People

Associate Professor

Dr. Johanna Eklund is an Associate Professor at the Department of Geosciences and Geography at the University of Helsinki and leads the Conservation and Sustainability Research Group. She is broadly interested in questions related to evaluating the effectiveness of conservation actions. Currently she works on projects attempting to disentangle the many links between funding, governance and ecological outcomes of protected areas. She is interested in developing new tools and methods for the evaluation of protected area effectiveness.

Her background is very interdisciplinary. She did her PhD with the Global Change and Conservation Lab at the Metapopulation Research Centre, University of Helsinki, and has since worked both at Development Studies and as a postdoctoral fellow at HELSUS (University of Helsinki). She has experience of working with both protected area managers and local communities on the ground (Tanzania, Madagascar) and with a diverse set of methods (both quantitative and qualitative).

Postdoctoral Researcher

Dr. Herizo Andrianandrasana joined the Conservation & Sustainable Development Group, Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki, as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Conservation Science in January 2025. Funded by the KONE Foundation, he collaborates with Assoc. Prof. Johanna Eklund to study the factors and pathways shaping sustainable conservation outcomes in tropical protected areas. 

Herizo holds a DPhil in evaluation methods from the University of Oxford, where his thesis assessed the effectiveness of community-based conservation in Madagascar. He also earned a PgDip in International Wildlife Conservation from Oxford’s WildCRU and MSc/BSc degrees in Forestry from the University of Antananarivo. 

Previously, he was a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, a civil servant overseeing environmental management in two regions of Madagascar, and a practitioner with Durrell Wildlife Madagascar. His work focuses on community-based conservation and participatory ecological monitoring. He has received the 2014 Tusk Award for Conservation in Africa and the 2006 Ramsar Crane Bank Award.

Doctoral Researcher

Saija Papunen is a doctoral researcher in the Conservation and Sustainable Development research group within the Department of Geosciences and Geography. With an MSc in forest sciences (2022) from the University of Helsinki and several years of industry experience as a forestry consultant, she brings a strong interdisciplinary perspective to her work. Her research explores the effectiveness of protected areas by integrating Earth observation with quasi-experimental methods to evaluate conservation outcomes. She is particularly interested in investigating the evolution of remote sensing data and analytical approaches in conservation science and the capacity of novel data-driven methods to enhance the evidence base for policy and management decisions.

Doctoral researcher

Wenyi Fang just started her doctoral studies and is interested in balancing recreation and conservation objectives in protected areas. She is especially interested in how recreational trail networks influence fragmentation in urban and peri-urban contexts. She holds a MSc in Geoinformatics for Urbanised Society from the University of Tartu.

Master's Student

Samantha Lee is a master’s student in the Environmental Change and Global Sustainability program, in the Forests, Global Changes and Sustainability focus area. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies (Development and Sustainability concentration) and Spanish from the University of North Carolina - Charlotte. She is currently working on her master’s thesis applying spatial analysis to international aid flows in relation to protected areas. She previously worked on research about urban agroecology in Rosario, Argentina through a political ecology lens.

Master's Student, Research assistant

Emilia Oinas is a master’s student in geography specializing in geoinformatics. She is particularly interested in applying remote sensing and other spatial data to environmental research. In her master’s thesis, she is using remote sensing data and counterfactual methods to study the outcomes of protected areas, such as avoided deforestation.