PhD students

Anne Cathrine Linder

Title of the PhD project
Using computational human ecology approaches to understand the role of cultural ecosystem services to trade-offs between human well-being and biodiversity conservation

Supervisors
David Lusseau & Laura Alessandretti 

Background of the project
One of the grand challenges of sustainability science is understanding principal trade-offs between human well-being and the natural environment. Such trade-offs are dependent on how well-being benefits emerge from spending time in nature and how such use of nature may in turn threaten biodiversity. Thus, it is relevant to determine the overlap between species and habitats sensitive to tourism and recreation and ecosystem features underpinning cultural ecosystem services (CES). CES are generally defined as non-material benefits people obtain from nature and have been suggested to be important contributors to human well-being. However, we have a poor understanding of how CES are derived from human-nature interactions, with one of the key hurdles being data access.

About the project
The objective of my PhD project is to utilize data from social media to understand cultural ecosystem services associated with human-nature interactions and assess trade-offs arising from these interactions. Social media sampling and text mining approaches will be used to sample the intensity of nature use and retrieve the context of human-nature interactions to identify key ecosystem features providing CES. This project will also estimate sentiment and emotions expressed in social media posts, which along with a series of controlled experiments will enable me to understand well-being emerging from CES exposure as facilitated by human-nature activities.

Perspectives
This project will advance sustainability science by providing a global understanding of CES. Moreover, this project will identify nature features important for eliciting well-being benefits and determine the overlap between these key features and species and habitats sensitive to tourism and recreation. Thus, providing a framework for assessing trade-offs arising from human-nature interactions.

Previous PhD students within the research area Fisheries Management (since 2020)

Berthe M. J. Vastenhoud
Fish stock assessment and fisheries dynamic modelling investigating sustainability of potential mesopelagic resource exploitation (link awaits publication of thesis)

Søren Espersen Schrøder
Decision Tools and Management in the Fish Sector. Examining the psychological components of the Analytical Hierarchy Processes methodology and its effect on decision-making

Katrina Bromhall
The effect of modified and lightweight fishing gears on benthic macrofauna

Tobias Mildenberger
Towards sustainable fisheries: Improving the robustness and effectiveness of management procedures for data-limited fish stocks

Marie-Christine Rufener
Integrating commercial fisheries and scientific survey data: Advances, new tools and applications to model the fish and fishery dynamics

Sieme Bossier
Evaluating Major Baltic Fish Stocks under Climate, Eutrophication and Fishing Pressure using a Holistic end-to-end Ecosystem Model

Kristian Plet-Hansen
Fisheries data from electronic monitoring and traceability systems in the context of the EU landing obligation