ZS (Zoë) Kleijwegt

I am a PhD-candidate at the Soil Geography and Landscape group, working within the Save the Tiger! Save the grasslands! Save the water!project, supervised by Prof. dr. Jakob Wallinga, Dr. Annegret Larsen and Dr. Jeroen Schoorl. My main interests lie in the understanding of human-ecosystem interactions and finding sustainable balance benefiting the landscape, the ecosystem and local people. I obtained my BSc and MSc in Biological Sciences at the University of Amsterdam, where I focused on paleoecological reconstruction and wildlife conservation with a strong emphasis on human impact. Thereby, I was able to experience relevant fieldwork in the Netherlands as well as in the Amazon rainforest, experiencing the complexity of human-ecosystem interactions in a range of environments while developing important fieldwork skills.

Within the tiger-consortium, my research aims to provide a long term reconstruction of the interactions between river dynamics, vegetation, animals and human activity in Bardia National Park and the Karnali river fan of Nepal. In doing so, we will be able to provide multiple baselines for the tiger habitat that can serve as conservation benchmarks.