I grew up as a specialist in the non-government nature conservation movement in Russia. Throughout my scientific career, I have been primarily interested in implementing very powerful GIS and RS tools into conservation-related research and the development of solutions able to help save the environment.
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 biomes 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.
