The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR and World Agroforestry (ICRAF) joined forces in 2019, leveraging a combined 65 years’ experience in research on the role of forests and trees in solving critical global challenges.
Dr Leigh Ann Winowiecki has been appointed the new Theme Leader for Land Health Decisions at World Agroforestry (ICRAF). A soil scientist, she has over 15 years of experience in the tropics addressing land restoration, sustainable agricultural intensification, and soil carbon dynamics. She is based in Nairobi, Kenya.
‘Healthy soil is fundamental for functioning ecosystems and critical for our own food and nutritional security,’ she said. ‘We need to dramatically rethink the important role of soil health and agriculture within the upcoming United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.
‘CIFOR-ICRAF has so much to offer by building on decades of on-the-ground experience in assessments and management of soil and land health. Advances in soil analytics using novel methods, such as soil spectroscopy, combined with cutting-edge data science, represent huge future opportunities.
‘Now is the time for sincere collaboration toward common goals to achieve restoration commitments globally in order to restore and maintain functioning ecosystems. Now is the time for us to come to together to tackle the root causes of land degradation, which make landscapes and people more vulnerable to climate change and pandemics such as COVID-19. We all need to take action to raise the profile of soil and land health in every aspect of our lives.’
Since 2009, Leigh has played a critical role in developing and implementing ICRAF’s Land Degradation Surveillance Framework in over 40 countries with a myriad of partners, including NGOs, district, county and national governments, and international organizations. The Framework is a systematic methodology to assess the health of soil and land, track changes over time, and monitor restoration.
She has published widely on soil organic carbon, ecosystem services and land degradation across Sub-Saharan Africa, including a coherent set of widely cited publications on ecosystem health based on the Framework’s dataset. Her publication record includes more than 20 open-access datasets available on Harvard Dataverse, including all of the Framework data collected within the CGIAR Research Program on Forest, Trees and Agroforestry’s Sentinel Landscapes, including the Nicaragua–Honduras Sentinel Landscape. She has deep botanical knowledge of African biomes born out of analysing vegetation as part of the Framework.
Often heard to say that the best way to prevent loss of soil carbon is to prevent erosion, she is a consummate communicator who tweets (@lawinowiecki), blogs, creates infographics, and who has spoken at the UN. She has also supported both the African Soil Seminar 2016 and Global Soil Week 2019 in Nairobi at the ICRAF campus.
Her research focuses on soil carbon cycling and dynamics, rangeland health, land restoration, and the integration of social and ecological dimensions of ecosystem health. In the last five years she has managed and contributed to over a dozen projects with smallholders to improve their on-farm productivity and livelihoods. This requires innovative tools to interact with farmers to learn from their experience and, together with them, devise context-specific approaches to land restoration. For example, implementing the options by context approach across East Africa and the Sahel. She is co-leading the Land Degradation Dynamics component of the Regreening Africa project.
She is committed to improving data quality and consistency, from sampling design through to database management and data curation, analytics and sharing. She actively mentors staff and develops capacity. A proponent of open source tools, she is a leading light in bringing evidence to bear in decision making, from farmer-level to national and international policy.
Leigh is a member of the Pedometrics Advisory Board, the journal Geoderma’s editorial board and a founding member of the board of the International Union of Agroforestry. One of her many engagements with world leadership in soil and restoration includes membership of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration’s Task Force on Monitoring and of the Global Land Outlook Steering Committee and the Global Restoration Observation Working Group.
Leigh joined ICRAF in January 2016, previously having worked at the Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (International Center for Tropical Agriculture). She did her postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, based in Tanzania. She earned her joint doctorate in Soil Science from the University of Idaho and Tropical Agroforestry from Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza (Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center) in 2008. In 2018, she was nominated as a landscape laurel.
Some of Leigh’s work
Implementing a farmer-centred approach to land restoration in the drylands.
Gender and land restoration: considerations for scaling.
Agroforestry ‘basins’ stir up big benefits for women in Kenya drylands.
Building a Makueni County Resource Hub.
Using the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework to assess land health in Rwanda.
Land Degradation Surveillance Framework deployed in Senegal.
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