The Landscape Decisions Programme are delighted to announce the award of four new Policy Interface Fellowships to Dr Victoria Jenkins, Dr Leo Peskett, Dr Sophie Tindale, and Dr Martin Wilkes. The Policy Interface Fellowships are intended to support the integration of research on landscape decision-making into policy. The four Fellows will each oversee a unique project aimed at ensuring interdisciplinary research and policy interfaces are improved both for the current Landscape Decisions Programme projects and for future research in the area of landscape decisions.
Victoria Jenkins – “Integrating Evidence on the Benefits of Peatlands into Local Policy and Decision Making”
Victoria Jenkins is an Associate Professor of Law in the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law at Swansea University. Her research interests lie in environmental law, specifically legal approaches to sustainable land management and natural resource management, including the significance of ideas of landscape. She is particularly interested in these issues from a local and Welsh perspective.
Leo Peskett – “Coordinating natural capital planning at a regional level: how can existing and emerging tools help?”
Leo Peskett is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh. He has over a decade of climate change research, consulting, and policy making experience at international and national levels within developing countries, and has been influential in the development of global policies to reduce emissions from deforestation.
Sophie Tindale – “What drives effective knowledge exchange between policy and research communities for landscape decisions?”
Sophie Tindale is a Research Associate in the School of Natural and Environmental Sciences at Newcastle University. She is an environmental social scientist with an interest in governance and management of natural resources. Her work focuses on using qualitative methods to understand stakeholder systems and behaviours in relation to policy implementation and decision-making.
Martin Wilkes – “Beyond ‘Good Ecological Status’: Making better use of freshwaters as sentinels of landscape functioning“
Martin Wilkes is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Essex. He is an ecologist with an industry background in data science, and is interested in data-driven explanations and predictions of biodiversity change. Utilising large (river basin to global) scale datasets, ecological theory, statistical programming and high performance computing, his work aims to support the environmental science and management communities find solutions to the challenges of maintaining biodiversity, food production and water security in a changing world.
