Dr Angie Elwin joined the Landwise team in January 2019 as a postdoctoral research assistant to work on Work Package 1 ‘Local Knowledge and scenarios’. Angie has an interest in human interactions with the environment with a particular focus on how ecosystem management impacts on ecological functioning and ecosystem service delivery. Angie received her PhD at the Department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Reading, where her project explored social-ecological resilience in mangrove shrimp farming communities in Thailand. Her interdisciplinary thesis combined mangrove forest carbon stock assessments in abandoned shrimp ponds to investigate the impact of land-use change on ecosystem carbon and patterns of ecosystem recovery over time, and participatory approaches to explore local ecological knowledge and perceptions of ecosystem health and ecosystem service delivery among mangrove-dependent communities in coastal Thailand.
Angie’s work on the Landwise project involves capturing farmer knowledge about land practice and soil management, and working with local stakeholders to develop future land-use scenarios for NFM. She has been exploring factors affecting perceptions of NFM acceptability and feasibility in lowland catchments as a bottom up approach to ‘targeting’ measures by identifying those that different stakeholder groups value most. To assist with this, Angie and the Landwise team have been running a series of local workshops with catchment partnerships, including in the South Chilterns, Upper Thames, Loddon, Ock and Kennet, to create catchment scale scenarios for NFM that reflect the type of measures the local community and organisations want to see. These scenarios will be run through models to ‘test’ how effective they are at reducing flooding. The findings from these workshops will feed into catchment planning.
Landwise drop-in event about NFM co-organised with the Pang Valley Flood Forum.
South Chilterns workshop – working with local stakeholders to develop future land-use scenarios for NFM.