Written by Siyu Qin As the cornerstone of conservation, protected areas (PA) are often expected to provide permanent protection to nature, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. In reality, however, legal changes made to loosen the PA restrictions (downgrade), shrink the PA boundaries (downsize), and remove the protection status (degazette) are widespread and through the history of…
Written by Johanna Coenen (ESR 12) A full year has passed since I started my PhD. Now it’s time to reflect on some experiences and lessons learnt. Here are 10 practical tips, I would have liked to know from day one of my PhD journey. They can be useful for anybody currently doing a PhD or…
Written by Nicocas Roux (ESR 02) and Floris Leijtenen (ESR 05) On the occasion of the 250th birthday of the famous geographer Alexander von Humboldt, Humboldt University of Berlin hosted the KOSMOS conference between August 28 – 30, as part of a broader movement to help society navigate the sustainability transformation in the 21st century.…
Our PhD student Joel has spent the past month in Northern Laos. He sent us this postcard of his initial reflections and experiences from a village nested in a stunning mountainous landscape inside one of Laos’ most renowned national parks, Nam-Et Phou-Louey. Laos is a country undergoing rapid changes in land-use, which has great impacts…
Eric Lambin, earth system science professor at Universite Catholique de Louvain and Stanford University, has been honored with the 2019 Blue Planet Prize. This award is widely considered the Nobel Prize for science that contributes to solving global environmental problems. Eric’s current research tries to understand how globalization affects global land use, and how private…
ATC 11 – Qualitative Research Methods at the Centre for Development and Environment, University of Bern, 27 April 2019 Written by Sahar Malik, ESR 14 After three days of intense discussions and networking at the Global Land Programme Open Science Meeting 2019 in Bern, the group of ESRs spent a rainy Saturday at the Centre…
Written by Gabi Sonderegger, ESR 09 In late April, the Early Stage Researchers, supervisors and many other partners of COUPLED travelled to the beautiful town of Bern in Switzerland to attend one of the most important conferences in our field, the 4th Open Science Meeting Global Land Programme. Hosted by the University of Bern, the…
Written by Perrine Laroche, ESR 04 Last February (2019), I went for my academic secondment at the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. An academic secondment is a mandatory opportunity, in Innovative Training Networks such as COUPLED, to experience a different research environment and build up interdisciplinary collaboration. For one month, I sat closer to Thomas…
![[Cerrado Brazil]](https://coupled-itn.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Larissa-Science-pic1-600x387.jpg)
Written by Simon Bager & Tiago Reis, Ph.D. candidates at UCLouvain in Belgium and Early Stage Researchers in COUPLED This blog post expands upon a letter recently published in Science, signed by 600+ scientists (including the authors of this post) and 300 Indigenous Peoples groups. Human consumption of food and agricultural products has a significant…
Written by Sébastien Boillat, Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Switzerland This blog post was written as part of a series of external contributions on topics related to telecoupling. Biological diversity on the planet is declining fast. To curb this crisis, governments, associations and private foundations have joined forces to create vast networks of national…