PRESENTADORES / PRESENTERS
Naikoa Aguilar
Dr. Aguilar-Amuchastegui, known as Naikoa to his teammates, is WWF’s Senior Forest Carbon Scientist and is focused on solidifying and expanding WWF’s science role in REDD+, forest carbon measurement and monitoring, and working closely with WWF’s global Forest Carbon Initiative as lead on measuring, reporting and verifying (MRV) of REDD+ activities and building MRV capacity in the field and with REDD+ partners.
Kemen Austin
Kemen is a Research Associate with the World Resources Institute where she focuses on measuring and monitoring the values of ecosystem services provided by tropical forests, and incorporating these values into land use decision making. Prior to joining WRI Kemen worked with The Nature Conservancy to support community based forest monitoring in the Adelbert Mountains of Papua New Guinea. Kemen holds an MA and a BSc in environmental science from Brown University where her research focused on quantifying terrestrial carbon stocks and fluxes due to residential development in New Hampshire, and due to mangrove wood extraction in Indonesia.
Noa Chutz Noah Chutz is from the beautiful Rocky Mountain state of Colorado in the western United States of America where he developed his passion for outdoor activities, environmental conservation and forestry. In 2004 he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in Forest Resource Management and worked in both the private and public natural resource sector as a consultant and forestry technician. After pursuing his interest in international affairs through spending time in Africa and South Asia, Noah returned to school to receive his Dual Masters Degree in International Affairs from American University and Natural Resources and Sustainable Development from the UN-mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica. Since 2011 Noah has been collaborating with the Comisión Nacional Forestal in Mexico as a Peace Corps Volunteer, coordinating the development of a participatory community-based forest resource monitoring protocol to be implemented in REDD+ Early Action sites. Four communities in the state of Jalisco are actively participating in the pilot program and the project plans on replicating the model in pilot sites in the Yucatán Peninsula starting in 2014. Noah completed a life goal before coming to Mexico when he worked as an alpine mountain guide in Alaska, and hopes to return someday.
Rishi Das Rishi Das is Senior Analyst for MRV with the Forest Carbon, Markets and Communities Program, a USAID funded program on international REDD+ capacity building. For FCMC, he has been working on the development of an MRV manual, technical reviews and studies for MRV, and MRV capacity building in Colombia. He holds degrees in forest ecology and environmental sciences, and has worked on land use change impacts on tropical forests, carbon and nutrient cycling.
Jörg Haarpaintner
I received my PhD in Physical Methods for Remote Sensing from the University of Versailles-St Quentin, France, in 2001. I am originally a Polar researcher with a strong background in sea ice and active microwave remote sensing, having worked for the Norwegian Polar Institute, and the American and Norwegian operational ice services. I am with Norut since 2005, and because of my strong interest for sustainable development, I was keen to work on tropical forest monitoring for REDD+/MRV since 2008 using mainly synthetic aperture radar. I only started recently to use also unmanned/remotely controlled aerial systems for this purpose.
José-Luis IzursaJose-Luis Izursa just finished a post-doctoral program with the university of Florida and Intelligentsia International Inc. The focus of his research was the creation of sustainable, multiple-income stream farming systems quantifying energy balances and GHG effects on climate change of biofuel production systems in Florida. Prior to that, Dr. Izursa was the Director of Science and Research at Bolivia’s Fundación Natura where his work focused on the design, management, and evaluation of biodiversity-conservation and climate change adaptation programs utilizing innovative social markets and REDD techniques. He also worked as a program coordinator for Conservation International and a consultant for the World Wildlife Fund in Washington DC. He received his Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences; his M.Sc. in Sustainable Development and Conservation Biology from the University of Maryland and has won a number of honors and awards including the Fulbright Scholarship and the Russell E. Train Education for Nature Fellowship.
Mike McCall Michael Keith McCall es Investigador Titular en el CIGA de la UNAM en Morelia, México. Enseñó también Profesor Asociado en el ITC, la Universidad de Twente, en Enschede, Países Bajos; y antes,. durante 8 años en la Universidad de Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Es un geógrafo social mediante la formación y la inclinación que ha trabajado en México, África Oriental y Sur, y Asia del Sur. Sus áreas de investigación actuales son en el mapeo social y SIG Participativo con las comunidades – sobre: los riesgos y la vulnerabilidad, mapeo de territorio, manejo comunal de recursos naturales, paisajes, carbono forestal, y pago por servicios ambientales. Ha investigado y impartido cursos y talleres en estas aplicaciones en México, Colombia, Cuba, Sudáfrica, Tanzania, Kenia, Holanda, Georgia, Brasil, India, Nepal, Tailandia, etc, y ha publicado en SIGP, carbono forestal de comunidades, y el gestión de riesgos de desastres.
Alicia PeduzziIs a Research Forester at the Forest Inventory and Analysis group part of the U.S. Forest Service. Her research interests are remote sensing applications to forestry. During her graduate programs, she worked with estimating Leaf Area Index using optical, laser, and radar remote sensing technologies in temperate mixed forests as well as in pine plantations. Currently, she is working with a growth and yield model (Forest Vegetation Simulator, FVS) to simulate forest growth and carbon trajectories after disturbance using national inventory data.
Manuel Peralvo Manuel Peralvo is a researcher at the Consortium for the Sustainable Development of the Andean Ecorregion (CONDESAN). Manuel is a Geographer and has 15 years of experience in the study of coupled human-environmental systems in the Andean region. His main area of interest is the integration of GIScience, remote sensing, and social science tools to support processes of natural resource governance at different levels. Currently, leads the Rural Livelihoods Thematic Area at CONDESAN and coordinates different projects with an emphasis in the articulation of environmental monitoring in decision making at local to national scales.
Arun Pratihast Arun Pratihast is a PhD candidate in his 3 rd
year in the GRS group at Wageningen University, the Netherlands and Institute for Technology and Resources Management in the Tropics and Subtropics (ITT), Cologne University of applied science, Cologne, Germany. His research interests include the use of evolving technologies and community based monitoring for effective REDD+ implementation. Arun is involved in various projects in the department, such as Land Use and Climate Change interactions (LUCCi), Vu Gia Thu Bon River Basin, Central Vietnam, Climate and Forest Monitoring through the German Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU) in the UNESCO Kafa Biosphere Reserve, Southwestern Ethiopia and the Google "Near real-time global deforestation monitoring using Google earth engine"
Sebastien Proust Sébastien Proust works for TNC, and is currently the Yucatan Peninsula REDD+ Coordinator for the Mexico-REDD+ Program. He coordinates the implementation of REDD+ pilot project in the region, and provides support to governments for the development of sub national initiatives. He has worked on forest carbon project since 2006, developing projects for the voluntary market in the Yucatan. He is the former director of U’yool’ché A.C., a local NGO which work with Mayan communities. During this time, he developed and applied community monitoring systems, for biodiversity, carbon and water. He also has experience and expertise in community based climate adaptation strategy, bioenergy projects and community sustainable development. Sébastien studied sociology and international development.
Jay Samek
Jay Samek is a specialist in social forestry with advanced degrees from Dartmouth College and Michigan State University. Jay is at the Global Observatory for Ecosystem Services, Michigan State University, and he has more than 20 years’ experience working in SE Asia. Jay has been involved with projects funded by NASA’s Land Cover and Land Use Change (LCLUC) program, the IGBP-IHDP Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC) programme, and the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN) programme. He currently leads the MSU component on the USAID funded Forest-PLUS India project.
John Stanturf
John Stanturf is a Senior Scientist with the US Forest Service, Center for Forest Disturbance Science in Athens, GA. His research interests are forest landscape restoration, climate change adaptation, and bioenergy. For the past 6 years he has worked on community-based monitoring projects in West and Southern Africa. He hold a PhD in Forest Soils from Cornell University and is Adjunct Professor of Forestry at Auburn and Mississippi State Universities.
Craig Wayson
Craig is the Latin American Regional Coordinator currently living in Lima, Peru for SilvaCarbon, a global program co-funded by the U.S. Department of State and USAID. He coordinates activities in the region as well as collaborating with researchers and government agencies in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico on issues relating to forest carbon dynamics in the MRV-REDD+ and South-South cooperation contexts. He has done research on numerous aspects of carbon cycling for nearly 15 years including biometric and eddy-flux measurements, modeling, remote sensing as well as uncertainty quantification. He was a Research Ecologist for the USDA Forest Service working on scaling forest carbon measurements from intensive monitoring sites to regional levels. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor and Research Fellow at the Center for Research on Energy and the Environment specializing in terrestrial carbon sequestration at Indiana University He received a Ph.D. and a MSES from Indiana University in Environmental Science as well as a Masters in Public Affairs specializing in International Development. He lived in Uruguay for 5 years with the U.S. Peace
Corps helping the Uruguayan government develop their National Park System as well as coordinating the Environmental Program for the Peace Corps.
