José Paulo Filipe Afonso de Sousa

Professor at the Department of Life Sciences ? University of Coimbra (UC), and a senior researcher at CFE-Centre for Functional Ecology. With over 140 papers published in indexed journals, he has been developing research on soil ecology and soil ecotoxicology. On soil ecology, his activities are focused on studying changes on soil biodiversity patterns (using soil invertebrates and trait-based approaches) to assess changes in soil quality derived from changes in land-use and landscape fragmentation in agricultural and forest systems. More recently he is interested in evaluating effects of extreme climatic events on soil organisms and service provision in agro-forest systems (in Mediterranean and sub-tropical systems). Regarding soil ecotoxicology, he has been working mainly in the Mediterranean region and the tropics (mainly Brazil) to assess effects of chemical substances (mainly pesticides) and wastes and to integrate in ERA schemes of contaminated soils. Current interests include assessing landscape resilience towards habitat change and pesticide use regarding biodiversity and service provision, especially pollination and pest control in Mediterranean systems and evaluating interaction between climate change and pesticide use on soil communities and service provisioning. He is a member of several European Workgroups responsible for the elaboration of test guidelines with soil invertebrates, published by ISO and OECD. Since 2009 is an external expert of the EFSA (European Food Safety Authority) attached to the Scientific Panel for Pesticides, being involved in the elaboration of the new technical guidance documents for pesticide registration in Europe. Since 2014 is has been appointed head of the thematic panel for Pesticides and GMOs for the Portuguese Food Safety Agency (ASAE). Besides doing active research he is also involved in consulting involving both prospective (for Portuguese paper industry and Shell Thiogro) and retrospective risk assessment (for PETROBRÁS) activities.