Karina Melgaço

Karina Melgaço is a forest ecologist with hands-on experience across tropical ecosystems, with a particular focus on Amazonian and Atlantic Forest biomes, from field expeditions and large-scale forest inventories to carbon quantification.
She currently works as a Forest Scientist and Plots Database Officer at BeZero Carbon, where she manages and analyses ground-based forest data to estimate forest biomass, growth curves, and ecosystem dynamics, contextualising carbon stocks for nature-based solutions assessments.

Before joining BeZero, Karina spent years coordinating field expeditions, forest inventories, and growth monitoring projects deep in the Amazon Forest in Brazil. She also worked as a research and data collaborator in a tropical forest database team at the University of Leeds, where she managed and quality-assured complex datasets underpinning high-impact peer-reviewed publications, delivered data analysis and management training to diverse audiences facilitating research partnerships across institutions worldwide.