Leigh Winowiecki

Bio

Dr Leigh Ann Winowiecki is the CIFOR-ICRAF Soil and Land Health Global Research Lead. A soil scientist, her research focuses on scaling farmer-centered landscape restoration, understanding drivers of degradation and quantifying the impacts of land management on soil organic carbon. She is based in Nairobi, Kenya. Since 2009 she has co-developed and implemented the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF) in over 40 countries. The framework is a systematic methodology to assess ecosystem health 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 Coalition of Action 4 Soil Health (CA4SH) within the UN Food Systems Summit, which aims to catalyze investments in soil health for human well-being and climate. 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. She is on the Scientific Task Force and the Monitoring Task Force for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration as well as the Scientific Steering Committee for the Global Soil Health Programme. She co-leads the Landscape Restoration Transformative Partnership Platform. She is also a founding Board Member of the International Union of Agroforestry (IUAF)