Biography

Leigh Ann Winowiecki is the global research lead for Soil and Land Health at CIFOR-ICRAF, based in Nairobi, Kenya. A soil scientist, her research focuses on scaling farmer-centred landscape restoration, understanding drivers of degradation and quantifying the impacts of land management on soil health. Since 2009 she has co-developed and implemented the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF) in over 40 countries across the tropics. The framework is a systematic methodology to assess soilhealth, land degradation and vegetation dynamics and track restoration efforts across landscapes. 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. She co-leads the CIFOR-ICRAF Landscape Restoration Transformative Partnership Platform. She co-founded the Coalition ofAction 4 Soil Health (CA4SH), which aims to catalyse investments in soil health for human well-being and climate mitigation.She is on the Scientific Task Force and the Monitoring Task Force for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, the Scientific Steering Committee for the Global Soil Health Programme and a member of the Expert Network for Regen10. She is a founding board member of the International Union of Agroforestry (IUAF) and on the Board of Directors of International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC).