I am an ecologist pursuing a PhD in Forest Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I am visiting the Earth Observation lab for a year thanks to a research grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). I’m broadly interested in understanding how human activities affect biodiversity, and how changes in the abundance and composition of vegetation and wildlife in turn alter land use and ecosystem services. During my time here in Berlin, I will use satellite imagery to quantify links between human activity in the wildland-urban interface, the spread of exotic pine and wattle trees, and fire regime changes in the montane grasslands of southern Africa since the 1990s