Welcome


iPhone 6 @ the artificial reservoir, Rayong Province, Thailand

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (Project Researcher) and at the Center for Southeast Asian Area Studies in Kyoto University (Affiliate Researcher)

My background

I am a researcher in ecology and area studies based in Kyoto. Currently, I am working as a project researcher for the LINKAGE project at the RIHN which aims at developing adaptive governance of natural multi-resources related to the water cycle enhancing regional resilience against local and global environmental stressors in tropical coral islands in the Pacific Ocean. I play the role of bridging knowledge generated from multiple sub-teams with different fields of study in the project. Also, I assess the impact of environmental degradation on the fish community in various habitats by using environmental DNA analysis as an independent researcher.

Previously, I worked as a post-doc researcher at Osaka University and Kyoto University, where I acquired specific skills including statistical analysis in natural and social science, machine learning including text mining by natural language processing and object detection by deep learning, and communication among stakeholders of local environmental issues as I was engaging to institutional research, marine pollution study, and environmental education.

I completed my Ph.D. in Area Studies at Kyoto University dealing with the effects of the biological invasion of non-native cichlid fishes in the Chao Phraya River delta, Thailand. From the ecological and human-dimensional perspectives, I evaluated the impact of the cichlids on the native ecosystem by analyzing the community and diversity of fish assemblage and food web as well as investigating cultural use of the cichlids in the context of both self-consumption and commercial use by local residents.

Research interests

I am strongly curious about the formation of Novel Ecosystems (NEs) and their management in the future. NE is a concept defined as ”a system of abiotic, biotic and social components (and their interactions) that, by virtue of human influence, differ from those that prevailed historically, having a tendency to self-organize and manifest novel qualities without intensive human management (Hobbs et al. 2006)”. This concept has invited a lot of criticism and controversy, particularly, among researchers in the field of invasion biology and biodiversity conservation because some researchers insist that all altered ecosystems could be restored to their original condition and the concept does not show an explicit threshold when a given ecosystem becomes an NE.

From my standpoint, I expect that the NE is not a concept to discards historical (native) ecosystems. Still, it provides a crucial suggestion that the types of ecosystems composing a landscape could be more diversified by co-existing historical and novel ecosystems. Furthermore, since the concept of NEs essentially includes value for people, I expect that it is necessary to foster transdisciplinary research which is inclusive not only to various researchers from multiple fields of study but also to diverse non-academic stakeholders regarding management policies. In that sense, as an ecologist (natural scientist) who studies area studies (social science), through a neutral manner and holistic perspective, I would like to explore how ecosystems are (trans)formed in interaction with multiple stressors including biological invasions, and what kind of landscapes and social-ecological systems are created by the ecosystem diversity, and tackle the management with various stakeholders without constraint due to persistence in the narrow academic discipline.

Collaboration

I always welcome collaboration proposals. If my research background and interest entertain you, please contact me.