economic activities with an emphasis on nature tourism and its role as a development and conservation strategy in the tropics.
Angélica’s research questions and approaches typically cross-spatial and temporal domains and compares different political and economic regimes. Her work employs both quantitative and qualitative methods, linking remote sensing and geographic information system data and geospatial analysis with policy analysis and in-depth socioeconomic household surveys. Her work has been published in top academic journals including Nature and Science.
Angélica received her doctorate from the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University in 2012. Her dissertation compared infrastructure development and land use tenure of smallholder farmers in the tri-national frontier of Peru, Brazil and Bolivia in Southwest Amazonia, and was conducted as a partner of the Poverty and Environment Network (PEN) at the Center for International Forestry Research. Angélica was also Doctoral Fellow at the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard University from 2011-2012.