Roberto Cazzolla Gatti (born February 11, 1984) is an Italian ecologist, conservation biologist and evolutionist with a Ph.D. in forest ecology. His research deals with Biological Diversity and Conservation, and Global Environmental Protection occurring, therefore, at the interface between macroecology, evolutionary biology, and behavioural ecology.
He is an associate professor of Conservation Biology and Biodiversity at the Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna, Italy, where he is also a member of the BIOME - Biodiversity and Macroecology Lab.
He also works as a freelance documentary photographer and wildlife filmmaker and coordinates geographic and scientific explorations of some of the most remote places on Earth. In 2019, his documentary film on the biodiversity of Congo river basin's forests entitled "Ivindo: a journey into the green heart of Africa" was released by the Colibrì Studio Productions.
Education and career
He earned a bachelor's degree in biology in 2006, defending a thesis in marine ecology, and a master's degree in environmental and evolutionary biology in 2008, defending a thesis in zoology and anthropology ("Primate visual system and stereopsis"), at the University of Bari, Italy.
He also holds a II Level master's degree (Hons) in international policies and global environmental protection, earned in 2009 at the University of Tuscia, defending a thesis on "Africa: biodiversity and climate change" and received a diploma from the School in Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany with training in Peyresq, Alpes de Haute-Provence, France.
He holds a Ph.D. in forest ecology earned in 2013 at the University of Tuscia in Viterbo (Italy), studying the tropical forests of Africa and their biodiversity.
He served for many years as a scientific advisor for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Italy and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN).
As a post-doc, he conducted research studies in tropical ecology and biodiversity at the Impacts on Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Terrestrial Ecosystems Division (IAFENT) of the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC), University of Tuscia (Viterbo, Italy). Then, he joined the Research Consortium "Digamma" to develop a stereoscopic system called "Tredimed" designed for 3D analysis of biological and medical samples.
From 2015 to 2021, he served as an associate professor and the head and scientific coordinator of the MSc program in biodiversity at the Biological Institute of the Tomsk State University in Russia.
In parallel to his professorship in Russia, he worked for several international research institutes and universities: in 2018–2019, he was a research associate at the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources of the Purdue University in the US and a visiting professor at the University of Beijing in China to teach a class in Biodiversity; in 2020–2021, he was a senior research fellow of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Austria, and in 2021, for the second academic semester, he worked as an associate professor at the Polytechnic of Rouen in France.
He is currently a member of the CEM (Commission on Ecosystem Management), the SSC (Species Survival Commission) and the WCPA (World Commission on Protected Areas) of the IUCN (The International Union for Conservation of Nature).
Research and works
Besides his empirical studies (he has been conducting field research on Mediterranean marine and terrestrial species of Europe, on tropical forests of Africa, India, Indonesia and Australia, on high-mountain and freshwater ecosystems of Russia and China, and on forest diversity of the United States), he is best known for arguing that biodiversity is an autocatalytic ecological and evolutionary process and for providing evidence of non-primate animal self-awareness (for instance, studying dog and wolf's cognition with a novel "Sniff-test" ).
He proposed that "life begets life" and that the diversity of species on Earth is generating itself by niche emergence.
He also suggested several novel hypotheses and theories in ecology and evolution such as the endogenosymbiotic origin of biodiversity, the canopy height-biodiversity relationship (proposing the existence of a Species-Volume Relationship in ecology), the coexistence of species through the "avoidance of competition", and the fractal nature of the latitudinal biodiversity gradient.