Luclab

Education

University of Oxford, MS in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management (2014)

Brown University, BS in Environmental Science (2013)

Research Interests

Conservation biology, land use change, climate change

My research spans ecosystems, with different projects linked by a guiding interest in the impacts of environmental, governance, and economic shocks on linked social-ecological systems. I am particularly interested in the impacts of these shocks on resource-dependent livelihoods and the effects of adaptations to these shocks on biodiversity and ecosystem health. For my dissertation, I am studying the impacts of hurricanes on land use trends in the Caribbean, a globally-recognized biodiversity hotspot. I am attempting to understand the factors that lead to agricultural land abandonment following hurricane strikes and the trajectories of abandoned farmland.

Before joining the LUC Lab, my research focused on marine systems, with a focus on coral reef conservation and small-scale fisheries management. Past projects include assessing the social-ecological vulnerability of Caribbean island nations and territories to coral bleaching, collaborating with the Environmental Defense Fund to project the impacts of different management scenarios in Myanmar’s marine fisheries, and developing an evidence base for marine spatial planning in the Caribbean islands of Montserrat and Curacao.

You can learn more about what I’m working on at my personal website.

Publications

Siegel KJ, RB Cabral, J McHenry, E Ojea, B Owashi, & SE Lester. 2019. Sovereign states in the Caribbean have lower social-ecological vulnerability to coral bleaching than overseas territories. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 286, 20182365.

McDonald G, SJ Campbell, K Karr, M Clemence, P Granados-Dieseldorff, R Jakub, T Kartawijaya, JC Mueller, P Prihatinningsih, KJ Siegel, & Y Syaifudin. 2018. An adaptive assessment and management toolkit for data-limited fisheries. Ocean & Coastal Management, 152, 100-119.

Leslie HM, X Basurto, M Nenadovic, L Sievanen, KC Cavanaugh, JJ Cota-Nieto, BE Erisman, E Finkbeiner, G Hinojosa-Arango, M Moreno-Báez, S Nagavarapu, SMW Reddy, A Sánchez-Rodríguez, KJ Siegel, JJ Ulibarria-Valenzuela, A Hudson Weaver, & O Aburto-Oropeza. 2015. Operationalizing the social-ecological systems framework to assess sustainability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(19), 5979-5984.