Youssra El Ghafraoui

Predoctoral Researcher

Youssra holds a master’s degree in Industrial Chemistry at the University of Tetouan (2018) in Morocco. Later, she got a master degree in Sustainable Use of Natural Resources and Ecosystem services at the University of Almería (2020) and developed her research practices at the SociECOS lab of lead by Prof. Dr. Antonio J Castro. During her master’s training she gained valuable knowledge and skills on the understanding of the social-ecological systems and the interdisciplinary assessment of ecosystem services.

Specifically, in her Master thesis entitled “Exploring landscape values and preferences to understand human-nature connectedness across Spanish drylands”, she investigated how ecosystem services values and preferences associated to landscapes of Spanish drylands can be integrated to understand conservation conflicts.

Currently, she is a PhD student under a predoctoral contract at the UAL, where she works with the Principal Investigator (PI) Dr. Cristina Quintas Soriano on the EmBraCe project titled “Evaluating biocultural diversity and social-ecological vulnerability for conserving rural areas in Spain” funded by the Convocatoria de Generación de Conocimiento 2022 from the Agencia Estatal de Investigación. Youssra is developing her Ph.D. thesis on biocultural diversity in order to understand which practices, traditions and knowledge are linked to nature and promote the conservation of biodiversity in southern Spain.