Kimberly Carlson is an Assistant Professor at New York University’s Department of Environmental Studies. As a land systems scientist with a focus on the tropics, Carlson’s expertise spans the disciplines of remote sensing, tropical ecology, biogeochemistry, and land change modeling. She received her PhD from Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in 2012. Carlson holds a Bachelor of Science with Honors from Stanford University, and then worked as a Hawai’i field tech and GIS specialist at the Carnegie Institute’s Department of Global Ecology. She was a Global Landscapes Initiative Post-doctoral Research Scholar at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment. Most recently, she was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management at the University of Hawai’i Mānoa. Carlson's research has been funded by NASA, NSF, USDA, and Google, among others.
Themes
Telecoupling of land use systems, Land governance, Land change trade-offs for ecosystem services and biodiversity
A new article in Environmental Research Letters found that while many RSPO certified growers make real changes to achieve certification, these changes do not always address core sectoral performance concerns.
A new article in Nature Communications shows eliminating deforestation from the supply chains of all firms exporting Brazilian soy to the EU or China from 2011-2016 could have reduced net global deforestation by 2% and Brazilian deforestation by 9%.
A new article in Environmental Research Letters leverages timeseries of spatially explicit corporate commodity sourcing data and ZDCs to assess the current and potential effect of ZDCs within soybean supply chains on forest loss and biodiversity.
Robert Heilmayr, Kim Carlson, and Jason Jon Benedict have a new paper in Environmental Research Letters on deforestation spillovers from RSPO certification in Indonesia. The paper provides some interesting evidence to suggest that eco-certification can strengthen compliance with government land use restrictions.
