Welcome to two new PhD students!

Janne will be working in the Actionable project, which is led by Alicia Donnellan-Barraclough (BIO) and aims translate the big global sustainability and biodiversity agendas and policies to local and regional coastal and marine realities. 

Marte is our first fully CeSAM funded PhD candidate, and will be supervised by Endre Tvinnereim (SV) and Peter Manning (BIO) to work on developing NCPNorge, a widely applicable model that will predict the social impacts of ecosystem change across the whole of Norway. 

Welcome on board! We asked Janne and Marte to further introduce themselves: 

Janne Thomsen:

"My name is Janne Thomsen and I am excited to join the CeSAM network as a new PhD candidate at Department of Biological Sciences at UiB. Being originally from Germany, I completed my bachelor’s degree in Geography at the University of Kiel and obtained my master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Kassel.

After developing a passion for studying urban human-wildlife interactions and social-ecological systems during my masters, I am now expanding my research on conflicting values of nature and associated land use conflicts in the context of the Nordhordland UNESCO biosphere reserve in Norway.

My PhD project is positioned within the transdisciplinary RCN research project ACTIONABLE led by Alicia D. Barraclough and investigates the potentials of nature valuation to guide sustainable land use management in biosphere reserves. With my spatial planning background, I am particularly interested in the social-ecological mismatches between people’s values and formal spatial planning and decision-making processes. As part of the project, I am most looking forward to working together with various stakeholders from Nordhordland biosphere reserve and beyond to address the environmental challenges of the area through co-creation and co-management approaches."

Marte Klemetsdal:

"Hi! My name is Marte, and I just started my 4-year PhD journey here at BIO, where I will investigate patterns of demand for Nature’s Contributions to People (also known as ecosystem services) across Norwegian Society. 

Originally, I come from Sande in Vestfold, but I’ve been in Bergen for the last four years. Some of you might have met me before, as I recently finished my master's degree in marine biology at BIO working with Dr. Mari Eilertsen.  Prior to that, I was a bachelor’s student at the Arctic University of Norway (UiT), studying “Biology, Climate and Environment”. Some of the key interests throughout my studies have been related to management and conservation, and understanding how human activities are affecting our environments. 

I’m therefore very excited to start as a PhD student, and as part of CeSAM and their project NCPNorge. I will work with the IPBES’ framework of “Nature’s Contributions to People”, where my main goal is to understand the demand for different contributions among stakeholders and rightsholders in Norway, and the underlying socio-economic factors driving this demand. This work will be interdisciplinary, and I will work closely with my main supervisor Prof. Pete Manning (Department of Biological Sciences) and Prof. Endre Tvinnereim (Department of Government). Among our methods, we’ll be using the Norwegian Citizen Panel to reach a representative cross-section of the Norwegian population. I’m very excited to work in the intersection between ecology and social science and I look forward to meeting and working with many of you!"