Current projects

I'm currently working on two main projects related to jurisdictional approaches to sustainable resource use in collaboration with the Governors for Climate and Forests (GCF) Task Force. For the more advanced study, I interviewed over thirty decision-makers, technicians, civil servants, and activists along the remote sensing value chain to learn more about the challenges and obstacles that users face when leveraging remote sensing data and technology for forest governance, such as land use change and fire alerts, mapping indigenous and customary territories, and estimating carbon biomass.

I am also involved in the Pangea project - short for PAN tropical investigation of bioGeochemistry and Ecological Adaptation. A scoping study for the NASA Terristrial Ecology campaing - an up to 10 year long research campaign. I am one of the co-leads for the social-ecological systems working group. Find out more about Pangea and how you can get involved here.

REMOTE SENSING FOR JURISDICTIONAL-SCALE FOREST GOVERNANCE: STAKEHOLDER PERCEPTIONS, CHALLENGES, AND OPPORTUNITIES

Over the last decade, the remote sensing landscape has changed substantially, propelled by the rise of free, web-based geospatial tools, efforts to make high-resolution remote sensing data available at no cost, and the development of powerful, bespoke remote sensing systems in major tropical forest countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Indonesia.

In the face of the rapidly evolving remote sensing landscape, we want to capture the perspectives on the role of remote sensing for forest management from a diverse group of stakeholders - from technicians on the ground, to regional decision-makers, data providers, and donors. In particular, we aim to identify if the perceptions around the challenges of remote sensing across different stakeholder groups align - a necessary condition to overcome these challenges.

THE JURISDICTIONAL APPROACH AT FIFTEEN YEARS: STAKEHOLDER PERSPECTIVES ON ITS CHALLENGES, OPPORTUNITIES, AND FUTURE

Jurisdictional approaches to sustainable resource use are governance approaches that operate within formal administrative boundaries and seek to establish policies and practices that apply to all stakeholders. Jurisdictional approaches have been established recently in comparison to more traditional approaches to environmental governance. The Governors for Climate and Forests (GCF) Task Force was established fifteen years ago, pioneering the development and adoption of jurisdictional approaches to sustainable resource use, predominantly in tropical countries. Since its inception, the number of GCF member states has grown rapidly to incorporate more than a third of the global tropical forests. During this time, scientific knowledge about forest governance has increased and the political and economic conditions across the world have undergone significant changes.

This study seeks to capture opportunities and challenges associated with jurisdictional approaches to sustainable resource use as perceived by practitioners along the jurisdictional approach value chain. In the absence of quantitative assessments of the performance of jurisdictional approaches, experiential knowledge provides deep insights into the successes and failures of jurisdictional approaches and generate insights into the most pressing challenges and the most promising opportunities.