Campus Directory

Pronouns she/her/ella

Division Visiting Faculty/Staff

Department/ College/ Unit Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department

Title Investigador Visitante

Affiliation Member

Staff Type Researcher

Primary Office Location Nat Sci 2 Main Building

Mail Stop Environmental Studies

Biography, Education and Training

Verónica Eltit Neumann is an architect, urban planner, university lecturer, and PhD candidate in Integrative Ecology at Universidad Mayor, Chile. She holds a Master’s degree in Territorial and Environmental Planning and has developed her academic and professional career at the intersection of urban planning, architecture, and ecology. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is conducting a four-month research stay focused on urban biodiversity and ecological connectivity.

Her work focuses on understanding cities as socio-ecological systems and on exploring how urban design and planning can contribute to biodiversity conservation while maintaining the social and functional benefits of compact urban environments. She combines experience in professional urban planning, academic teaching, and interdisciplinary ecological research.

Summary of Expertise

Verónica has professional experience in urban planning and public-sector urban development, including work at the Municipality of Temuco, Chile, where she was responsible for coordinating the municipal zooning plan and related urban planning processes. She has also led urban design and planning initiatives within local government.

In academia, she teaches in the School of Architecture and Urbanism at Universidad Mayor and participates in interdisciplinary research related to urban ecology, biodiversity, and socio-ecological planning. As part of her doctoral training, she conducts field-based and spatial research on residential landscapes, plant biodiversity, urban form, environmental conditions, and ecological connectivity.

Her work combines ecological methods, urban spatial analysis, GIS, remote sensing, statistical modeling, and urban design perspectives to address questions at the interface between biodiversity conservation and contemporary urban development.

Research Interests

Her research interests lie at the intersection of urban ecology, biodiversity, landscape ecology, and ecological urbanism. She is particularly interested in understanding how cities function as socio-ecological systems shaped simultaneously by ecological processes, urban form, management practices, and human decisions.

Her doctoral research examines how the configuration of the built environment influences biodiversity in residential gardens within compact cities. Her current work focuses on relationships among urban density, garden size and configuration, impervious surfaces, vegetation structure, microclimatic conditions, management, plant diversity, and ecological connectivity.

She is especially interested in moving beyond purely taxonomic measures of biodiversity toward functional approaches that consider ecological traits, functional diversity, habitat quality, and the role of mixed native and non-native vegetation assemblages in urban ecosystems.

A further area of interest is the contribution of private and semi-private green spaces to functional ecological connectivity. Her research explores whether networks of residential gardens can operate collectively as habitat patches and stepping stones for urban biodiversity, including pollinators, and how these distributed green spaces can complement conventional public green infrastructure.

During her research stay at UC Santa Cruz, she will focus specifically on functional ecological connectivity in urban areas, working with Dr. Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela in the Conservation and Ecology Lab. This work forms part of her doctoral research and examines how urban landscape structure and distributed green spaces can support species movement and ecological connectivity across highly urbanized environments.

More broadly, her research seeks to contribute evidence for urban planning and design strategies that reconcile compact urban development with ecological functioning, rather than treating urban density and biodiversity conservation as inherently incompatible.

Teaching Interests

Her teaching interests focus on ecological urbanism, urban ecology, sustainable urban design, and the integration of ecological evidence into architecture and urban planning.

She is particularly interested in teaching students to understand cities not simply as disturbances of natural systems, but as ecosystems with their own structures, processes, environmental conditions, and socio-ecological dynamics. From this perspective, urban design becomes a tool for improving ecological performance while preserving the accessibility, interaction, services, and opportunities that make cities successful human habitats.

A central component of her teaching is promoting evidence-based decision-making in urban planning and design. She encourages students to move beyond intuitive or purely formal design responses and to critically evaluate scientific literature, spatial data, environmental indicators, and empirical evidence when defining problems, comparing alternatives, and justifying design decisions.

Her teaching emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches that connect ecological science with spatial planning and design. Topics of particular interest include biodiversity-sensitive urban design, green infrastructure, urban vegetation, habitat quality, ecological connectivity, compact-city development, landscape structure, and the relationship between biodiversity, environmental quality, and human well-being.

She is also interested in developing students’ ability to translate scientific knowledge into applicable urban design criteria, strengthening the connection between research, planning, and professional practice.