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 (he/they) 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-economically inclusive and equitable environmental governance. He has always been passionate about social justice and great care for the environment with a particular focus on the critical political economy of the environment and political ecology as key exploration area in his research experience.
He has recently completed his MPhil studies in Environmental Change & Management at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford.
During his MPhil project, Mattia worked across participatory social science and art-based methods in Oxford. Through the lens of recognitional equity, Mattia explored how community values and relations with institutions across different social-economic groups in Oxford affect their access to green spaces (distributional equity) and participation in local governance (procedural equity). In his current role at the ECI, Mattia is exploring the social dimension of nature markets in Oxfordshire being established under the new mandatory policy provision of Biodiversity Net Gain as part of the Agile Initiative sprint ‘How can the UK implement the finance-related goals of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework?’.
Oscar defended his DPhil thesis at the School of Geography and the Environment in January 2024 and is currently working as a Social Sciences Engagement Fellow between the School and Youngwilders, a youth-led nature recovery organisation based in the UK which he co-founded.
He is an environmental geographer whose work centres around the emerging interdisciplinary field of ‘digital ecologies’, and his DPhil thesis considers the mobilisation of seabirds as sentinels of environmental change, and their entanglement in digital transformations in ocean governance. His current fellowship seeks to integrate social scientific insights on effective participatory approaches to nature’s recovery into the work of Youngwilders and the European Young Rewilders network, and he is also working as a visiting researcher between KTH Royal Institute of Technology and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
Olga is a senior researcher of machine learning and artificial intelligence at the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery (LCNR). She works on applying machine learning for nature recovery: digitising historic topographic maps for estimating deforestation over time, deriving forest health from remote sensing, measuring biodiversity via acoustics. She is passionate to develop novel machine learning methods that serve nature recovery.
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.
Erle Ellis is Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) where he directs the Anthroecology Laboratory.
His research investigates the ecology of human landscapes at local to global scales to inform sustainable stewardship of the biosphere in the Anthropocene. His recent work examines long-term changes in Earth’s ecology produced by human societies through the concept of anthropogenic biomes, or anthromes, a term he introduced in 2008.
He has developed online tools for global synthesis of local knowledge (GLOBE) and inexpensive tools for mapping landscapes in 3D (Ecosynth). He is a Global Highly Cited Researcher, a UMBC Presidential Research Professor, a lead author on the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment, a Fellow of the Global Land Programme, a Senior Fellow of the Breakthrough Institute and a former member of the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. He teaches environmental science and landscape ecology at UMBC and has taught ecology at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. His first book, Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction was published by Oxford University Press in 2018.
Flurina Wartmann is a social environmental geographer who focuses on human-nature relationships, with a particular interest on cultural landscape values and people-place relations. She uses digital media, public surveys, and participatory research methods, such as participatory mapping and GIS, to explore society-nature relations.
At the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, Flurina works on exploring the landscape aesthetics of nature recovery in the UK. This research will contribute to understand how perceptions about what the landscape ought to look like enable and constrain nature recovery.
Kay has worked in knowledge exchange and communications roles for research programmes on energy, infrastructure and on climate adaptation. Before joining the University of Oxford, Kay worked in communications for local government and the third sector. As well as climate and energy research, her experience includes community energy systems, EU consumer legislation and gender equality.
Raphaella Mascia holds a dual role within the Leverhulme Center for Nature Recovery as both an environmental practitioner and a researcher. She is the monitoring and evaluation manager for the Evenlode Landscape Recovery project and an interdisciplinary environmental researcher, who connects other Leverhulme Center researchers with the Evenlode Landscape Recovery project. In her role as a Leverhulme Center for Nature Recovery researcher, she currently co-leads a project on utilizing available nature finance opportunities to maximize habitat connectivity in agricultural landscapes in the UK, across various scales. Raphaella also has supported Leverhulme Center research projects on farmer’s perception of nature recovery aesthetics in the Cotswolds and on aligning archeological preservation with BNG and nature finance markets guidelines. Her additional research interests encompass democratization, inclusivity, and access in nature valuation methodologies.
Cecilia is a senior researcher with a passion for ecosystem functioning and a particular fondness for things that crawl and creep. She manages and coordinates the ecological work for the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery (LCNR) around Oxfordshire where she is developing a gradient of grazing intensity for studies on the effectiveness of regenerative farming. Cecilia is involved with research coordination across the Wytham Green Estate where she in the process of establishing a network of baseline data that can be utilised by a wide range of research projects. She also runs a NERC funded project on the ecological and multitrophic impact of ash dieback in Wytham Woods as well as a master’s elective on Nature Recovery that aims to introduce the students to the complexities of nature recovery and the ongoing work at the LCNR.
