Tim Treuer: Ecological Kintsugi - A New Paradigm for Habitat Restoration?

Ecological restoration brings enormous social, economic, and biodiversity benefits. Perhaps most importantly, it can give us a source of hope amid an age of global environmental disaster. However, a large swath or restoration activities may be too expensive or quixotic in the face of continued global change to meet the scale of current need.

In this talk, Gund Postdoctoral Fellow Tim Treuer takes inspiration from a Japanese artform involving the repair of broken pottery to attempt to articulate a new paradigm of improving the condition of damaged and degraded habitats at a scale commensurate with the challenges faced by endangered socio-environmental systems around the world.

Though a proud and lifelong Alaskan, Tim somehow caught the tropical ecology bug. His current research as a Gund Postdoctoral Associate explores possible links between the risk of malaria and forest cover/agricultural land-use decision-making in Madagascar, while his Ph.D. investigations at Princeton centered on Guanacaste, Costa Rica, focusing on pathways toward scaling up ecological restoration and what that might entail for biodiversity.

In the past, Tim has had the privilege of playing a turn as a botanist, herpetologist, entomologist, and coral reef ecologist in settings spanning Jamaica to Sulawesi. In general, he is excited to work on questions that involve disentangling the messy complexity of natural systems to find positive conservation and socio-economic outcomes.