Manu is a postdoctoral researcher whose research interests revolve around investigating how anthropogenic pressures and their interactions with climate can alter fire regimes in tropical forests. She does so through studying both fine-scale flammability metrics and broad-scale drivers and patterns via spatial modelling. Currently, Manu is investigating the apparent atypical fire season of 2019 in the Amazon and unpicking the relative contribution of the main drivers. Her John Fell/GCRF project seeks to inform policies and prevent other severe fire seasons in the Amazon.

Huanyuan is a Postdoctoral researcher with a profound interest in African forest ecology, carbon cycle modelling, and plant functional traits. Affiliated with both the University of Oxford and UC Berkeley, he is responsible for building the Global Ecosystem Monitoring (GEM) Forests carbon cycle database. Dr. Zhang-Zheng's primary research endeavours encompass the compilation of the GEM forests carbon cycle database, data-model comparisons of forests' gross primary productivity, and meta-analyses of forest productivity across a multitude of tropical sites. He is also the sole author of CRAN R package 'ARTofR' (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ARTofR/index.html). Dr. Zhang-Zheng earned a BSc in Environmental Science from Sun Yat-sen University in China, and the University of Birmingham. He also holds an MRes in Ecosystem and Environmental Change (Distinction) from Imperial College London. In 2023, he was awarded DPhil in Geography and the Environment from the University of Oxford with a thesis entitled "Gross primary production of West African tropical forests". He has been the recipient of the Environmental Change Institute small grants from the University of Oxford, the Tang scholarships awarded by the China Oxford Scholarship Fund, and the Henfrey scholarship on Chinese studies from St Catherine’s College, Oxford. Additionally, his research was funded by Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden Open Funding, and African-Oxford Catalyst Grant, awarded by African-Oxford Initiative. Born on a tropical island (Nan'ao Island, China) and passionate about tropical ecosystems, he has travelled to and conducted research in Mexico, Colombia, Ghana, Malaysia and Yunan, China. He is also a PADI qualified Free Diver and Dive Master.

Eleanor is a postdoctoral researcher in the Oxford Ecosystems and Oxford Seascape labs. Her background is in ecological remote sensing with a focus on tropical forest ecosystems.     She is currently working on a Bertarelli Marine Science Project that seeks to quantify the importance of seabird-derived nutrients on tropical island ecosystems. This is a joint project between Oxford, Exeter and Lancaster University The project works with local partner organisations across the Chagos Archipelago, Seychelles and French Polynesia to support tropical island conservation and restoration in these regions.   She is also a Senior Researcher at Gentian Ltd. Outside of work, you can see her cycling around Oxfordshire, flying her drone up at Wytham woods, or swimming in the river.

Felipe is a community and spatial ecologist focusing on how spatial structure influences biodiversity and related ecological processes. In his research, he studies the effects of anthropogenic landscape structures on different facets of biodiversity, including taxonomic diversity, functional diversity and beta diversity. Currently, he also seeks to use the multidimensionality of biodiversity to gain insights into natural capital biological assets, both in pristine and recovering natural areas. Felipe has also developed computational spatial modelling tools for nature recovery, including the simulation of ecological corridors and the identification of priority areas for restoration and conservation. He is currently an ecological remote sensing postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, funded by Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, where he is working on the use of Earth Observation data to map aspects of ecosystem functionality and resilience, and to assess the temporal dynamics of land use and land cover change in areas dedicated to nature recovery.

As an interdisciplinary ecologist with a core background in zoology and conservation, Ella works on providing evidence for effective biodiversity restoration measures. Introduced to the fascinating hidden world of bats during her undergraduate Zoology degree, she was hooked, and has been studying bats ever since using them to understand impacts of anthropogenic environmental change on biodiversity. Bats’ use of echolocation led Ella to a deeper exploration of the use of passive acoustic monitoring techniques for gathering vital ecological data, and she co-wrote the first guidelines for conservation practitioners on using passive acoustics. Ella continues to work on developing and improving tools for collecting passive acoustic data and extracting ecologically information from audio using machine learning methods. Ella is more widely interested in combining conservation technologies, Internet of Things systems, and AI tools for enabling automation, to improve the efficiency of biodiversity data collection and assessment of biodiversity recovery measures.

Laurence is a postdoctoral researcher focusing on nature, human health and wellbeing, funded by the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and the Flourishing and Wellbeing Theme of the Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre. He completed his PhD in Geography from the University of Southampton. This work explored the relationship between environmental conditions, including landscape characteristics and climate risks, upon different dimensions of both objective and subjective wellbeing – with a particular focus on the Volta Delta in Ghana. Laurence is a social scientist, with experience in using both qualitative and quantitative methods to detect human-environment relationships. He also undertook a consultancy role at the UN Food & Agriculture organisation (Regional Office for Asia Pacific) where he worked on incorporating broader dimensions of wellbeing within the nature-based solutions programme.

Megha is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, where she is working on the development of a biodiversity intactness index for tropical savannas. Her research focuses on understanding the ecological health of savannas, particularly in relation to herbivory intensity and various management interventions. Megha explores a wide range of ecological factors, including taxonomic and functional diversity, as well as energy flows within these complex ecosystems. She completed her PhD in India, where her thesis investigated the impact of plant invasions on Asian tropical savannas. This work contributed novel insights into the shifts in functional composition of these understudied systems, advancing our understanding of biodiversity dynamics and ecosystem resilience.

Isamar Marie Cortés, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, where she works on understanding biodiversity on forest resilience through a combination of field work and remote sensing analysis. She is a physical geographer by training, with emphasis on coupling remote sensing analysis with numerical models to quantify Earth surface processes. Throughout her career, Isamar has led numerous collaborative projects, including those with NASA, where she analysed changes in mangrove vegetation and tree structure, as well as using Google Earth Engine and other tools for geospatial analysis. She has also received several research grants, including funding from NASA and the National Science Foundation, to advance her studies in climate impacts and ecosystem modelling. As a leader in the scientific community, Isamar founded the GeoLatinas Coding Group to empower underrepresented groups in Earth sciences, providing a space for learning open-source programming. She has also contributed to science communication initiatives, co-directing the Code to Communicate program, which provides bilingual coding and geoscience training. In her career, Isamar hopes to continue to understand how climate change will alter tropical forest dynamics and bring this research to local stakeholders.

Broadly, Kendall’s research interests are in remote sensing applications to pollinator ecology, exploring how we can scale monitoring of pollinator communities and their interactions with plants across various environmental gradients. Kendall will be applying these questions as a post-doctoral researcher at the LCNR, working on remote sensing approaches to characterise pollinator diversity and plant-pollinator interactions in nature recovery landscapes of Eastern Ghana. She is also a stipendiary lecturer in ecology at Worcester College.

Bhavya is a research assistant at the Ecosystems Lab, where she is working on applying the ecosystem energetics methodology across different ecosystems. Her research focuses on testing metrics to quantify ecosystem vibrancy and the diversity of energetic pathways in a community to explore how an energetics lens adds to our understanding of ecosystem health in addition to traditional metrics such as taxonomic and functional diversity.  She completed her MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management at SOGE where she explored biogeographic variation in energy flows in bird and mammal communities in Peruvian and Bornean lowland tropical rainforests. She has a background in marine biology and has previously worked on the intersections between gender and fisheries management, and with the Wildlife Conservation Society to quantify trends in illegal wildlife trade.