August 17, 2018
Neo-Australian landscapes along RN11a in eastern Madagascar: Grevillea, Eucalyptus, Acacia…
Beyond the rice paddies, beyond the orchards of litchi, cloves, and coffee, beyond the rare patches of lemur inhabited natural forest, beyond the swidden fallows, a new landscape has appeared in lowland eastern Madagascar in the past half century. These ‘neo-Australian’ forests include four or five trees introduced from Australia that have, in many ways, become integral to regional lifeways: Read the rest of this entry »
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Acacia, Introduced and Invasive Plants, Madagascar, Research, Uncategorized | 
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Posted by christiankull
September 19, 2017
Unrecognizable 20 years ago: Acacia plantations and new road in Nam Đông district, Thừa Thiên-Huế province.
The past week marked the launch of our new, Swiss government funded research project on the “forest transition” in Vietnam, which I’m leading in collaboration with colleagues Trần Nam Thắng and Ngô Trí Dũng of Huế University and Roland Cochard at Unil (see previous blog). The project aims to promote sustainable forest management and resilient rural livelihoods in the rapidly changing forest landscapes of this region.
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Leave a Comment » | Acacia, Conservation, Development, Research, Smallholder farming, Sustainability, Vietnam | Tagged: agroforestry, forest transition, landscapes, plantation forests | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
April 25, 2017
Forest in Vietnam can mean many things. There are the dense, dipterocarp rainforests that have divulged mammal species previously unknown to science, like the saola. There are also the vast plantations of exotic acacias growing wood for industry, as I detailed in a previous blog entry. And these forests have changed rapidly in the past few decades in step with the country’s economy and politics. The country is often seen to have undergone a “forest transition”, whereby a previous history of deforestation transitions to a new phase characterised by forest stability and indeed regrowth (albeit largely with exotic plantations). In a new research-for-development project (see PhD job ad here), we intend to investigate the exact nature of the forest transition and its feedback into sustainable development for the heavily peopled rural landscapes of Vietnam.
Acacia mangium, forest plantations, and natural rainforest in A Luoi district, Vietnam
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Posted by christiankull
October 17, 2016
Last month I gave the ceremonial first lecture of the academic year for our Faculty. The video is now online (see below). The presentation dips into a number of research projects I’ve contributed to in recent years in order to make a number of observations about the relationship between plants and people, notably with iconic ‘natural’ plants and problematic ‘invasive’ weeds. These observations include: Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | Acacia, Conservation, Interdisciplinarity, Introduced and Invasive Plants, Sustainability, Uncategorized | Tagged: australian acacias, baobabs, biological invasions, invasive species, weeds | Permalink
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