Sarah Jane Wilson is a forest geographer with a background in ecology/biology (MSc, BSc) and human geography (PhD). She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher with the PARTNERS restoration network at the University of Connecticut. She has worked with community-based forest restoration and conservation enterprises in montane cloud forests in Andean Ecuador and the Nepalese Himalaya, and in lowland jungle in Guatemala’s Peten.

Daniella Schweizer is a tropical socio-ecologist with 13 years of experience in ecological and social data analysis and synthesis of forest restoration. Her work includes research on the ecology of understory succession and enrichment planting in native species silviculture plantations in Panama, the political ecology of watershed committees in the Panama Canal Watershed, the use of tools such as phylogenetic ecology in planning and conducting restoration plantings and in the assessment of restoration success. Currently, she is conducting research aimed at characterizing the various approaches to FLR implementation and the perceptions on barriers and opportunities to increase the scale of forest restoration.

Kurt von Kleist worked as an applied ecologist performing environmental assessments across an array of ecosystems with the U.S. National Park Service, Florida Department of Transportation, and the U.S. Forest Service prior to becoming a project manager with a consulting firm in western Montana. After 10 years planning, developing, and implementing restoration projects in the northern Rocky Mountains, he took his skillset abroad to improve restoration outcomes in tropical forests. His current interests include bridging gaps between policy, planning, and implementation via extension and outreach in order to effectively scale-up forest restoration and better attain the biodiversity objectives inherent in global reforestation efforts.

Pedro Brancalion is a Tropical Forestry Professor at the Department of Forest Sciences of the “Luiz de Queiroz” College of Agriculture, University of São Paulo, Brazil, where he develops research and outreach programs on tropical forest restoration in human-modified landscapes.

Manuel Guariguata serves as CIFOR’s Principal Scientist on tropical forest ecology and forest management for production and conservation. Before joining CIFOR he was a forest researcher at CATIE, Costa Rica, where he also worked as a Professor on Conservation Biology in the Graduate Program. Manuel also served as Environmental Affairs Officer at the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity where he facilitated intergovernmental deliberations on forest biodiversity and climate change.