My work and research seek to improve understanding of land-use systems and human-nature interactions. As the Land System Science Lead for the Global Land Programme (www.glp.earth), I work with both academic and non-academic partners to synthesize lessons-learned from land-system science and to develop practice-oriented research approaches. Current areas of interest include assessing socio-ecological trade-off and synergies associated with multiple land-management goals; exploring pathways and methods to incentivize and scale up sustainable land-use; and investigating implications of different land governance systems for people, nature and climate.

I am an agroecologist and land use scientist by training and my background includes experience in tropical field ecology, social science, environmental policy and international development. My research approach builds on 15 years of experience working on agricultural land-use issues. My dissertation research focused on plant-soil interactions and farm-management decisions in smallholder cocoa agroforests in Sulawesi, Indonesia. As a postdoc at UC Berkeley and the Leibniz Centre of Agricultural Landscape Research in Germany, I investigated impacts of landscape-level agricultural land-use change on ecosystems in California and Brandenburg, Germany. My work has also included collaborations with NGOs and public sector institutions such as the World Agroforestry Centre, the World Bank, IFAD, UNDP, the French National Institute for Agronomic Research, the Asia-Pacific Network for Sustainable Forest Management and Project Drawdown.