Marcus Collier
Professor
Botany
Trinity College Dublin
Ireland
Biography
I am the leader of Connecting Nature, a €11.4m Horizon 2020 project which runs from 2017 to 2022 (see website). This project will develop innovations by scaling out nature-based solutions in 11 cities in Europe as well as cities in China, Brazil, Korea and the Caucasus. From 2011 to 2016 I was the leader of the TURAS FP7 project. This was a €6.8m project with 28 partners across Europe and 2 in Taiwan. TURAS has developed novel strategies, and spun out three new companies to date, that enable urban communities-of-interest to tackle urgent issues such as cliamte adaptation in urban areas to the challenges of the future using novel design, collaboration and integrated and resilient policy prescriptions. In June 2012 TURAS was awarded one of five special awards in the Champions of European Research for ranking first in the Sustainable and Resilient Green Cities section of the FP7 call topic (for scoring 15/15). I led a Work Package Leader on another FP7 project, OPERAs which studied Ecosystem Services and my focus was on socioeconomic / sociocultural values. I was short-listed for an ERC Starting Grant in 2014 and 2016, and was appointed an ERC Consolidator Grant expert, a Marie-SkÅ‚odowska Curie, and an ERA-NET Cofund panel member. I am also an external evaluator for the EC Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
Research Interest
My research interests focus on the complex and fascinating interface between social and ecological systems and the implications of the Anthropocene. My PhD research concentrated on severely damaged landscapes: resilience planning, rewilding and collaborative processes. This study was part of an interdisciplinary collaboration between several Universities (via the EPA funded BOGLAND Project). My main areas of expertise are in transdiciplinary research, social-ecological systems, landscape and restoration ecology, environmental policies and collaborative governance. I am very interested in Novel Ecosystems and their potential for rewilding urban areas as well as urban communities and welcome all who share a similar interest! See here for my TED talk on Novel Ecosystems.
Publications
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The emergence of green infrastructure as promoting the centralisation of a landscape perspective in spatial planning
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Renaturing cities using a regionally-focused biodiversity-led multifunctional benefits approach to urban green infrastructure
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Operationalizing urban resilience through a framework for adaptive co-management and design: Five experiments in urban planning practice and policy
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Novel ecosystems: Challenges and opportunities for the Anthropocene
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Renaturing cities using a regionally-focused biodiversity-led multifunctional benefits approach to urban green infrastructure
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European university-community partnership-based research on urban sustainability and resilience
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Urban transformation with TURAS open innovations; opportunities for transitioning through transdisciplinarity
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Public Participatory Mapping of Cultural Ecosystem Services: Citizen Perception and Park Management in the Parco Nord of Milan (Italy)
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Novel ecosystems and the emergence of cultural ecosystem services
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Industrially Harvested Peatlands and After-use Potential: Understanding Local Stakeholder Narratives and Landscape Preferences
