María Fernanda López

María Fernanda López

Senior lecturer at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, FLACSO-Ecuador. She studied her undergraduate degree in Geography at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador and did her PhD in Human Geography at the University of Regensburg (Germany) with a post-doctoral research stay at the University of Erlangen Nuremberg (Germany). She is a founding member of the Geographical Association of Ecuador, editor-in-chief of Iconos, a social science journal for Latin America. Her research interests stem from human geography, with a focus on socio-ecological systems, land use change with emphasis on Andean environments, territorial development, and governance; mixed methods and interdisciplinary research on environmental and territorial issues. Her regional research interests are land access in high Andean areas, socio-ecological interactions and territory construction. She is currently Academic Director of FLACSO, Ecuador and member of the scientific committee of CALAS, Andes.

Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Ecuador
maflopez@flacso.edu.ec

Project

The project addresses the notion of political constellations, from the analysis of the role of elites as actors of territorial governance structures, and the articulation between actors involved in extractive mining activities and landowning elites.

Publications

López-Sandoval, MF; Maldonado, P. (2019). Change, Collective Action, and Cultural Resilience in Páramo Management in Ecuador. In: Mountain Research and Development 39(4); https://doi.org/10.1659/MRD-JOURNAL-D-19-00007.1

López, S.; López-Sandoval, MF. & Jin-Kyu Jung, J-K:  (2020): New Insights on Land Use, Land Cover, and Climate Change in Human–Environment Dynamics of the Equatorial Andes, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1804822
 

López, S., López-Sandoval, MF., Gerique, A. y Salazar, J (2020). Landscape change in Southern Ecuador: An indicator-based and multitemporal evaluation of land use and land cover in a mixed-use protected area. En: Ecological Indicators 115, 106357. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2020.106357
 

Hayes, T., Murtinho, F., Wolff, H., López-Sandoval, M. F., Salazar, J. (2021). Effectiveness of payment for ecosystem services after loss and uncertainty of compensation. Nature Sustainability, 1-8. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00804-5