Diego Martínez-Revelo

Welcome! I am a Colombian biologist dedicated to conserving tropical forests through field-based research and applied entomology within forestry management. Colombia, one of the world’s most biodiverse countries, is home to vast tropical forests that support countless species and local communities. However, these ecosystems are under increasing threat from agricultural expansion, particularly cattle ranching and monoculture crops like sugar cane and oil palm, which have already led to extensive forest loss.

My expertise lies in assessing the health of forest ecosystems throughout Colombia, using insects as bioindicators of land-use change. I specialize in dung beetles, having contributed to the discovery of new species that are critical to the conservation of forest ecosystems. My PhD is based at Universidad del Valle, Cali, and University of Cambridge and examines how deforestation drives biodiversity loss across spatial scales. I approach this question through extensive fieldwork on dung beetles as bioindicators, collected from forests and pastures across large spatial areas and key geophysical gradients in Colombia. Through the use of statistical models and various diversity metrics (taxonomic and functional), I aim to understand the spatial dynamics of biodiversity loss and its ecological consequences.

This research informs policymakers and conservation scientists about regional biodiversity losses over large areas that are often overlooked in local assessments. It encourages decision-makers to develop strategies that address biodiversity loss at the local scale while also protecting the ecological processes that sustain broader biodiversity critical for forest conservation and management.