Research summary

My research focuses on sustainability transformations in land systems, aiming at informing policies that improve outcomes for people and nature. Specifically, I work towards understanding trade-offs and co-benefits between biodiversity, ecosystem services, and agricultural productivity and how these are affected by land management practices, including forest restoration and agroforestry. I aim to bring knowledge into action by designing relevant and applicable research through co-production processes. Furthermore, I’m passionate about open science, science communication, and collaborations with junior and senior researchers from diverse disciplinary and geographical backgrounds.

For my PhD in the Diversity Turn project, I’ve studied smallholder agricultural land systems in Madagascar, investigating how vanilla agroforests can be managed to serve biodiversity, ecosystem services, and yields. The interdisciplinary work further compared vanilla cultivation to forest and land under shifting cultivation, highlighting the importance of land-use history in land system science. Today, I’m working on various research syntheses projects within the field of land system science. My background in Geography and Ecology equips me with knowledge on a range of approaches from plot-based field data collection, over transdisciplinary methods, to meta research.

Since March 2023, I work as an advanced PostDoc in the Plant Ecology group of Prof Markus Fischer at the University of Bern, Switzerland, leading the synthesis subproject of the project “The role of nature for human well-being in the Kilimanjaro Social-Ecological System” (Kili-SES).

Since April 2024, I’m Co-PI of the “Considering local demand for more effective restoration in Madagascar” (Demand4Restoration) project funded through the “Solution-oriented research for development” (SOR4D) program of the Swiss National Science foundation.

In January 2025, I will start as an Assistant Professor for Resilient Landscapes in the Wildlife Ecology and Conservation group at the Department of Environmental Sciences at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands.