About the team

Kendall is an MPhil student in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management at the University of Oxford. Her current research, supervised by Jesús, combines remote sensing and modeling to investigate habitat change for the Rufous hummingbird, a species of conservation concern. She is broadly interested in pollinator health and the effects of large-scale drivers of land cover change such as forestry and agriculture on species distributions. Kendall attends Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship.

Before pursuing her masters at Oxford, Kendall earned a BA in Environmental Science and Policy as well as English from Duke University. She completed her undergraduate thesis on governance and social-ecological impacts of marine protected areas in Indonesia. She has also worked with the Duke Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Lab to monitor land cover change in the coastal North Carolina. With a background in English literature and a love of visual art, she is passionate about communicating environmental issues in creative ways.

Xiongjie is a Chinese DPhil (PhD) student from China. His doctoral research focuses on measuring, modelling, monitoring, and forecasting forest spatiotemporal dynamics across tropical ecosystems based on both active and passive remotely sensed data in junction with in-situ measurements. Specifically, he investigates how to map and predict plant functional traits from space and how functional traits help to understand tropical forests’ responses to the changing environment. Xiongjie earned his bachelor’s degree in Geomatics from Chongqing University and Masters degree in Resources and the Environment from Wuhan University. In his daily life, Xiongjie loves reading novels and history books, and hiking.

Jed Soleiman is passionate about ecological restoration and rewilding, and the intersection this shares with agriculture to improve outcomes for both people and the planet. Currently, Jed is pursuing an MPhil in Biodiversity, Conservation, and Management, with a view to progress to DPhil. He is currently working to understand how mycorrhizal communities and functions respond to rewilding and regenerative agriculture, to find synergies that could help galvanise landscape scale conservation in the UK. Jed holds a BA in Geography from the University of Cambridge, and prior to his MPhil worked in circular economy, consulting on reusable packaging design and managing C-suite stakeholders. In his spare time, Jed is also a keen gardener and forager who loves to share his passions with anyone who’s keen to listen!

Waira S. Machida, I am a PhD. student from the Universidade Federal de Goiás, Brazil. I´m a Bolivian and Japanese environmental science researcher that loves tropical biodiversity and its ecological processes. I am a biologist with a Masters in Ecology from the University of Brasília.

I am currently a Graduate student in the Program on Ecology and Evolution at the Universidade Federal de Goiás, under the supervision of Dr. Luísa Carvalheiro and co-supervision of Jesús.

In my MSc thesis I show how the recovery of woody plants in Brazilian savannas depends on a fire regime with an interval of at least 8 years. Currently, in my Ph.D. thesis, I try to understand the effects of vegetation properties and their interaction with the landscape on pollinators assemblages. I hope to demonstrate how the quality of natural and semi-natural fragments plays an important role in pollinator conservation. I like singing and cats, and I am always available for a chat, especially when there is an afternoon coffee.