Megan

Meacham

PhD

Postdoctoral researcher

megan.meacham@su.se

+46 707 417 450

@meganmeacham

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Profile summary

  • Ecosystem services
  • Ecosystem service bundles
  • Urban landscapes
  • Resilience
  • Complex social-ecological systems

Megan Meacham’s research focuses on ecosystem services and the role of urbanization in the Anthropocene

Meacham is a postdoctoral fellow under the Wallenberg Foundation Research Exchange program on Natural Capital, Resilience and Biosphere Stewardship, which is jointly hosted by Stanford University and the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Her research focuses on the actors, flows and dynamics of urbanization. She uses food and other ecosystem services to study quantitative and qualitative linkages between cities and their support systems.

Additionally, Meacham is the research coordinator for the Wallenberg foundation research exchange program. She is also the course leader and lecture for the course Ecosystem Service Assessments, a 4-credit course at Stockholm University.

As a PhD candidate, Meacham used the ecosystem service bundle concept to describe social-ecological landscapes within Sweden. She explored how social, geographic and ecological dynamics relate to ecosystem service bundles. She advanced the ecosystem service bundle approach by testing accessible data, feasible methods and expanding comparability with other assessments.

Meacham was previously a coordinator for the Program for Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) within Future Earth. She is still a member of PECS and collaborates with several other international projects.

Publications by Meacham, Megan

Land-use intensity mediates ecosystem service tradeoffs across regional social-ecological systems

Journal / article | 2021

Qiu, J., Queiroz, C., Bennett, E.M., Cord, A.F., Crouzat, E., Lavorel, S., Maes, J., Meacham, M., Norstrom, A.V., Peterson, G.D., Seppelt, R. & Turner, M.G. 2021. Land-use intensity mediates ecosystem service tradeoffs across regional social-ecological systems. Ecosystems and People 17(1), 264–278.

A key sustainability challenge in human-dominated landscapes is how to reconcile competing demands such as food production, water quality, climate regulation, and ecological amenities. Prior research has documented how efforts to prioritize desirable ecosystem services such as food and fiber have often led to tradeoffs with other services. However, the growing literature has revealed different and sometimes contradictory patt...

Integrating supply and demand in ecosystem service bundles characterization across Mediterranean transformed landscapes

Journal / article | 2019

Quintas-Soriano, C., García-Llorente, M., Norström, A. et al. 2019. Integrating supply and demand in ecosystem service bundles characterization across Mediterranean transformed landscapes. Landscape Ecol (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-019-00826-7

Humans continually transform landscapes, affecting the ecosystem services (ES) they provide. Thus, the spatial relationships among services vary across landscapes. Managers and decision makers have access to a variety of tools for mapping landscapes and analyzing their capacity to provide multiple ES. This paper characterizes and maps ES bundles across transformed landscapes in southeast Spain incorporating both the ecological...

The undisciplinary journey: early-career perspectives in sustainability science

Journal / article | 2018

Haider, L.J., Hentati-Sundberg, J., Giusti, M. et al. 2017. The undisciplinary journey: early-career perspectives in sustainability science. Sustain Sci. 13: 191. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-017-0445-1

The establishment of interdisciplinary Master’s and PhD programs in sustainability science is opening up an exciting arena filled with opportunities for early-career scholars to address pressing sustainability challenges. However, embarking upon an interdisciplinary endeavor as an early-career scholar poses a unique set of challenges: to develop an individual scientific identity and a strong and specific methodological skill-s...

Welcoming different perspectives in IPBES: “Nature’s contributions to people” and “Ecosystem services”

Journal / article | 2018

Peterson, G. D., Z. V. Harmackova, M. Meacham, C. Queiroz, A. Jiménez Aceituno, J. J. Kuiper, K. Malmborg, N. E. Sitas, and E. M. Bennett. 2018. Welcoming different perspectives in IPBES: “Nature’s contributions to people” and “Ecosystem services”. Ecology and Society 23(1):39.https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10134-23013

A recent paper by Díaz et al. (2018 a ) presented “nature’s contributions to people,” a conceptual framework developed within the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The authors wrote that it could nurture a paradigm shift from the concept of ecosystem services. The paper has sparked quick reactions including a critical editorial response in the journal Ecosystem Services...