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 is the CIFOR-ICRAF Soil and Land Health Global Research Lead. A soil scientist, her research focuses on scaling farmer-centered landscape restoration, understanding drivers of degradation and quantifying the impacts of land management on soil organic carbon. She is based in Nairobi, Kenya. Since 2009 she has co-developed and implemented the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF) in over 40 countries. The framework is a systematic methodology to assess ecosystem health and track restoration efforts across landscapes. She has published widely on soil organic carbon, ecosystem services and land degradation across sub-Saharan Africa and the tropics, including a coherent set of open access datasets. She co-leads the Coalition of Action 4 Soil Health (CA4SH) within the UN Food Systems Summit, which aims to catalyze investments in soil health for human well-being and climate. Leigh has a PhD from CATIE in Costa Rica in Tropical Agroforestry and in Soil Science from the University of Idaho. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University - Earth Institute. She joined CGIAR in 2011. She is on the Scientific Task Force and the Monitoring Task Force for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration as well as the Scientific Steering Committee for the Global Soil Health Programme. She co-leads the Landscape Restoration Transformative Partnership Platform. She is also a founding Board Member of the International Union of Agroforestry (IUAF).
Articles
Publications
Publications (co-authored)
Projects
Overall objective
To generate evidence regarding the benefits of soil protection and rehabilitation for the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and carbon sequestration…
Project Background
Drylands cover 40 % of the global land area, host 2 billion people, and support approximately 50% of the world’s livestock population. In the drylands…
Purpose
To focus on how WLE research across CGIAR centers can better help landscapes to become sustainable and resilient while addressing the interlinked global challenges…
Overall goal
To contribute to the reduction of rural poverty and food insecurity of smallholders, by developing their economic potential. This development goal will be…
Purpose
This project aims to bring affordable soil analysis to small hold farmers across Africa by:
This project aims to provide an open-access soil information system that uses a sound sampling framework, uniform methodologies for data gathering, accompanied with thorough documentation of the…
The main objective is to build a public–private partnership for restoration through agroforestry systems with cocoa and active restoration for carbon sequestration.