Marieke has a strong interest in the challenge of reconciling nature conservation and (agricultural) development and how human-environment interactions lead to spatial variation in land use and conservation outcomes at different spatial scales. During her PhD (Wageningen University, 2014), Marieke spent 4 years in Kenya and Uganda investigating the outcomes of the interactions between socio-economic, political and ecological processes in space and over time on a mountain forest in Uganda. Before this she worked for the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Cameroon and Gabon, assessing local values for forests to inform conservation management. Her MSc thesis (Wageningen 1999) focussed on the population ecology of the Kobus kob kob in the context of a hunting concession in North Cameroon. Her experience strengthened her belief in the importance of recognising local perspectives and using interdisciplinary approaches in conservation research.
Marieke is currently a senior researcher at Wageningen University (Plant Sciences) and Wageningen Environmental Research, where she investigates the trade-offs and potential synergies between agricultural development and biodiversity related objectives in developing regions using interdisciplinary approaches. Prior to this she worked at the UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), investigating the impacts of land-use change on biodiversity and ecosystem services using future scenarios and spatial analysis at the regional to national scale to inform national agricultural policy development. In her current work she returns to more field-based research to improve the contextual grounding of research that seeks to inform policy development. A strong focus is on tree-crop commodities (e.g. cacao and coffee) at the moment, though she is broadening the work to more dryland type ecosystems where human-wildlife interactions (including with lions) are an important driver of land use and conservation outcomes. She places her work strongly in the context of current debates on food/agriculture production and biodiversity, Multilateral Environmental Agreements and the Sustainable Development Goals. Marieke is Dutch but was born in Tanzania and grew up in, amongst others, Indonesia and Côte d’Ivoire.
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