Suzanne Marselis works since March 2021 as a postdoctoral scientist at the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) on various interdisciplinary research project on (1) the use of key performance indicators to facilitate agricultural transitions and (2) the monitoring of our environment using remote sensing data.

More information about Suzanne Marselis

Professional experience

Suzanne received her PhD in Geographical Sciences from the University of Maryland in the United States of America. She studied the potential use of spaceborne full-waveform lidar data for mapping tree species diversity in the tropics. Her PhD was funded through the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship program. She also worked as a research assistant on the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission: a lidar mission designed to map global biomass. Suzanne assisted with model development and the collation of a large field- and lidar database used for the calibration of biomass models. Additionally, she provided support for the mission website and published team meeting summaries in NASA’s Earth Observer magazine. After her PhD she worked as a data scientist at a large international IT company where she developed applications for object detection algorithms on remotely sensed imagery to solve client’s spatial challenges.

Research topic

Suzanne’s current research revolves around the topics of biodiversity, agriculture, and sustainability. She primarily works on the development of a key performance indicator system to enable the transition towards a more sustainable agricultural sector. She is also involved in the long-term research project in the Polderlab Vrouwe Venne, where different sustainable agricultural practices on peatland are tested. She is tightly connected to the Leiden University’s Liveable Planet program, for which she has been the program manager since March 2021. She also works together with colleagues from LIACS on projects using artificial intelligence to enhance remotely sensed datasets. Finally, she recently received a seed grant from the Global Transformations and Governance Challenges program to organize a workshop in El Salvador focusing on Stakeholder-led adaptation strategies to climate change in the Salvadoran coffee sector.  

Publications