Dr Lisa Wedding

Dr Lisa Wedding is an Associate Professor in Physical Geography and a Tutorial Fellow of Worcester College, the University of Oxford, where she leads The Oxford Seascape Ecology Lab. She is Associate Editor for the npj Ocean Sustainability journal and Editorial Board Member for the Landscape Ecology journal. Dr Wedding previously held a Research Associate position at the Center for Ocean Solutions, Stanford University, and was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the University of California at Santa Cruz, USA.

Dr Wedding's research focuses on understanding the social-ecological causes and consequences of spatial patterns and ecological processes in the marine environment. Increasingly, her research is positioned at the interface between science and policy and where she often works with a highly interdisciplinary team of lawyers, social scientists, and practitioners to link place-based scientific research findings to inform ocean governance.

Dr Wedding's Oxford Seascape Ecology Lab is centred on three main thematic areas of research, including 1) seascape ecology and conservation; 2) cultural seascapes and ecosystem services and; 3) linking geospatial data science to ocean governance solutions. Read more about these research areas on the lab's research page. Learn more about our current Bertarelli-funded project where our team is studying island restoration and land-sea ecological connectivity.

Undergraduate

Dr Wedding co-leads the Geographical Techniques and Physical Geography Fieldwork courses for first year students of the Oxford Geography degree, focused on field and analytical techniques for ecological sampling. She also teaches the marine ecology content in the Prelims foundational course 'Earth System Processes' and the Final Honour School foundational course 'Environmental Geography'. Dr Wedding developed and co-leads the Final Honour School option 'Geographic Data Science'.

Postgraduate

Dr Wedding developed the 'Seascape Ecology and Conservation' elective module for the SoGE MSc/MPhil programmes. She also teaches the marine ecology content in the MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management core modules. In addition, Dr Wedding leads the 'Coral Reefs in the Anthropocene' lecture course for the Environmental Change and Management MSc students in the School of Geography and the Environment. She was awarded Teaching Development and Enhancement Project Funding in 2021 to develop a new postgraduate elective module on "Diversifying the Curriculum Through Multiple Ways of Knowing".

Current Graduate Research Students

Academic Advising

At SoGE, Lisa leads research in each of these sub-themes:

• Integrating seascape ecology and remote sensing to study land-sea connectivity to evaluate marine conservation strategies, inform biocultural restoration and support spatial management decisions.
• Applying advanced geospatial technologies to illuminate climate change effects on coastal social-ecological resilience and tipping points.
• Prioritising cooperative, interdisciplinary approaches to seascape research to support mapping of biodiversity, ecosystem services, and cultural value at sea.
• Linking geospatial data science to ocean governance solutions and answering place-based management questions in order to address complex socio-ecological challenges.

She encourages individuals wishing to undertake graduate research relating to the main themes of The Oxford Seascape Ecology Lab to visit the 'Join Us' page that details information for prospective students.

For a full list of Dr Wedding's publications, please see Google Scholar and ResearchGate.