Doctoral Researcher
Marie Pratzer is a doctoral researcher at IRI THESys, funded by the ERC project “SystemShift” at the Geography Institute of Humboldt University Berlin. After obtaining a B.Sc. in Geography and Political Science from the Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) Munich, she graduated in “Global Change Geography” (M.Sc.) from Humboldt-University. Accompanying her studies, she worked on different research projects as a student collaborator, thematically ranging from the effectiveness of conservation measures and human-carnivore co-existence to the application of satellite imagery to study the ecological marginalization of forest-dependent people.
In her PhD project, she will contribute to a better understanding of how land use – as the key link between humans and the environment, and as a manifestation of society, culture, economy, and politics – shapes challenges and opportunities to conservation. She is specifically interested in the spatial representation of social complexity on land – the roles of scaling and mapping, and how different approaches motivate certain policies while foreclosing others. Methodologically, her research relies on spatial data analysis and advanced statistical modelling equally as on expert elicitation and literature synthesis.
Research Interests
- Just conservation
- Social-ecological implications of land use and globalization
- Political ecology
Project
Land, people, and conservation: Understanding complexity related to land use for effective and equitable conservation in the tropical dry forests.
As part of SystemShift.
Publications
Pratzer, M., et al. (2024) ‘An actor-centered, scalable land system typology for addressing biodiversity loss in the world’s tropical dry woodlands’, Global Environmental Change, 86. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2024.102849
Pratzer, M. et al. (2023) ‘Agricultural intensification, Indigenous stewardship and land sparing in tropical dry forests’, Nature Sustainability, pp. 1–12. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01073-0.
Pratzer, M. et al. (2022) ‘Large carnivore range expansion in Iberia in relation to different scenarios of permeability of human‐dominated landscapes’, Diversity and Distributions, p. ddi.13645. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.13645.
Full list here.
