Juan Pablo Lobo-Guerrero Villegas

Juan Pablo is interested in understanding how forests respond to long-term environmental change and using interdisciplinary approaches to support restoration and management. He is part of the ecological genetics group in Edinburgh, collaborating on projects that seek to understand resilience and rates of adaptation in trees and forests to threats of global climate change and emerging pests and diseases.

Juan Pablo currently works in the UKRI Treescapes project, newLEAF, and the European Commission project, FORGENIUS, where his role involves a combination of work in the molecular labs, including DNA extractions, determining ploidy using flow cytometry and preparing experimental fungal inoculation trials, as well as fieldwork recording growth and phenology trait data, sampling plant tissues and estimating disease infection in trees. 

Juan Pablo is interested in science outreach and public engagement, particularly in improving access to the outdoors and understanding people's knowledge and experience of nature. He leads a NERC-funded public engagement project, Forest Bound, using participatory art approaches grounded in environmental science to engage ethnic minority communities in Edinburgh with the future of forests.