Leader, Land Health Decisions at World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF)
Co-leader of the Restoring Degraded Landscapes Research Theme, WLE
WLE Science Focal Point for ICRAF
Dr. Leigh Ann Winowiecki is a Soil Systems Scientist at World Agroforestry (ICRAF) based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her research focuses on soil carbon dynamics, rangeland health, land restoration, and the integration of social and ecological dimensions of ecosystem health. Since 2009 she has co-developed and implemented ICRAF’s Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF) in over 40 countries with a myriad of partners, including NGOs, district, and national governments, as well as international organizations. The framework is a systematic methodology to assess soil and land health, track changes overtime, and monitor restoration.
She has published widely on soil organic carbon, ecosystem services and land degradation across sub-Saharan Africa, including a coherent set of widely cited publications on ecosystem health based on the LDSF datasets. She also published has over 20 open access datasets available on Harvard Dataverse. Leigh has a PhD from CATIE (The Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center in Costa Rica) in Tropical Agroforestry and in Soil Pedology from the University of Idaho. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University - Earth Institute. She joined CGIAR in 2011 with International Center for Tropical Agriculture
