A huge congratulations to Dr. Juan Carlos Villaseñor-Derbez on the successful defense of his exemplary dissertation, “Essays on Environmental Markets and Marine Conservation”.
Juan Carlos has been a vital member of the Bren School community since 2016 where he first earned his Master’s in Environmental Science and Management as a Latin American Fisheries Fellow and subsequently began a PhD under the guidance of co-chairs Chris Costello and Steve Gaines and committee members Kyle Meng and Fiorenza Micheli.
Juan Carlos’s dissertation focused on the underutilized application of environmental markets in the conservation and management of marine resources. His first chapter, published in Nature Sustainability, explores how an existing market for fishing effort interacts with a nation’s incentive to engage in marine conservation in the form of Marine Protected Areas. His second chapter proposes, designs, and analyzes a global market for marine conservation, where nations can trade conservation obligations. Finally, his third chapter studies the implied carbon costs of human-induced whale mortality, thus providing a way to connect cetacean conservation and carbon markets. Together, these essays show how seemingly benign nuances in market design features and ecological processes are pivotal in determining the incentives for marine conservation.
While his doctoral dissertation explored the interaction between environmental markets and marine conservation, Juan Carlos’s broader research agenda has contributed to other topics such as invasive species ecology, community-based marine conservation, fisheries management, and land-ocean interactions, leading to many publications concurrent with his PhD. A few selected publications include:
- Villaseñor-Derbez, J.C. Amador-Castro, I., Hernández-Velasco, A., Torre, J., & Fulton S. Two decades of community-based marine conservation provide the foundations for future action. Frontiers in Marine Science. DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2022.893104
- Millage K.D.**, Villaseñor-Derbez, J.C.**, Bradley D., Burguess M., Lenihan H., Costello C. (2021). SelfFinanced Marine Protected Areas. Environmental Research Letters DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ac3439 *co-first author
- Villaseñor-Derbez J.C.*, Fitzgerald S.* (2019). Spatial variation in allometric growth of invasive lionfish has management implications. PeerJ. DOI: 10.7717/peerj.6667 *co-first author
- Villaseñor-Derbez J.C., Faro C., Wright M., Martínez J., Fitzgerald S., Fulton S., Mancha-Cisneros M.M., McDonald G., Micheli F., Suárez A., Torre J., Costello C. (2018). A user-friendly tool to evaluate the effectiveness of no-take marine reserves. PLoS ONE. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0191821
Juan Carlos has been a leader in Environmental Data Science and a generous supporter of his peers. Notably, he helps organize EcoDataScience, a community of Environmental Data Science at UCSB and beyond, and runs ERRE, a blog about all things R and RStudio in Spanish.
Juan Carlos will continue to explore the linkages between human and natural systems as a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University.
Congratulations JC! Thanks for all of your great years here. Good luck in the next step!