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University of Oxford
School of Geography and the Environment

 School of Geography and the Environment

IGS: Current and Recent Graduate Research

Ashley Massey

Resilience and adaptive capacity of customary conservation practices in Malaysian Borneo

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Academic Profile

Ashley received her BA(Hons) from Dartmouth College (USA) in Environmental Studies with a minor in Environmental Public Policy. As an undergraduate she interned with the University of Port Elizabeth (South Africa) Terrestrial Ecology Research Unit and completed the Dartmouth College Africa Foreign Study Program. Her honors thesis investigates the attitudes towards conservation of community members bordering Tembe Elephant Park in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Ashley worked in rural Guinea and the Gambia, West Africa as an agroforestry and biodiversity conservation extension agent in the United States Peace Corps from 2005 to 2007.

Ashley joined the School of Geography and the Environment in 2008 as an MSc student in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management. Her dissertation, "Do dragons prevent deforestation? Assessing the resilience of customarily conserved areas in Kiang West, the Gambia," employed remote sensing of satellite imagery and social surveys to determine the conservation value of a local belief in mythical dragons. She graduated with distinction and expanded on her dissertation as an intern in the Environmental Change Institute. She commenced her DPhil in Geography and the Environment in 2009.

Current Research

As a member of the Oxford Biodiversity Institute, Ashley collaborates with the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC) to map Religious Forest Sites (RFS) around the world. She joined the RFS project due to her research interest in conservation and indigenous belief systems. Religious groups own 5-10% of global forests and influence much more, in addition to their investment in commercial forestry and consumption of wood and forest products. The initiative's Religious Forest Sites include, inter alia, Shinto shrines in Japan, Cambodian forest managed by Buddhist monks and forest holdings of the Church of Norway.

Ashley's doctoral research on customary conservation considers conservation actors in the matrix beyond protected areas in bio-culturally diverse Malaysian Borneo. She investigates the resilience of indigenous systems with conservation value in the context of rapid socio-economic change via case studies in maritime, forest, mountain and riverine ecosystems.

Cave entrance guarded by local cave guardian at Mantanani Island, Sabah, Malaysia.

Cave entrance guarded by local cave guardian at Mantanani Island, Sabah, Malaysia.

Teaching

Ashley teaches postgraduates Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS); she instructs MSc workshops and options courses and tutors DPhil students from the departments of Plant Sciences and Zoology. She has instructed first-year geography undergraduates on the Paris Field Course and has led tutorials for an undergraduate dissertation on co-management by the Department of Conservation and Maori of New Zealand.