December 5, 2018
Announcing a special issue on the human and social dimensions of invasive species masterfully coordinated by Ross Shackleton, who came to Lausanne as a post-doctoral scholar funded by the Swiss Government’s Excellence Scholarship, and has prolonged his stay with a lecturer contract. The special issue, published in the Journal of Environmental Management, includes three review papers and thirteen case studies – see the Table of Contents below. In our editorial paper, we review advances in the four main ways people interact with invasive species:
- causing or facilitating invasions
- thinking and feeling about invasions
- being affected by invasions, for better or for worse
- getting together to manage invasions
Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | 
Introduced and Invasive Plants, Research, Uncategorized | Tagged: human dimensions, invasive species | 
Permalink
Posted by christiankull
September 14, 2018
Patrick leading the reflections
New paper in Global Environmental Change, under the amazing leadership of Patrick Meyfroidt, bringing together and surveying a wide family of theories of land use and land cover change.
Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | Interdisciplinarity, Research, Sustainability | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
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 »
Leave a Comment » | Acacia, Introduced and Invasive Plants, Madagascar, Research, Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
June 11, 2018
The study of invasive plants and animals might be seen as the domain of biology and environmental managers. But in a recent piece I argue for a “critical” approach due to the deeply social nature of invasion landscapes, the power relations affecting the science of invasions, and the differential impacts of weed or pest control on lives and landscapes. By “critical” invasion science, I mean research that is informed by social theories, with a sensibility to questions of social justice and to the social construction of scientific knowledge. The piece investigates several aspects of invasion science ripe for critical analysis: the history of the science (to understand what the science is doing and why), the terminology and categories of analysis, and the highly contested social, political, and ethical context within which invasion management takes place. The piece conclude with four proposals for further work in critical invasion science and examples of the types of questions it might ask. Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | Introduced and Invasive Plants, Political ecology, Research | Tagged: biological invasions, critical physical geography, invasion science, political ecology | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
May 25, 2018
I’d like to introduce my current doctoral team, who are a great pleasure to work with. Their research interests have coalesced around the political ecology of environmental governance, specifically of forests, commodities, and rivers. In other words, who decides, who wins, who loses, and why, when decisions are made about trees, water, fish, cocoa, and sheep? What ideas are decisions based on, and how does the materiality of the object shape the outcomes? Here are some brief words on the team and their interests, grouped by three general themes: Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | Doctoral students, Political ecology, Research, Teaching | Tagged: development studies, human geography, PhD students, political ecology | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
November 10, 2017
The historical roots of urban invasion studies across the rural–rural-wild spectrum. Fig. 1 in Salomon Cavin & Kull 2017. Kindly drawn by Lionel Cavin.
The study of invasive plants and animals has started to pay attention to cities. In a paper just out, written by my colleague Joëlle Salomon Cavin and me, we document this ‘urban turn’ and ask what its implications are. Specifically, our paper does a few things. We review how the ecological sciences in general have long had blinders as far as matters urban go, but also the existence of alternative paradigms – notably in 20th century European circles and in diverse ‘urban ecology’ traditions. Then, we look in more detail at how invasion biology has dealt with (or ignored) cities. In doing so, we Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | Interdisciplinarity, Introduced and Invasive Plants, Research | Tagged: cities, invasion species, urban ecology, urban nature | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
November 8, 2017
What happens when you take a concept developed to describe lacustrine ecology or fire regimes and apply it to complex social-ecological phenomena involving politics, economics, culture, and more? What challenges occur when concepts are borrowed from systems ecology or complexity science and applied to situations with people, power, perceptions, contingencies, and feelings?
I’m excited to announce a brand-new paper that addresses exactly these questions (official link; authors preprint PDF). Published in Geographical Research, the paper does four things: Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | Interdisciplinarity, Research | Tagged: critical realism, epistemology, regime shift, Resilience, social-ecological systems | Permalink
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
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
Read the rest of this entry »
2 Comments | Acacia, Conservation, Development, Interdisciplinarity, Research, Vietnam | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
Christian Kull 