David Eryenyu

Field Director, Budongo Conservation Field Station

MSc Environment and Natural Resources, Makerere University; BSc Forestry, Makerere University

Location: Budongo Conservation Field Station

RESEARCH INTEREST: Global change research, understanding the effect of past management and global changes on forest functioning and implications on ecosystem interactions

Background

David received his BSc Forestry, and MSc in Environmental and Natural Resources from Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda; and for his MSc, he researched on how weather variables and past management activities impact of carbon sequestration belowground in the forest ecosystem.

From 2014 to 2017, David worked as a graduate fellow with Budongo Conservation Field Station, overseeing the field establishment of intensive carbon monitoring plots in the Budongo Forest.

He has been a fellow of the Earthwatch Institute, and a field team leader of the Budongo Conservation Field Station and Earthwatch Institute citizen science program since 2017, where volunteers are involved in field research and conservation activities, providing the opportunity for citizen scientists to contribute towards scientific research while learning, increasing the population of a global citizenry.

David’s current research interests are in the impact of climate change and past management interventions  on forest functioning, with a strong bias on carbon dynamics.

David was the Research and Training Coordinator at Budongo Conservation Field for two years (2018-Marc2019), where he was in charge of overseeing the long-term research and supervising independent researchers’ work. He was also responsible for organizing and coordinating BCFS’s training sessions with different stakeholders, where is has gained experience working with multiple stakeholders to provide field training to arrange of stakeholders including university undergraduate and graduate students.