Marc Mayes, Ph.D.

Marc is an Earth scientist who studies land use and climate change effects on terrestrial ecosystems, including carbon, nutrient and water cycling, with a focus on semi-arid developing landscapes in sub-Saharan Africa. His work emphasizes scaling among field and remotely sensed data to understand environmental change at landscape and watershed spatial scales. For his PhD, based between Brown University and The Marine Biological Lab Ecosystems Center (Woods Hole, MA), Marc studied nutrient cycling (carbon, nitrogen) and land cover change in the Tanzanian Miombo Woodlands, focusing on changes in the N cycle and woody biomass accumulation during forest regrowth, and characterization of Miombo Woodland land cover with MODIS, Landsat and Worldview satellite imagery. Marc’s previous work as a Nature Conservancy NatureNet Fellow (2016-2018), formally affiliated with the Princeton Environmental Institute at Princeton University, addresses effects of climate change, agriculture and forest land-use for landscape water and nutrient budgets, including understanding effects of wood-fuel extraction on Miombo ecosystem processes and improving the mapping of forest and agricultural land cover change.