Paula Valdujo

Principal Consultant, Nature Strategy

PhD

Paula is a conservation biologist with over 20 years’ experience in tropical biodiversity. A specialist on amphibians and reptiles, she also brings broad experience in Red List assessments, biogeography research, and the design of priority areas for biodiversity conservation.

Paula joined The Biodiversity Consultancy after nine years with WWF-Brazil’s Science Programme. In partnership with Brazil’s national and state governments, she led multi-stakeholder, multi-sector projects on territorial planning for biodiversity conservation and sustainable hydropower. By creating a customised, systematic conservation planning framework she was able to integrate and make sense of large datasets from different sources, including biodiversity, ecosystem services, landscape, and economic uses.

She applied this framework across most of Brazilian ecoregions to support conservation policies and safeguards on land, freshwater, and oceans, including protected areas design, sustainable, productive landscape planning, habitat restoration, and aquatic connectivity.

In addition, Paula has considerable field experience in biodiversity assessments for protected area design, management plans and ecological impact assessments. She is a commission member of the IUCN SSC Species Monitoring Specialist Group and the First Secretary for the Brazilian Society of Herpetology. Paula is fluent in English and Portuguese.

Paula Valdujo