Simone Gingrich, PI
Simone is interested in the changing sustainability challenges during industrialization processes, with a particular focus on the relations of land and energy use. She has conducted analyses of long-term change in numerous sustainability problems at a variety of spatial scales, with a regional focus on Europe. The idea of HEFT is nourished by her interest in the relevance of both historical and ongoing land and energy use for the pressing current sustainability challenge to mitigate global climate change.
Sonja Bauernschuster
Sonja’s background is in sociology and social ecology. She graduated with a qualitative and quantitative comparison of different kinds of agricultural land use systems regarding energy efficiency and focussing on a “permaculture” case study. In HEFT she studies the forest transition in the Lao PDR. This work enables her to pursue her interest in hidden patterns and causes of observed phenomena by studying the socio-metabolic processes that cause ongoing reforestation processes.
Christian Lauk
Christian's background is in biology and social ecology. He is interested in how society's use of biomass relates to land use and GHG emissions. He has contributed to scenario studies on the relation between the biomass system, in particular diets, and related GHG emissions, mainly on national (Austrian) and global scales. In HEFT, Christian's main contribution relates to the modelling of GHG emissions related to forest transitions, as well as the application of GHG accounting models to counterfactual scenario approaches.
Andreas Magerl
Andreas has backgrounds in landscape planning and architecture, and in social ecology. He has worked on energy transitions in India with a particular focus on energy efficiency. In his PhD project he analyzes the forest transition in the United States of America during the past century in the context of national greenhouse gas budgets. In particular, he is interested in agricultural frontier expansion and subsequent abandonment from east to west and its effects on terrestrial carbon budgets.
Sarah Matej
Sarah has a background in sociology, geoinformatics and social ecology and works on the quantification and spatial representation of land use impacts. Aiming to understand the role of land use in the carbon cycle, she contributes to mapping a time-series of global biomass carbon stocks. In HEFT she explores the development of forest carbon emissions over the past decades, searching for interlinkages with changes in agriculture, climate change mitigation strategies and the socio-metabolic profiles of nations.
Melanie Pichler
Melanie has a background in political science and development studies and works on the politics of social-ecological transformations from a political ecology perspective. She has conducted research in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore) on the contested expansion of oil palm plantations and involved in a research project on the role of labour in the transformation of the Austrian automotive industry. In HEFT, Melanie contributes to the integration of biophysical and political dimensions in analysing forest transitions with a special focus on Southeast Asia.
Martin Schmid
Martin is an environmental historian trained in history and archaeology. He studies societies' biophysical and symbolic relationships with nature since c.1500. His research covers rivers, agriculture, cities and wars, and has a spatial focus on Austria and Europe. Martin is fascinated by crossing the 'great divide' between natural sciences and humanities. In HEFT, he contributes an environmental historian's perspective to the project's vision of an integrated, socio-natural perspective on forest transitions.
Previous contributors
Manan Bhan
In 2018-2022, Manan was a PhD student in the HEFT project. In June 2022 he defended his excellent thesis on "Quantifying, mapping and assessing the impacts of land use on global biomass carbon stocks", supervised by Karlheinz Erb, Simone Gingrich and Patrick Meyfroidt. It has been an honor to work with you, Manan!
Léonore Darrobers
In the summer of 2021, Léonore Darrobers joined the HEFT team as a student collaborator to compile a dataset on the history of the United States international trade in wood products.
Dino Güldner
From 2018-2019, Dino contributed to HEFT by reconstructing the 19th century expert discourse on the forest transition in Austria regarding changes in forest use and their sociopolitical regulation.
Julia Le Noë
In 2018-2023, Julia importantly shaped the HEFT project as Post-Doc researcher. Among others, she conducted novel empirical research on ecosystem C dynamics in France and developed the CRAFT model which opened new grounds for further analyses.
Maria Niedertscheider
Maria was instrumental in setting up the HEFT project in 2018 by contributing to theoretical and conceptual work at the project start and co-designing the kick-off meeting.
Zully Rosadio Cayllahua
From Feb. 2020 to May 2020, Zully supported the HEFT team as student collaborator by transcribing and coding interviews conducted by Sonja Bauernschuster and Melanie Pichler during their field research in Laos.
Michaela Theurl
Michaela collaborated in the HEFT project in 2022 and 2023 and created a dataset of global agricultural emissions from 1910-2015.
