Andrea León Parra is a second-year PhD student at the School of Environmental and Rural Studies at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. Her doctoral work deals with changes in Colombian landscapes generated by human activities, and how they may lead to new configurations in terms of the composition, structure, and function of ecosystems. Andrea is a biologist who graduated from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and she has an MSc in biology from the same university. She specializes in ferns, and through her research into this plant group she has proposed and developed projects in taxonomy, systematics, and ecology in different types of natural ecosystem in the Andean and Amazon regions of Colombia.