My research is focused on land use transitions, natural resource management, food security and climate change adaptation and mitigation in the Global South. I am particularly interested in understanding causes of land use changes and how they affect socio-economic and environmental systems. My recent research is focussing on effects of land use changes on carbon storage in soil and vegetation and soil fertility management in agroecosystems with focus on shifting cultivation, rubber plantations oil palm plantations. I am also investigating the environmental and socio-economic impacts of the expansion of maize production that is currently taking place in mainland Southeast Asia. My regional focus is Southeast Asia, but I have also worked in East Africa, West Africa and in the Pacific.
Themes
Telecoupling of land use systems, Land-atmosphere processes, Land change trade-offs for ecosystem services and biodiversity , Land management systems
A new paper in Global Environmental Change uses case studies across the Mekong Region, a place which serves as a harbinger for crop booms globally, to propose a new analytical framework for understanding and governing crop booms.
A new article in People and Nature that grew out of discussions at GLP's 2019 Open Science Meeting in Bern looks at what happens after shifting cultivation and finds eight transitions with varied consequences for people and nature.
The authors conclude that the narrow focus on specific ES categories strongly limits understanding of SF in shifting cultivation areas and that it is more relevant to compare SFs with other agricultural systems rather than with old-growth forests.
For a Special Issue of Land, GLP Members Dr. Thilde Bech Bruun and Dr. Cornelia Hett as well as colleague Dr. Rob Cramb seek papers that provide new empirical evidence, review papers, and meta-analyses of case studies from the region. They are particularly interested in papers that look at the causes and effects of land-use changes from a multi- or interdisciplinary perspective, from a landscape level to a regional level.
