Hi Everyone, welcome to the Carbon Discussion Forum. This is the place where you should place general comments, or threads that folks from our thematic group can read and respond to at their leasure. If everyone could visit this discussion forum, and say a quick hello and who they are it would permit us to get to know each other a little better, including our interests before we start the chat next week. It also allows us all to get an idea of what everyone looks like and helps to personalize the discussion space.

Welcome!
Fabrice

Hi,

I'm Barbara Kagima from Iowa State University,
located in central Iowa.  I am originally from Kenya and my interests
are in conservation biology, natural resource and wildlife policy, and
ecosystem services.  I am a 2nd year Masters student working on diet
and habitat selection of a reintroduced bison and elk population in an
ongoing tallgrass prairie reconstruction effort in South-East Iowa. 
This is the first class I am taking about ecosystem services and this
project will be my foray into a topic I have often thought about,
carbon sequestration, especially in developing nations.  I look forward
to learning as much as I can about this area and contributing to the
overall paper. 

Habari Barbara, I thought you might be from Kenya. I had the priviledge of living in Kisumu for 4 months last years before being kidnapped by Costa Rica. You have a beautiful country and beautiful people. My son's alternate name is Simba Odiambo (Lechmuni).

You might be interested in doing a carbon project using the Sauri Kenya dataset then?

Fabrice

Hi Everyone,
I'm Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio, one of the instructors/ facilitators of this thematic group. I'm currently working as a Constultant to the Rockefeller Foundation in New York City on Climate Change Adapatation issues. I'm also an affiliate scientist at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University. Prior to my current position, I was a postdoctoral scholar at the Earth Institute at Columbia, where I had the great fortune to work with Fabrice on a Carbon Sequestration / Agroforestry Project as a part of the Milliennium Villages Project. You'll see some of the data we collected in the data folder. My PhD is in Forest Ecology and Biogeochemistry from the University of Colorado, Boulder, where I worked on salvage-logging issues.
What else to add?? My favorite ecosystem is still the subapline forest.. and when I'm not working, reading, or stuck on the subway, I can be found taking tango lessons or exploring the city.