Casey
Ryan
Senior Lecturer in Ecosystem Services and Global Change
University of Edinburgh
Dr. Casey Ryan is a senior lecturer in ecosystem services and global change at the University of Edinburgh, School of GeoSciences. Broadly, he is interested in tropical land use change science and ecosystem ecology with his research mainly focused on the miombo woodlands of Southern Africa, their ecology, and the ecosystem services that they provide. Dr. Casey’s main research topics include: Miombo woodland ecology, particularly the role of fire; land use change in woodlands and savannahs, particularly in SE Asia and Africa; the carbon cycle of tropical savannas and dry forests; the leaf phenology of seasonally dry ecosystems; tree allometry and biomass estimation; reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD), with a particular emphasis on African woodlands and shifting cultivation. Dr. Casey employs a mixture of methods and techniques his research, from field based studies of trees and soil, to data acquired from satellites and employs computer modelling and GIS techniques for much of his work. Current select projects include: ACES, Abrupt Changes in Ecosystem Services and Wellbeing in Mozambican Woodlands; Streamlining Monitoring for Smallholder and Community PES (SMS-PES); and the SHAMBA tool, a project aimed at developing a greenhouse gas accounting approach for Climate Smart Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa that is accessible to non-specialists and is applicable across a broad range of environmental conditions and land use interventions in partnership with many local research institutions and project developers in Mozambique, Malawi, and Zambia.