Marc Steininger
Associate Research Professor
Dr. Steininger is an Associate Research Professor with 20 years of experience in geography, ecology and remote sensing research and applications. His areas of research include forest monitoring, secondary forest regrowth and fallows, biomass dynamics and carbon emissions, biodiversity impacts of land-cover change, methods for Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) of Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) and climate driven forest flammability and fire risk. He is former National Research Council (NRC) Fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), former Senior Director of Remote Sensing and Ecosystem Analysis at Conservation International (CI), where he directed the organization’s strategy, applications and capacity building in ecosystem and habitat monitoring, and former Task Lead for MRV of the USAID Forest Carbon, Markets and Communities program (FCMC 2017), where he directed MRV research and national capacity assessments and building.
Dr. Steininger has conducted capacity building in over a dozen countries, mostly in the tropics, especially South America and Madagascar. He co-authored the Sourcebook on Remote Sensing and Biodiversity Indicators of the United Nations (UN) Convention on Biological Diversity (Secretariat of the CBD, 2007) and led the production and writing of the FCMC REDD+ MRV Manual (FCMC 2014a). He co-designed the OSIRIS Tool in the IDRISI GIS-analysis package developed by Clark Labs (Clark Labs 2017) and designed and developed the satellite model of forest flammability now used in alert systems at CI, the Global Forest Watch (GFW) program and in Bolivian local NGOs. He was a founding member of the NASA – Conservation NGO Group, a member of the NRC NASA Decadal Survey team, a member of the external review team for forestry methodologies of the Verified Carbon Standards (VCS) program, a member of the Ad Hoc Technical Group (AHTEG) of the Subsidiary Body on Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA) of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and a member of the SecFor network of researchers on secondary forests.
