Plenary Lecture
Assessing the Impact of Agricultural Change on Ecosystem Services
Professor Luis Loures
Polytechnic Institute of Portalegre
Portugal
E-mail: lcloures@esaelvas.pt
Abstract: Agricultural development, from crops to animal production, has caused serious problems in terms of environmental and landscape degradation, highlighting the positive impact that sustainable productive systems might have in the future of agriculture, constituting not only a way to consolidate emerging productive subsystems, with the potential to be a major driving force of the agricultural sector, but also to face the new challenges to come. In this regard, the envisioned special issue intents to cover a wide range of topics related to agricultural sustainability of different but complementary productive systems, assessing the impact of contemporary agricultural systems and landscape management strategies both on food production, ecosystem sustainability, biodiversity, landscape design, among others.
Brief Biography of the Speaker: Luís Loures is a Landscape Architect and Agronomic Engineer, Professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Portalegre, who holds a Ph.D. in Planning and a Post-Doc in Agronomy. Since he graduated he has published several per reviewed papers at the national and international levels and he has been a guest researcher and lecturer both at Michigan State University (USA), and at University of Toronto (Canada) where he has developed part of his Ph.D. research with the Financial support from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (Ph.D. grant). During his academic career he had teach in several courses in different Universities, mainly regarding the fields of landscape architecture, urban and environmental planning, agronomy, ecosystem services and sustainability. Currently, He is a researcher both at VALORIZA - Research Centre for Endogenous Resource Valorization - Polytechnic Institute of Portalegre, where he is a researcher on several financed research projects focusing several different investigation domains such as urban planning, landscape development and the use of environmental planning as a tool for achieving sustainable development.