Leigh Winowiecki

Dr Leigh Ann Winowiecki is the Theme Leader for Soil and Land Health at World Agroforestry (ICRAF). A soil systems scientist, she has over 15 years of experience in the tropics addressing ecosystem restoration, sustainable agricultural and soil carbon dynamics. She is based in Nairobi, Kenya. Since 2009 she has co-developed and implemented ICRAF’s Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF) in over 40 countries. The framework is a systematic methodology to assess soil and land health, track changes over time, and monitor restoration efforts across landscapes, combining field-based measurements with earth observation. She has published widely on soil organic carbon, ecosystem services and land degradation across sub-Saharan Africa and the tropics, including a coherent set of open-access datasets. Leigh has a PhD from CATIE in Costa Rica in Tropical Agroforestry and in Soil Science from the University of Idaho. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University – Earth Institute. She joined CGIAR in 2011.