Mary Crossland
Email
Room Details
World Agroforestry Centre, Nairobi, Kenya.
Qualifications
- BSc Environmental Science (University of Southampton)
- MSc Agroforestry (Bangor University)
Project title: Linking land restoration and livelihoods in East African dryland systems
Supervisors
- Tim Pagella (Bangor University)
- Leigh Winoweicki (World Agroforestry Centre)
Research
Combining systems modelling and participatory processes, this project aims to understand how interventions to restore degraded land can and cannot influence the livelihoods of those living in the drylands of Kenya and Ethiopia, and the degree to which they can directly and indirectly contribute to reducing poverty and increasing food security. The overall hypothesis is that land restoration options (technologies, market interventions and policies) can improve food security and reduce poverty, but need to be locally adapted, combined and matched to fine-scale variation in livelihood context in order to do so.
This research is being conducted in collaboration with an international project led by the World Agroforestry Centre, “Restoration of degraded land for food security and poverty reduction in East Africa and the Sahel: taking successes in land restoration to scale”, which embraces a research ‘in’ development approach by collaborating with large development programmes to systematically test promising land restoration options across a range of contexts to find out what works best where, why and for whom.
Research Interests
- Smallholder farm systems
- Livelihood trajectories
- Land degradation and restoration
- Dynamic systems modelling
- Gender and intra-household dynamics
Publications
Crossland, M., Winowiecki, L., Pagella, T., Hadgu, K. and Sinclair, F. 2018. Implications of Variation in Local Perception of Degradation and Restoration Processes for Implementing Land Degradation Neutrality. (In review).
Crossland, M. and Westaway, S. 2015. Optimising Subsidiary Crop Applications in Rotations: On-farm Testing of Cover Crop Species Mixes. Aspects of Applied Biology 129, pp. 13-18.
Wolton, R., Westaway, S., Chambers, M., Crossland, M. and Smith, J. 2016. Harvesting fuel from hedges. Conservation Land Management 14 (1), pp. 4-9.
Affiliations
Research Fellow at World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF).
Biography
2010-2013 BSc Environmental science: University of Southampton, UK
2014-2015 Agroforestry Researcher: Organic Research Centre, Newbury, UK
2015-2016 MSc Agroforestry: Bangor University, UK
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mary_Crossland
Twitter: @MaryCrossland1