Research
My main area of interest regards the anthropogenic drivers of biodiversity loss, mainly in tropical forest ecosystems. My current research is related to the evaluation of how agriculture and habitat fragmentation impacts tropical forest communities and to the assessment of species persistence in humanized landscapes. My PhD thesis was dedicated to the effects tropical forest fragmentation on the spatio-temporal dynamics of bat communities and my fieldwork is carried out at the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, Central Amazon, Brazil. I now work on the Conservation Evidence project, a global repository of evidence about the effects of conservation interventions (http://conservationevidence.com/)
Publications
Rocha, R., López-Baucells, A., Farneda, F.Z., Groenenberg, M., Bobrowiec. P.E.D., Cabeza, M., Palmeirim, J.M. & Meyer, C.F.J. (2017) Consequences of a large-scale fragmentation experiment on Neotropical bats: disentangling the relative effects of local and landscape-scale attributes. Landscape Ecology, 32, 31-45
Conenna, I.*, Rocha, R.*, Russo, D. & Cabeza, M. (2017) Island endemic bats and research effort: a review of patterns and priorities worldwide. Mammal Review, 47, 169–182 *These authors contributed equally to this work
Eklund, J., Blanchet, G., Nyman, J., Rocha, R., Virtanen, T. & Cabeza, M. (2016) Contrasting spatial and temporal trends of protected area effectiveness in mitigating deforestation in Madagascar. Biological Conservation, 203, 290–297
Rocha, R., Tarmo, V. & Cabeza, M. (2015) Bird assemblages in a Malagasy forest-agricultural frontier: effects of habitat structure and landscape-scale forest cover. Tropical Conservation Science, 8(3): 681-710.
Farneda, F.Z., Rocha, R., López-Baucells, A., Groenenberg, M., Silva, I., Palmeirim, J.M., Bobrowiec. P.E.D. & Meyer, C.F.J. (2015) Trait-related responses to habitat fragmentation in Amazonian bats. Journal of Applied Ecology, 52(5): 1381-1391.
