Biogeography Lab at the Humboldt University of Berlin 

Since July 2014, I have been in collaboration with the Biogeography lab at Humboldt University of Berlin. My Master's thesis, co-advised by lab PI Dr. Tobias Kümmerle, has led to further joint work. My thesis sought to isolate the socio-economic and biophysical drivers of agricultural abandonment across the European Union; we also tracked the spatial relationships between these drivers and the observed abandonment data. We used a spatial form of component-wise gradient descent boosting with algorithm components chosen to match those proven to be optimal in the mathematical and statistical literature.

 

In 2015, I presented my thesis at a selection of academic conferences, including the Spatial Statistics Conference, the International Workshop on Statistical Modeling, the Workshop on Statistical Computing, two talks at the German Statistical Week and finally the Viadrina Days on Empirical Economics. My participation in these conferences was generously funded by several German Statistical Society Young Scientists Travel Grants (page in German). A first conference proceedings has been published in Procedia Enviromental Sciences and there are several papers in preparation. I also shared my results in non-technical talks at the Land System Science Cluster at the Humboldt University and the Öko-Institute, an environmental policy think-tank in Berlin.

 

During June-July 2015, I got my hands dirty with some agricultural "fieldwork", volunteering at La Pizpireta, an organic berry farm in gorgeous Vega de Pas, Spain.