ESP’s Sectoral working group 3 – Ecosystem services in forestry production has two new members of the lead team – Elsa Varela and Can Vatandaşlar. They are already lining up their ideas for the future activities of the working group:
Ideas and visions for the working group
We envision active collaboration between group members as well as dissemination our activities beyond ESP. Some of the activities we envision are:
- Database of researchers/practitioners working on or interested in ES and Forestry production;
- Writing reflection/ position papers or commentaries;
- Organising workshops and seminars outside ESP conferences on specific topics;
- Writing research proposals together;
- Sharing knowledge- providing overviews of recent and key publications for the forestry sector;
- Networking with regional forestry production organizations to disseminate activities in a mutual fashion.
An immediate and easy action we would like to take in the next weeks is giving credit to relevant publications by the members of the working group.
An introduction of the new leads
Elsa Varela is a postdoc researcher at the Institute for Agrofood Research and Technology (IRTA) in Barcelona, Spain. She is a forest engineer by training and her work focuses on the assessment of societal preferences for ES generated by forest ecosystems and agroecosystems in the wide sense. You can find more information here.
Can Vatandaşlar graduated from Istanbul University Faculty of Forestry as a forest engineer. He is currently working as a Research Assistant at the Department of Forest Management at Artvin Coruh University (Turkey) and writing his PhD thesis on “integrating erosion control ES of forests into management and planning” at the same department. His other research interests include remote sensing, GIS, and soil erosion modelling. You can find more information here.