RESEARCH
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OVERVIEW
Hi! I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California Los Angeles and work with the Governors for Climate (GCF) and Forests Task Force.
I'm interested in policies and governance mechanisms of land use. Specifically, I investigate if and how certain governance approaches can help to reduce the negative impacts of land use in the tropics while encouraging sustainable and fair use of natural resources. To address my research questions, I use qualitative and quantitative methods.
Please feel free to contact me for questions or suggestions at vonessen@ucla.edu.
You can find my CV here.
CURRENT PROJECTS
Funding for conserving and sustainably managing forests is scarce, and many state and provincial governments compete for a small pot. Yet some jurisdictions secure international support more often and at larger scales. We’re asking what conditions make that possible. To find out, we designed a mixed-methods study that pairs a global scan of forest-funding flows with interviews with funders and practitioners.
You can find more detail on the study here.
PAST PROJECTS
Remote sensing tools and data are becoming more and more accessible - but do they also reach those who rely on them to protect tropical forests? To answer this question, we interviewed 38 providers, facilitators, and on-the-ground users across the global tropics. You can find out what they said here.
Can governance interventions be successful in slowing deforestation? Under what conditions are they the most effective and equitable? Using our agent-based model, we test these question in this study.
Land use governance interventions - like jurisdictional approaches - are notoriously difficult to study. This is why we developed an agent-based model that allows us to investigate governance interventions through computer simulation.
What are jurisdictional approaches to sustainable resource use? How can they be categorized and how are they different from other approaches? Can they deliver effective and equitable outcomes? We try to answer these questions in this conceptual study.
How do the choices of how we use land affect the services these ecosystems provide to humans? To answer this question, we utilized the InVEST toolkit to compare ecosystem service provision under stakeholder-designed land-use scenarios. For more details, check out the study page.
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