Christoph Nolte
Associate Professor
I am an interdisciplinary conservation scientist interested in understanding the effects and costs of efforts to protect and restore nature.
I wonder: where and how should conservation happen today if “we” want Earth’s diverse values to persist?
That’s a hard question. In addition to not knowing where everything is, and what it takes to keep it around, we barely know what nature “we” want and how to balance it with other uses.
My lab’s research agenda is shaped by questions that aim to contribute to this “portfolio of life” problem in one way or another. Our projects ask:
- How effective are different conservation efforts (e.g. protected areas, payments, acquisitions, indigenous lands)? Where do they happen and why?
- How much do conservation efforts cost in different parts of the landscape, e.g. buying additional land vs. paying farmers to not deforest?
- How much do humans appear to value different aspects of nature, e.g. clear lakes, critical habitat, absence of pollution, hurricane risks, etc.?
To answer these questions, our projects combine remote sensing and rich spatial and temporal data on people, properties, and policies with quasi-experimental causal inference and predictive machine learning. Our open-source pipeline openplaces pulls these datasets together.
At Boston University’s Department of Earth Environment, I teach environmental statistics (★ 4.2), environmental economics (★ 4.6), and data science for conservation decisions (★ 4.8), which combines open-source spatial data synthesis with decision theory.
My research seeks to produce actionable insights for public interest users, such as government agencies, donors, land trusts, and indigenous governments. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have an interesting, policy-relevant data challenge.
Before coming to Boston to speak American and Python, I studied conservation efforts in 24 countries in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. Feel free to contact me in German, French, English, and Spanish.
- PhD, Natural Resources & Environment, University of Michigan
Advisor: Arun Agrawal - International MSc in Rural Development, Humboldt University Berlin DE, Agrocampus Rennes FR, Universidad de Córdoba ES, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences CH
Information for prospective graduate students
Google Scholar | Research | Publications | Teaching
Sachini Ranasinghe
PhD candidate
Sachini is interested in applying Remote Sensing techniques for inland water quality monitoring. She uses satellite imagery to study water quality parameters such as suspended particulate matter and algal blooms to provide information for environmental management and policy decisions. Sachini develops LakeSense, a data pipeline that derives high-quality time series of lake water quality indicators from Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery. She is passionate about studying nature and climate and enjoys diving and traveling in her free time.
- M.Sc Geology, Kent State University
- B.Sc Marine Sciences, University of Ruhuna (Sri Lanka)
Former Lab Members
PhD students
- Dr. Adam Pollack, now assistant professor at University of Iowa
- Dr. Ana Reboredo Segovia, now research associate at World Resources Institute
Graduate research assistants
- Hasmitha Rayasam, now project scientist at Satelytics
- Mira Kelly-Fair, now PhD candidate at Boston University
- Yuhe Chang, now PhD candidate at Boston University
- Emily French, now Remote Sensing Analyst at TCarta
Visiting postdoctoral students
- Dr. Blake Simmons, now Environmental Social Scientist at Tampa Bay Estuary Program
- Dr. Hongbo Yang, now Researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Dr. Qi Zhang, now Research Scientist at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
Undergraduate research assistants
- Kaitlyn Lee, now PhD student at Arizona State University
- Shelby Sundquist, now PhD student at North Arizona University
- Becky Petrou O’Rourke
- Colter Schroer
- Caroline Koehl
- Julianne Vaughan
- Katherine Anne
- Shraddha Pingali