Welcome!
My work seeks to (1) identify actions and pathways towards sustainability and opportunities to catalyze system transformation towards just and sustainable futures; (2) understand how interacting global changes affect pastoral and mountain ecosystems and livelihoods and to detect the patterns and underlying mechanisms driving these responses and feedbacks; (3) conduct global syntheses across grasslands and tundra ecosystems and across mountain social-ecological systems worldwide; and (4) help re-define science through a ‘transformative science with society’ approach. My projects typically combine diverse methods, including field experiments, local knowledge, modeling, systematic reviews, GIS, surveys, and synthesis.
Aside from working in academic settings, I am committed to getting sustainability science and research into practice through participating in the UNFCCC COP and other significant action-oriented and policy venues.
Highlighted Projects
Mountain Sentinels Collaborative Network
Mountains are globally ubiquitous, locally unique, iconic coupled social-ecological systems (SES) that provide ecosystems services to over half of the world’s population. A grand challenge for mountains, and the goal of this network, is to understand system dynamics across scales and explore alternative future trajectories in the different contexts of mountain systems worldwide. Mountain Sentinels is composed of transdisciplinary, globally-representative teams of mountain scientists and stakeholders, who are using an innovative global-framework approach and are engaged in knowledge co-creation and coordinated practice. Click here for the Mountain Sentinels Website
On the Tibetan Plateau, extreme spring snowstorms are reportedly becoming more frequent and severe, while climate warming in Tibet is several times greater than the global average. At the same time, grazing policies that include land tenure changes and grazing restrictions are also affecting the pastoralists and environment on the Tibetan Plateau. The overall goal of this project is to investigate the social and ecological implications of climate warming, snowstorms, and grazing policies, and more broadly, pastoralists’ changing vulnerability to global change.