Lucy is a conservation scientist with Natural State, where she works on developing methods to quantify change in biodiversity in response to restoration initiatives. Her work is mainly focused on collecting, processing and analysing data from passive sensors such as acoustic monitors and camera traps. Currently, the projects she is involved in are focused on data from the Kenyan rangelands and the Namibian drylands. Together, Natural State and the LCNR are working on developing robust and scalable solutions for monitoring change in these systems and interpreting these changes in the context of nature recovery. This will help to generate actionable insights on ecological restoration.
Department/Institute: School of Geography and the Environment
Nicola is the current Trapnell Fellow in African Environments. My current research interests are centred around understanding the dynamics of African grassy ecosystems and how they are changing in the Anthropocene. I’m especially interested in understanding how altered fire and herbivory regimes against a backdrop of changing CO2 concentrations are driving changes. Along this vein I have become particularly interested in the phenomenon of woody encroachment where open ecosystems across the tropics are being invaded by native woody species. It has also driven me to improve our ability to predict future species ranges under global change by improving our mechanistic understanding of range edges in disturbance limited systems. I have ongoing projects in Southern and East Africa.
Carlo Pasqua has experience collaborating with central banks, financial institutions, and standard-setting bodies to address climate and nature-related financial risks while assessing green investment needs. With a solid foundation in Economics, Finance, and Monetary Policy, including prior roles at the Counsel to the Executive Board and the Climate Change Centre of the European Central Bank, as well as in the private financial sector, he is dedicated to aligning finance and policy with sustainable development and advancing the transition to a net-zero, nature-positive future.
Carlo’s work emphasizes integrating environmental risks into financial decision-making and driving innovation in nature finance. At the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, he will leverage his expertise to explore effective strategies for mobilizing investments to address environmental and economic challenges in Kenya.
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.
Lea is a DPhil student in the School of Geography and the Environment’s Environmental Change Institute, conducting critical social science research on the relationship between property regimes and biodiversity restoration. Lea’s current research focuses on the land management practices of Scottish community landownership organisations and their interactions with public and privatised nature recovery initiatives.
The project, which has been co-developed with community-based partners, aims to support to the needs of community landownership organisations while also contributing to broader understandings of the role for alternative ownership models in nature recovery. This work is situated within the Society Research Theme, investigating the distribution of costs and benefits under various approaches to nature recovery and their implications for more just and equitable human-nature relations.
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.
Laurence is a social geographer with research interests centred on the interaction between environmental conditions – such as climate risks and landscape characteristics – and wellbeing outcomes, including both objective (i.e., poverty) and subjective measures (i.e., happiness).
He is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery working on projects that explore the health and wellbeing benefits of nature in the UK and global context. Laurence completed his PhD in Geography at the University of Southampton, where he explored the relationship between objective and subjective wellbeing in the vulnerable coastal location of Volta Delta in southeast Ghana. He also has experience working at the UN Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) Regional Office for the Asia Pacific region, where he supported efforts to integrate broader concepts of wellbeing within nature-based solution projects.
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.
Shiyang is a DPhil student at the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) within the School of Geography and the Environment (SoGE) at the University of Oxford, supervised by Dr. Tom Harwood, Prof. Yadvinder Malhi, and Dr. Samuel Cushman. He is passionate about interdisciplinary research, with a focus on spatial ecological modelling across scales, from global to local. His research interests span land-use, biodiversity, climate, food systems, genomics and genetics. Currently, Shiyang is working on a project that explores landscape connectivity for British biodiversity in the context of climate change.
Before joining the University of Oxford, Shiyang earned a master’s degree in Data Science from UCL, where he also completed his undergraduate studies in Mathematics.
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.