Short abstract:

Lydia Gibson is an ESRC postdoctoral fellow at UCL working along the interface of environmental anthropology and ecology. Lydia’s particular focus is Maroon resource use and environmental change in Caribbean tropical forest ecosystems, where diseconomies of scale, absence of large-bodied mammals, complex topographies, and legacies of plantation economies create very specific social, cultural, political, and technical arrangements seldom reflected in contemporary conservation analyses. Lydia’s current preoccupation is simulacra of justices (environmental, social, data) in conservation-based advocacy. Lydia is an IUCN SSC Specialist Group member (Birds) and contributes to the IUCN assessment of two species of parrots endemic to Jamaica. Lydia also uses GIS to support local countermapping and “countermonitoring” efforts in Jamaica.