Johanne Pelletier is a quantitative ecologist/environmental scientist with expertise in remote sensing. Johanne joined SPIA in December 2021 to advise and lead remote sensing work for SPIA’s research portfolio. Her research interest focuses on understanding of the impacts of human interactions with terrestrial ecosystems through land-use/cover change, with the goal of mitigating climate change, sustaining ecosystem services and improving livelihoods. She earned her PhD at McGill University (Canada) and with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (Panama). She played a leadership role on a NASA-funded project focusing on improving estimates of carbon emissions and removals from land-cover change in Southern and Eastern Africa as a postdoctoral fellow at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. She was selected for a highly competitive NatureNet Fellowship by the Nature Conservancy at Cornell University, where she worked with agricultural and development economists studying the relationship between deforestation and the use of agricultural inputs by smallholder farmers. More recently, she led a collaborative partnership project of TNC-Cornell Atkinson Sustainability Center to create new soil maps for Zambia to estimate land-based climate change mitigation potentials and to monitor charcoal production with remote sensing.