Thomas is a DPhil candidate researching urban biodiveristy and connectivity within urban landscapes with a specific focus on London, UK. He is a part of the Environmental Change Institute, the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and works within the Biodiveristy, Ecosystems, and Conservation Cluster in the School of Geography. He is a member of Oriel College.
Prior to his Doctoral studies, Thomas completed his MSc also at Oxford in SoGE where he studied Biodiversity, Conservation and Management. His dissertation looked at the role and proficiency of Biodiveristy Net Gain (BNG) in meeting conservation requirements in the City of Westminster. Before this he achieved a BA from McGill University in Montréal, where he studied Philosophy and Environmental Biology, graduating with Distinction.
Thomas also worked at the Gluon Group – a green investment holding company – in London upon finishing his undergraduate studies. He is committed to finding solutions to tackle the biodiveristy and climate crises in our cities and is looking to work with private, public and third sector organisations to achieve this throughout his DPhil.
I am a Senior Research Associate at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. I use a mix of quantitative methods to explore socio-ecological systems, working at the intersection of nature, risk, collective action, and sustainable development. At the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, my current research investigates how nature can be integrated into economic modeling frameworks to inform strategies for nature conservation and restoration. This research aims to help shaping the global discourse on nature finance, examining whether pricing ecosystem services can enhance the management of natural capital and how payment for ecosystem services could support developing countries in breaking the cycle of unsustainable debt.
Haoran is interested in tree pests and disease outbreaks worldwide. During the Master’s, he worked to understand the ecological consequences of ash dieback disease. He compiled a climate-demographics database to study how the environment interacts with the pathogen to change tree mortality rates.
He also developed a model to forecast disease impact on forest health at Wytham Woods. In his DPhil project, Haoran will compile a global database of forest pests and diseases, and assessing how they affect forest biodiversity and nutrient cycles through integrative modelling. He is passionate about providing data and modelling products to nature recovery in diseased woodlands.
Haoran has a BA in Ecology from Zhejiang University, and an MPhil in Biodiversity, Conservation, and Management from, the University of Oxford. His DPhil project will be funded by the Scottish Forestry Trust.
Wendee is an urban geographer, with research interests mainly including environmental sustainability, wellbeing and urban planning. Wendee is now a postdoctoral researcher at Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery working on project investigating the health/wellbeing benefits of urban green and blue spaces. For the past two years, Wendee worked on projects funded by medical research council on health benefits of urban green and blue spaces in Merseyside and Cheshire. Wendee is the current secretary of Geographies of Health and Wellbeing Research Group at RGS. Wendee finished her My PhD in Geography from University of Melbourne, the thesis examined the sustainability transitions of urban planning in a future city, its implications on environmental policies on urban water management, and the usage of hydraulic missions to realise water sustainability. Her research findings had been published on Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water, Land Use policy, Journal of Environmental Management etc.
Tom Harwood is the Associate Director of the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. He is currently working with the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery to set local case studies within their regional biodiversity context, and build a globally consistent environmental infrastructure to support the next generation of integrative decision tools addressing biodiversity, land use and climate change.
He is a spatial ecological modeller with advanced software engineering skills who works across a wide range of environmental domains at fine resolution from local to global scales. Over the course of his career, Tom has worked on epidemiology, geneflow, weather and microclimate generation, terrain adjustment and downscaling of climate, land use and crop modelling. Tom has a particular focus on the delivery of spatial metrics for practical policy to address biodiversity loss and climate change, and joined Oxford from CSIRO in Australia in 2023, where he has been supporting national planning and monitoring for 14 years. Another key focus of Tom’s work is the estimation of the local condition of habitat using different remote sensing based approaches, as a prerequisite for biodiversity analysis.
Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist, writer, and speaker with a background in plant sciences, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science. He received a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), and sits on the advisory board of the Fungi Foundation.
Nicola works with financial institutions, governments and business to help integrate environmental risks into decision making and align finance and policy with the transition to a resilient, net-zero and nature-positive economy. She is Director, Greening Finance for Nature for the UKRI Integrating Finance and Biodiversity Programme and Director of the Resilience Planet Finance Lab. Nicola’s background combines complex systems modelling, public policy, international development, environmental economics and finance. Her academic work is centred on data, analytics and decision making and she works across the world, from the City of London to Ghana. For the Leverhulme Centre for nature Recovery, Nicola leads work on mobilising finance for nature in Kenya.
Dr Aoife Bennett is Departmental Research Lecturer in the Environmental Social Sciences at ECI, SoGE. She is an interdisciplinary environmental research scientist with expertise in the social sciences, a strong background in Political Ecology and a focus on the socio-political and environmental challenges and opportunities – particularly in Latin America and the Amazon. Her research involves a large amount of multi-methods field-based research, and always includes the most marginalized members of society as active members of her research. She is particularly interested in decolonizing research techniques and activities and working together on breaking down the North/South divide therein.
Aoife is an active member of the global social and environmental community within and outside of academia. She sits as Fellow to the Biodiversity Council at the World Economic Forum (where Aoife created the World Economic Strategic Intelligence Map for Biodiversity, Trustee for the charity Action for Conservation, as an author on the Science Panel for the Amazon (including in the Amazon Assessment Report), and as Advisor to a small indigenous charity that promotes cultural preservation in the Peruvian Amazon.
Aoife is a passionate researcher that likes to be involved in the lives of the people in the places where she works and as such is something of an activist academic she also engages in philanthropy and meaningful local capacity building and mutual aid.
Mattia aims to broaden the analysis of mainstream conservation initiatives from a socio-ecological perspective by looking at the feasibility of a more ecologically-informed and socio-economic just climate governance. He has always been passionate about social justice and great care for the environment with a particular focus on the Political Economy of the Environment as key exploration area in his undergrad experience.
In his MPhil studies, he’s been looking at the potential of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) in stimulating community-led conservation practices. His MPhil research area focuses on community-grounded aesthetic sensibilities of nature recovery in accessible urban green spaces aiming at creating spaces for local ownership of common green spaces by directly enquiring residents, and supporting a planning of accessible green spaces in Oxford which is more equitable and responsive to the needs and values of communities inhabiting those spaces.
Felipe is a community and spatial ecologist focusing on how spatial structure influences biodiversity and related ecological processes. In his research, he studies the effects of anthropogenic landscape structures on different facets of biodiversity, including taxonomic diversity, functional diversity and beta diversity. Currently, he also seeks to use the multidimensionality of biodiversity to gain insights into natural capital biological assets, both in pristine and recovering natural areas. Felipe has also developed computational spatial modelling tools for nature recovery, including the simulation of ecological corridors and the identification of priority areas for restoration and conservation.
He is currently an ecological remote sensing postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, funded by Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, where he is working on the use of Earth Observation data to map aspects of ecosystem functionality and resilience, and to assess the temporal dynamics of land use and land cover change in areas dedicated to nature recovery.
