My Journey in Social-Ecological Interactions for Sustainable Land Management
After 5 years at the Social-Ecological Interactions Group (SEIAS), I started last month a new position at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. My time as a postdoc has been a nice and fruitful period of personal and professional development, an experience I want to summarize in this post.
One thing I appreciate about working in academia is its multifaceted nature. It is a career choice where you are encouraged to constantly explore and move within and beyond your comfort zone. This aligns well with my personal inclination, and I was fortunate enough to have spent my time as a postdoc integrated into the Social-Ecological Interactions in Agricultural Systems (SEIAS) research group, brilliantly led by Tobias Plieninger, where I was allowed to do just that. Under his guidance, I could follow a career development path that aligned with my interests and needs, encompassing research, teaching, and societal impact dimensions. I could always work on incredibly interesting projects and collaborate in numerous side activities with talented colleagues.
I arrived at SEIAS in February 2018, just a few months after the chair was created, and left in September 2023 to start a tenure track at VU Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Over that period, I was fortunate to work on several projects and independent studies, design and teach at different programs, and slowly integrate myself within the international landscape research community. In parallel, I saw the research group grow, evolve, and become established as an international reference within the field of social-ecological systems science. In this brief piece, I look back on my pesonal trajectory in the group and reflect on how I navigated this period. I start by highlighting the two largest projects in which I collaborated, to then talk about teaching and make some notes on career development.
SINCERE — Innovating for Forest Ecosystem Services
One major challenge related to the management of Europe’s forests is to balance the provision of distinct forest ecosystem services and habitat for biodiversity with broad societal demands. Only some of the services that forests provide are formally part of markets, such as timber, while policies focused on the promotion of multiple forest ecosystem services have so far largely failed to meet the task.
Under the umbrella of the SINCERE project, I contributed to the the process of providing a robust evidence-base of forest ecosystem services, integrating scientific and practical knowledge and considering both supply and demand. One hightlight of this work was a Pan-European survey directed towards European forest owners and managers to elicit their perceptions toward forest ecosystem services supply, demand, as well as detailed management and profitability aspects. The results showed a large mismatch between the high perception of forest ecosystem supply and demand, and the low income that forest managers receive for most forest ecosystem services beyond timber production. Another highlight was a participatory process which included a solution scanning for the sustainable supply of forest ecosystem services in Europe, where we identified and prioritized the 15 major challenges hindering the balanced provision of multiple FES and identified potential solutions to tackle each of them.
In parallel to these knowledge synthesis exercises, in collaboration with the European Forest Institute and the Swiss company Pan Bern AG, we delved into the role of cultural ecosystem services in European forestry, where we identified promising potential for further promotion of non-material values in forests and a diverse mix of tools to achieve that goal.
LANDSCAPE CHAINS — Linking Sustainable Landscape Management and Value Chains
Agricultural landscape changes, though manifested at local levels, are increasingly driven by globally interconnected economies and markets for food products and other agricultural commodities. These act across large distances and create interactions between regions. The complexity of these connections between distant places pose not only threats but also opportunities for landscape sustainability. For example, within this context, the objective of the project ‘Landscape Chains’ was to look at specific landscape products that could assist in the identification of leverage points supporting a transition towards sustainable landscape management, accounting for social and ecological trade-offs across scales and users.
“In landscape chains we look into how specific products can lever landscape sustainability. For example, how by looking at cork production we can capitalise landscape benefits in the Portuguese montado.”
Within this line, my research focused on the analysis of social-ecological trade-offs around sustainable landscape management. Using the Mediterranean region as a microcosm of social-ecological dynamics, I developed cross-comparisons of selected landscape products in Spain (olives), Portugal (cork), and Morocco (walnut).
Teaching in Human-Nature Relationships
In 2018, as a new chair, the research group was meant to contribute to the MSc program of Sustainable International Agriculture with two new modules. After a thorough study of the MSc program, in a series of iterative discussions, it was decided to start a module on “Participatory Methods for Sustainability” and a module on “Agriculture and Ecosystem Services”. I had the luck to share the task of coordinating these courses with María García-Martín for the first years, with whom I established a teaching team that was for me both productive and enjoyable.
“Together and with the support and inputs from many people within and outside the research group, these two courses became some of the most popular courses in the master program.”
Some of the principles that we established in the courses that worked well and were instrumental in the relative success of these courses were that we strived to always (1) instill a sense of purpose and relevance of all the materials presented to the students, (2) ensure that the content of the course had an application to the individual context of the students, (3) share some responsibilities and obligations with the students, for example by leaning on “peer-to-peer” learning methods, (4) generate spaces for active participation, (5) capitalize on students’ individual strengths, and (6) employ critical thinking and interdisciplinary perspectives.
Career Development
Being a postdoctoral researcher and transitioning from being a PhD student to a more senior academic position is complicated. It requires high doses of a combination of luck, effort, and sacrifice (personal and from those around you). As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, it is easier when you have the chance to develop your work in a healthy academic environment and are surrounded by a nice team. In my case, there were some elements that additionally helped me.
Without any particular order of importance, and with the humble hope that they can be of use, these are: (1) seeking opportunities for continuous learning by participating in courses, workshops, summer schools, etc., (2) cultivating a network of collaborations by being generous with your ideas, efforts, and time, (3) reserving time to balance personal and professional life, something particularly relevant as career stabilization in academia often overlaps with personal and family plans, and (4) being passionate about your research, making it interesting and relevant.
As the famous quote goes:
“Find a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
Further reading
- Torralba M, Nishi M, Cebrián-Piqueras M, Quintas-Soriano C, García-Martín M, Plieninger T. 2023. Disentangling the practice of landscape approaches: A Q-method analysis on experiences in socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes. Sustainability Sciences 18: 1893–1906. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-023-01307-2
- Hernández-Morcillo M, Torralba M, Baiges T, Bernasconi A, Bottaro G, Brogaard S, Bussola F, Díaz-Varela E, Geneletti D, Grossmann CM, Kister J, Klinger M, Loft L, Lovrić M, Mann C, Pipart N, Roces-Diaz JV, Sorge S, Tiebel M, Tyrvainen L, Varela E, Winkel G, Plieninger T. 2022. Scanning the solutions for the sustainable supply of forest ecosystem services in Europe. Sustainability Science 17: 2013–2029. https://doi.org/101007/s11625-022-01111-4
- García-Martín M, Torralba M, Quintas-Soriano C, Kahl J, Plieninger T Linking food systems and landscape sustainability in the Mediterranean region. 2021. Landscape Ecology 36: 2259–2275. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-020-01168-5
- Torralba M, Lovrić M, Roux JL, Budniok MA, Mulier AS, Winkel G, Plieninger T. Examining the relevance of cultural ecosystem services in forest management in Europe. 2020. Ecology and Society 25(3):2. https://doi.org/105751/ES-11587-250302
