Sofia Vaz Email & Phone Number

I'm trilled to manage the innovation process inside the visionary NBI, advancing the way biodiversity, natural capital and ecosystem services can support economic progress with sustainable businesses and people's quality of life at the very forefront. Supported by an energetic, resilient and visionary team, my role is to co-identify R&DI strategies, partnerships, business opportunities and new technologies to deliver nature-based values and opportunities for new generation business models and industry structures.

NBI – Natural Business Intelligence is a start-up that results from the societal call to find alternative proposals to the current model of unsustainable growth towards a safer Nature-Based Economy. The evidence that other ways are possible – and desirable – accumulates, and the body of knowledge grows every day with new ideas and options for regional development and business models emerging and evolving. NBI team consists of researchers and senior business advisors, used to work within ‘partnerships-ecosystems', both at the level of business consultancy services as well as National and European R,I&D project consortia, with wide experience developing and coordinating projects regarding Natural Capital Management, Ecosystem Services Assessment and Valuation, Climate Adaptation, Nature-Based Processes, Agroecology, Bioeconomy and Circular Economy.

Vairão, Porto, Pt

My research plan, titled "Digital technology and the monitoring of nature: combining social media and Earth observations to tackle environmental challenges in a changing world", aims to advance the monitoring of environmental challenges by combining digital technology and data from social media platforms and satellite Earth observations. It is particularly focused on three of the most striking environmental challenges of the Mediterranean region: nature-based experiences (e.g. recreation, ecotourism), invasive species and wildfires. These challenges are tackled using state-of-the-art methods, including deep learning and natural language processing tools on social media data, and remote sensing analyses on freely available satellite imagery. The plan is being developed at BIOPOLIS-CIBIO, in collaboration with INESC-TEC (Univ. of Porto) and DECSAI (Univ. of Granada). Research outcomes are expected to offer guidance for the 2030 EU Biodiversity Strategy, the 2030 National Strategy for Nature Conservation, and the 2030 National Strategy on Wildfires, keeping Europe and Portugal at the forefront of research on the valuation of natural capital, invasion risk assessments, and wildfire monitoring.

Granada, Granada , Es