My research comes from a very real and practical need: understanding how to improve the capacity of organizations working to solve complex environmental problems in a given landscape. This brings me to a more varied set of questions about the governance process, the nexus of competing and synergizing issues, and the social and environmental outcomes resulting from these processes.
A number of my projects have included digital tool development, such as mobile apps and interactive web-maps, to help practitioners coordinate activities, build staff capacity, and develop new collaborations across the landscape. I am interested in understanding how to make such tools more useful and available to practitioners in a way that makes any underlying (or reinforcing) biases in the data and technology more transparent for the user.
I frequently co-design research and projects with non-academic partners. My work is highly interdisciplinary and can be generalized as environmental governance research, in which I focus on landscape outcomes and management needs resulting from human-environment interactions. Conceptually, I draw from sustainability science, social-ecological systems, and resilience thinking, and contribute to the human dimensions of global change research community.
Please see my publications for examples of my work.