Independent Researcher

About

Researcher at IMIDRA (Madrid Institute for Rural Development, Agriculture and Food Research), my interests and experience are in plant genetic resources and Ethnobotany, especially in wild edible plants. Collaborating with researchers of the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid and two universities (Universidad Autónoma and Complutense de Madrid), I have leaded several projects for:
• registering which species were traditionally consumed in Central Spain and an ethnobotanical review of the  wild food species used in the whole country
• evaluating the natural production and nutritional value of a selected number of species (wild vegetables and fruits)
I am also interested in quantitative ethnobotany, chiefly in the measure  of the  relative importance of  the plant species used in the cultures surveyed. We have proposed a cultural importance index, based on informant consensus and the diversity of uses, that allows the comparison among different ethnobotanical works and the statistical test of different hypotheses.