Welcome Dr. Ágnes Vári to the Gonzalez Lab!

My background is in Hydrobiology and Plant ecology, I graduated from the Technical University of Munich (Germany). I started off as a limnologist, researching macrophytes at Lake Balaton in Hungary, doing my PhD, but the last couple of years I switched to ecosystem services research. I have been working with ecosystem services in several regional and national assessments. More recently, I took part in the National Mapping and Assessment of ecosystem services in Hungary, where I lead the working group on hydrology, assessing water related ecosystem services. Water is an important topic to me, not only in research, but also personally – I love water, and all kinds of water related activities.

I joined the Gonzalez lab, as I got a post-doc position in the ResNet project, that is partly supervised by Elena Bennett and partly by Andy Gonzalez – which fantastically complements each other. ResNet is a NSERC funded project, with a diverse set of landscapes all across Canada, with different research and management questions on land-use, all of these with a specific focus. I will use an ecosystem services approach for synthesizing results from these landscapes, looking for a set of ecosystem services indicators that are comparable and can be tested for up and/or downscaling in order to obtain results that can provide answers relevant for local decision making as well as for higher level decision making.