GLAD

Ph.D: Moscow State University, 2017. The diversity of dark coniferous forests of the Northwest Caucasus and their spatial distribution. PhD project was aimed to develop a syntaxonomy and spatial geodatabase of fir (Abies nordmanniana (Stev.)Spach) forest associations in North-West Caucasus

MS: Moscow State University, 2009. Mapping of fir (Abies nordmanniana (Stev.)Spach) forest in North-West Caucasus with Landsat supervised classification and development of recommendation to save High Conservation Value Forest

Complementary Education: Teacher & Educational Products’ Designer, 2018.

My background is working in the non-government nature conservation movement in Russia. Before joining GLAD team I had been working for Greenpeace Russia and Greenpeace International since Feb 2006, where I participated in development of GIS department, Intact Forest monitoring, mapping and research of fires and led the development of educational and mentoring program to support using GIS and remote sensing tools by environmental protection specialists in Greenpeace and allies NGOs.

Throughout my scientific career, I have been primarily interested in implementing powerful GIS and RS tools into conservation-related research and the development of solutions able to help to protect the environment. I graduated from Plant Ecology department of Moscow State University, and I always have been considering GIS/RS technologies as must-have for plant ecologists and functional botanists, so im my research I was focusing on a number of first-edge plant ecology and vegetation dynamic problems such as rare plant communities and their typical traits, communities’ composition and biodiversity patterns and dynamics to support their mapping and monitoring, 

I dedicated my MS and Ph.D. research to extremely high conservation value forests in North-West Caucasus combining the research (developing the syntaxonomy, understanding the spectral and radar-derived characteristics of the forest communities, and implementing the machine learning methods to the classification process) and conservation (developing the recommendations for sustainable forestry and methodological support of the conservation initiatives).

After Ph.D. I was a leader of a group of Moscow State University researchers aimed to investigate the processes of succession at abandoned lands in the transition area of Polistovsky National Reserve. We used Sentinel 2 and drone data to map the meadow communities and understand the spatial distribution and drivers of the number of associations to support the conservation of temperate-zone placor meadows.

The most exciting spheres for me are implementing GIS and RS into plant ecology research, Intact Forest Landscapes monitoring, carbon emission assessment, assessment of fire loss and vegetation change's drivers. I feel myself mostly a specialist in temperate biome’s forest and meadow natural vegetation, but as a plant ecologist, I am curious to become familiar with other vegetation types. I am also fond of the application research and developing of recommendations to increase the sustainability of the practices all over the world.

Currently I am participating in OPERA-DIST project on it’s validation stage and developing the vegetation loss alert attribution.