February 24 – 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
UNIgreen’s JRC4 – Biodiversity, Forestry, and Agroecology
Webinar Series: Episode 4
This event, organized within the UNIgreen JRC4 Living Lab framework, brings together researchers, students, and forest practitioners to discuss aliens and flames – when fire ecology meets invasion ecology.
Thematic
It is widely known that plant invaders normally benefit from disturbance. Fire is one of the best examples of this relationship.
The relation between fire and invasive plants can be bi-directional when fire promotes plant invasions and these promote fire, leading to a feedback loop that is in many cases hard to break.
Here we explore this relationship using examples mostly from Portugal and other mediterranean-type regions. Given the changes in climate, this topic is also relevant for countries and regions where fire occurrence is expected to increase in the future.
When?
On Tuesday, 24 February, 2026, join us for an online event, from 14:00 to 15:00 CET with expert speaker and engaging discussions.
Who should join?
Researchers, students, forest managers, and anyone curious about forest ecology and sustainability.
Speaker
Joaquim Sande Silva
Professor at Politechnic University of Coimbra.
Joaquim Sande Silva holds a BSc and a PhD in Forestry from the University of Lisbon, and a Master’s degree in Environment and Renewable Resources from the International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies (CIHEAM), Greece.
He is Professor at the Polytechnic University of Coimbra, Portugal, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in fire ecology and fire management. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Bari, Italy (2019, 2022, and 2025).
He has led or currently leads six nationally funded research projects and has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed articles indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases, primarily in forest ecology, invasion ecology, and fire ecology. In addition, he has authored over 190 non-indexed publications, including conference proceedings, book chapters, and technical reports, and has served as editor of six books. He has served on six national scientific expert panels on forest fires, appointed by the Portuguese Government and the Portuguese Parliament. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the environmental NGO League for the Protection of Nature (LPN) and a member of the Portuguese Society for Forest Science.
