Carmelo J León is Full Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, since 2002, being working at the aforementioned University since 1988. He currently holds the position of Director of the Institute of Tourism and Sustainable Economic Development (TiDES) of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain), and Director of the UNESCO Chair in Tourism Planning and Sustainable Development. The TiDES Institute has more than 70 researchers specialized in various areas of tourism, from marketing and tourism image to spatial planning of tourism, management, tourism statistics, and tourism development cooperation. On the other hand, he obtained a degree in Economics from the University of La Laguna in 1988, and a Doctorate in Economics from the University of Las Palmas in 1994, as well as a Master in Economics from the University of Manchester in 1993, and Diploma in Economics from the University of Manchester in 1991. He has been Visiting Researcher at the University of California (Berkeley, USA) in 2005, and at the University of Technology in Sydney in 2011. He has published as author or co-author more than 70 articles in scientific academic journals, as well as more than 10 books on the environment and tourism. He has participated, either as a director or as a researcher, in more than 30 research projects on various aspects related to the environment and tourism, including those carried out in Morocco, Senegal, Cape Verde, Colombia, Venezuela,Ecuador, Guatemala, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Paraguay. His area of general specialization is the economic and social aspects related to the environment and tourism, and in particular, the analysis of tourists' preferences on the environment and natural resources, with implications for marketing and designing tourist products. In this area he has made academic contributions to the development of methods for the economic valuation of the environment, being among the first researchers to apply the Bayesian techniques for the analysis of data in the economic valuation of the environment.