Enrica Garau

Postdoctoral Researcher

Enrica Garau holds a Bachelor's degree in Urban and Environmental Planning from the University of Sassari, Italy (2011–2014), and a European Master's degree in City Planning and Policies from the same university (2014–2016). In 2018, she completed a Master's in Management of Protected Areas at the Autonomous University of Madrid. She earned her PhD in Environmental Science from the Department of Geography at the University of Girona (UdG) in 2022. Her PhD research focused on human-nature relationships through a social-ecological lens, exploring perceptions, values, and mental models that influence freshwater resource management and landscape planning policies.

In 2022, she joined the SociECOS Lab at the University of Almería (UAL), and the Centro Andaluz para el Cambio Global - Hermelindo Castro (ENGLOBA), as a postdoctoral researcher within the EU-funded project “BONEX: Boosting Nexus Framework Implementation in the Mediterranean”. She currently holds a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellowship at UAL. Her research focuses on the socio-cultural dimensions of urban nature, particularly on perceptions, values, preferences, and mental models in semi-arid urban contexts. The goal of her research is to inform the design of socially accepted urban nature spaces that enhance social-ecological resilience and human-nature connections in arid and semi-arid ecosystems.

Over the past three years, her academic journey has enabled her to establish a wide network of collaborations and participate in international research initiatives, such as the PECS Working Group and the YESS network. She has expanded her research network through active participation in national and international research projects and research stays at prestigious European institutions, such as the University of Kassel (Germany), the Stockholm Resilience Centre (Sweden), and the Social-Ecological Systems Institute (Germany). These opportunities have enhanced her interdisciplinary expertise in urban and environmental planning.

She has presented her research in different national and international conferences through oral and poster presentations, earning awards for best presentations at the XI Congreso Ibérico de Gestión y Planificación del Agua and the 3rd ESP Europe Conference. She has also co-chaired sessions at the 5th ESP European Conference (Wageningen, Netherlands, 2024) and the Spanish Ecology Society Conference (2023), where she also contributed to local coordination efforts.