Niels Debonne is a PhD researcher in the Environmental Geography Group. His research aims at developing methods to model land use changes that emerge from telecoupled systems, and specifically as a consequence of large-scale land acquisitions. He conceptualizes and models novel trajectories of land change at the world region and global scale. This research is embedded in the GLOLAND ERC-project (Integrating human agency in global land change models) under the supervision of Prof. Peter Verburg.

Niels completed a Master of Science in Geography – Spatial analysis and GIS program at the University of Leuven and the VU Brussels, and a Bachelor of Science in Geography at the University of Leuven. While these programmes provided Niels with a broad background in human geography and physical geography, Niels developed a specific interest in human-environment interactions and the spatial analysis of these interactions. For his master thesis, Niels travelled to a remote forested area in Southwest Ethiopia to investigate the impact of rural in-migration on the forest. He developed an operational agent-based model of the human-environment interactions he observed.

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