Tor-Gunnar Vågen

Tor-Gunnar Vågen has a varied background of soil science, hydrology, landscape ecology, statistical modeling, and remote sensing (earth observation). Dr. Vågen has been leading the development and application of the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF), which was initially developed in the Sahel and has been implemented in a range of projects across 45 countries in the global tropics. He currently leads research initiatives to establish global data-driven networks of sites for comparative assessments of ecosystem health, linking earth observation data and models to biophysical and socio-economic variables to understand drivers of deforestation, land use change and land degradation across the global tropics. His research also focuses on land restoration, landscape resilience and spatially explicit modeling of soil and biomass carbon sequestration potential using earth observation.