Maria Cifre-Sabater holds a degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She obtained a PhD in Environmental Anthropology awarded by the University of Kent (England) with her thesis entitled “Changing forests in a changing Mediterranean island: forests, fires and heritagisation of the landscape in Serra de Tramuntana, Mallorca”. Her doctoral work was funded by the “50th Anniversary Scholarship” of the University of Kent. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the IN3 – Open University of Catalonia (UOC) in the “WUICOM-BCN Fire Resilient Interface Communities of Barcelona” projects.

She has ten years of research experience, particularly focused on the social, historical, and environmental spheres of fire in Mediterranean contexts, the environmental management and social impacts of natural protected areas, as well as the transformations and heritagisation processes of cultural landscapes. These research interests have also been pursued in her professional activity through the design, coordination, and leadership of applied research projects in interdisciplinary teams, covering topics such as forest fire risk in the wildland-urban interface, community forest management, cultural landscape conservation, and circular economy networks in rural areas, among others.

Cifre-Sabater has carried out a research stay at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide (Sevilla, 2017) and at the Universitat de les Illes Balears (Mallorca, 2017). She has also participated in numerous national and international scientific conferences and seminars and has experience imparting university seminars at graduate and postgraduate courses.

• Forest Fires
• Natural Protected Areas
• Socioenvironmental conflicts