Week 1 Progress Report

Getting Started

Author

Jody Holland

Published

October 20, 2025

Progress This Week

  • Moved into College and restarted work

  • Have determined what funding is available to me through my bursary (£75 a month for books, £3000 over the course for conferences, £500 a year for equipment).

    • Also some osptions for field work funding in SEA
      • Notably the Selena Sun Travel and Research Fund from Trinity
      • Deadline for Applications is the 13th February 2026
      • Covers China, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar (bad idea!), Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines ect.

  • Started Feasibility Report plan and made good progress

    • Fleshed out background section (500 words)
    • Have aimed to produce a brief overview of the current “state of the science”
    • Pretty happy with the introduction

  • Made a flow chart outlining the local leakage methods

  • Began work on a conceptual framework to hypothesise what could induce a landscape to be more or less prone to local leakage

    • Emphasised the context of the economic activities occurring
    • Exploring the concept of “Factor Mobility”
      • A concept taken from New Economic Geography (Krugman etc.)
      • Denotes the degree to which an activity/industry could move across borders and landscapes
      • Incorporates both how mobile the workforce might be and how regionally specific a particular activity might be
    • Also examined how landscape topography could interact with local leakage propensity beyond factor mobility
      • Specifically the positioning on the protected area within the landscape
      • PAs are often located in the most politically convenient places - not the most ecologically critical
      • Could mean that there is little economic pressure on the periphery of projects
      • Could also mean that the people living in the vicinity of the PA have little political or economic power to resist the imposition of a PA

  • Read Dasguta’s On Natural Capital

    • Not too much that I hadn’t already been introduced to
    • Was a pretty eloquent framing of ecological damage as a “tragedy of the commons” in absence of accurate pricing of natural captial

  • Studied Brodie et al. (2023)

    • Pretty fascinating how they conclude that PAs can have positive impacts on biodiversity across a landscape
    • Notably in the case of mammals they find that PAs could lead to safeguarded source populations
      • That would incur density driven dispersal of animals across a landscape, even if that landscape is degraded habitat
    • This could mean that even if we see elevated habitat destruction around a project there could nonetheless be positive spillovers for biodiversity in the landscape
      • Land Sparing wins again?

  • Studied Lui and Coomes (2015)

    • They find no evidence for local leakage

    • Some issues with their approach (no dynamic baselines)

    • Also they don’t explore any link between the relative rate of additionality within projects and any rate of leakage in the buffer

  • Set up Quarto website for progress tracking

    • When new reports are made they are automatically rendered as html, word, and pdf formats and added to the site.

  • Began testing PACT V3 to see if it it fungible and robust

    • Checked if the sum of additionality from Gola North, Central and South was equal to the additionality reading from running the project as a whole

      • 96.4% the same

    • Started running PACT V3 across 35 placebo projects

  • Finished up some of the residual tasks for REDD+ paper

  • Began running carbon density analysis on Gola Buffer villages

  • Got my head around the Zoology PhD training log

  • Had a look at the Choice of Advisors page

    • Currently looking at Lynn Dicks and Ed Turner

Problems Encountered

  • College is taking some time paying me my stipend, hopefully will be resolved soon (I have some savings to dip into so not an issue
  • Due to not having accommodation, I was unable to attend the induction day, although I have made up for this by attending the safety workshop later, I have yet to meet any other Zoology PhD students other than Robin in Rob’s group
  • I’m having difficulties making sure my Feasibility Report sections are succinct and direct.
    • Specifically, what is the core message I want to communicate in the background section?
    • 500 words to summarise the “state of science” around tropical forest leakage
    • Struggling to maintain message discipline
    • Also want to find space to add in ‘Biodiversity Leak’ paper
  • With the section on research plan, I’m trying to neatly split the CLOCs and BLOCs concept into individual separated studies
    • Should one chapter be about the nuances and trades offs in building the map and another be its utilities and uses.
    • This is inspired by Ali’s approach to LIFE
      • Paper on how it works
      • Paper demonstrating it’s uses
    • For methods, I’m struggling to determine how detailed I need to be
      • Word limitations are significant *(500-100)
      • I need to determine what isa the appropriate and realistic experimental design for local leakage
      • I think I will include my conceptual framework into the report
  • Resources and Costs section
    • A bit confusing, costs at the moment are minimal
    • But this could change if I do field work and an exchange
    • I also plan to attend conferences (BES ect.) should I put this down
  • Training
    • Need to find training courses relevant to my aims
      • Hoping to find public speaking training, as well as econometric refreshers
      • Also looking into TESSERA workshops and if they count as training

Plans for Next Week

  • Finish Research Aims section of Feasibility Report

    • Make a secondary flowchart outlining CLOCs and BLOCs

  • Sign onto a training course to happen in November

  • Draft a short field work idea to have in the back-pocket

  • Arrange TESSERA training workshop (talk to Keshav at next weeks lab lunch)

  • Produce the placebo results of PACT to allow us to know its relative predictive accuracy around the world (for SI of chapter 1)

  • Identify the set of REDD+ project and their metadata to run leakage analysis on

  • Determine the metrics to be used for damage in leakage analysis

    • Forest cover

    • Extinction Risk

    • Forest Carbon

  • Study the following papers for potential reference and guidance for the Feasibility Report.

    Balmford, A., Green, R., & Phalan, B. (2015). Land for Food & Land for Nature? Daedalus, 144(4), 57–75. https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00354

    Bitariho, R., Akampurira, E., & Mugerwa, B. (2022). Long-term funding of community projects has contributed to mitigation of illegal activities within a premier African protected area, Bwindi impenetrable National Park, Uganda. Conservation Science and Practice, 4(9), e12761. https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.12761

    Fuller, C., Ondei, S., Brook, B. W., & Buettel, J. C. (2020). Protected-area planning in the Brazilian Amazon should prioritize additionality and permanence, not leakage mitigation. Biological Conservation, 248, 108673. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2020.108673

    Gilroy, J. J., Edwards, F. A., Medina Uribe, C. A. M., Haugaasen, T., & Edwards, D. P. (2014). Surrounding habitats mediate the trade‐off between land‐sharing and land-sparing agriculture in the Tropics. Journal of Applied Ecology, 51, 1337–1346. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.12284

    Malan, M., Carmenta, R., Gsottbauer, E., Hofman, P., Kontoleon, A., Swinfield, T., & Voors, M. (2024). Evaluating the impacts of a large-scale voluntary REDD+ project in Sierra Leone. Nature Sustainability, 7(2), 120–129. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01256-9

    Pendrill, F., Persson, U. M., Godar, J., & Kastner, T. (2019). Deforestation displaced: Trade in forest-risk commodities and the prospects for a global forest transition. Environmental Research Letters, 14(5), 055003. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab0d41

    Shahi, K., Khanal, G., Jha, R. R., Bhusal, P., & Silwal, T. (2023). What drives local communities’ attitudes toward the protected area? Insights from Bardia National Park, Nepal. Conservation Science and Practice, 5(2), e12883. https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.12883

    Silwal, T., Devkota, B. P., Poudel, P., & Morgan, M. (2022). Do Buffer Zone Programs Improve Local Livelihoods and Support Biodiversity Conservation? The Case of Sagarmatha National Park, Nepal. Tropical Conservation Science, 15, 19400829221106670. https://doi.org/10.1177/19400829221106670

Picture of the Week

A picture I snapped of the Trinity Great Court Run

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First progress report