Dr Stefania Cerretelli
BSc, MSc, PhD, FHEA
Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science
Agriculture, Health and Environment Department
+44 (0)1634 88 3015
Dr Stefania Cerretelli obtained the Bachelor Degree in Natural Science, and the Master Degree in Environmental Biology at the University of Trieste (Italy) in the 2010 and 2013, respectively. During her Master’s and Bachelor’s Degrees she developed experience in planning and conducting environmental surveys (such as vegetation surveys as well as mammals monitoring).
She obtained a PhD in Ecology at the University of Udine (Italy) and The Hames Hutton Institute (UK) with the title “The role of ecosystem services in the spatial assessment of land degradation: a transdisciplinary study in the Ethiopian Great Rift Valley”. Her PhD was part of the ALTER (Alternative Carbon Investments in Ecosystems for Poverty Alleviation) project, a three years international and interdisciplinary project funded by ESPA (Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation) with partners from UK, Ethiopia, and Uganda.
For her PhD, she mapped the landscape capacity to supply ecosystem services (carbon storage, soil retention, and nutrient retention) integrating data from global datasets, as well as soil properties data from a local survey, and a supervised land use classification. Moreover, she developed and implemented a participatory approach (through single interviews, focus group discussions, and participatory mapping) that involved local stakeholders. The spatial data and the local participatory knowledge and information were finally integrated in a spatialised Bayesian Belief Network model to map land degradation risk in several land use scenarios.
She joined the Natural Resources Institute in July 2019 as a research fellow for the project “Sustainability-Intensification Trade-offs in Coffee Agroforestry in Central America”, to work on ecosystem services modelling through GIS techniques. She also worked and still work identifying relationship and trade-offs between productivity and biophysical aspects (e.g. soil characteristics, shade management, biodiversity). She became Senior Lecturer in April 2023 and she is involved in teaching, tutoring and supervising activities for the BSc on Environmental Science and the MSc programmes Global Environmental Change and Agriculture for Sustainable Development.
Since the end of 2023 she is involved in the project “Evaluating the interrelated impacts of commodity agriculture, market access and forest conservation on food security in tropical landscape” where conservation efforts, markets access and commodity agriculture are analysed to infer how they affect rural livelihoods and poverty.
Throughout her career, Dr Stefania Cerretelli gained good knowledge of and experience on Remote Sensing techniques and GIS-based systems (e.g. GRASS, QGIS, and ArcGIS), programming and statistical analysis skills including BBN statistics (mainly using R-Cran Software), good skills in managing large sets of data.
During her academic career she worked with important academics in her own field: Jeremy Haggar, Truly Santika, Alessandro Gimona, Laura Poggio, Helaina Black, Rolando Cerda
- Santika, T., Nelson, V., Flint, M., MacEwen, M., Cerretelli, S., and Brack, D. (2024) Leverage points for tackling unsustainable global value chains: market-based measures versus transformative alternatives. Sustainability Science, 19, pp. 285–305. (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-023-01430-0)
- Cerretelli, S., Castellanos E., González-Mollinedo S., López E., Ospina A., and Haggar J. (2023) A scenario modelling approach to assess management impacts on soil erosion in coffee systems in Central America. Catena, 228, 107182. (doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.catena.2023.107182)
- Katic, P.G., Cerretelli, S., Haggar, J., Santika, T., and Walsh, C. (2023). Mainstreaming biodiversity in business decisions: taking stock of tools and gaps.. Biological Conservation, 277(8), 109831. (doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2022.109831)
- van Oijen, M., Haggar, J., Barrios, M., Büchi, L., Cerda, R., Cerretelli, S., López, E., de Melo Virginio Filho, E., and Ospina, A. (2022) Ecosystem services from coffee agroforestry in Central America: Estimation using the CAF2021 model. Agroforestry System, 96, pp. 969-981. (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10457-022-00755-6)
- Cerretelli, S., Poggio, L., Yakob, G., Boke, S., Habte, M., Peressotti, A., Black, H., and Gimona, A. (2021) The advantages and limitations of global datasets to assess carbon stocks as proxy for land degradation in an Ethiopian case study. Geoderma, 399, 115117. (doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2021.115117)
- Haggar, J., Casanoves, F., Cerda, R., Cerretelli, S., González-Mollinedo, S., Lanza, G., López, E., Leiva, B., and Ospina, A. (2021) Shade and agronomic intensification in coffee agroforestry systems: trade-off or synergy?. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 5, 645958. (doi:https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2021.645958)
- Cerretelli, S., Poggio, L., Gimona, L., Yakob, G., Boke, S., Habte, M., Peressotti, A., and Black, H. (2018) Spatial assessment of land degradation through key ecosystem services: The role of globally available data. Science of the Total Environment, 628–629, pp. 539–555. (doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.02.085)
Her main research interest is in identifying trade-offs between different ecological as well as socio-economic aspects within different agro-ecosystems. Methods that help achieving sustainability without compromising communities’ resilience and adaptation to environmental changes are her main research focus.
She is interested in the integration of remote sensing data and field data to model important environmental factors and ecosystem services (soil retention, carbon storage, water yield); these models are an important means to inform decision-making processes that could help supporting the adoption of better management to foster a sustainable development without depleting ecosystem services. Another interest of Dr Stefania Cerretelli is to integrate biophysical data and stakeholders’ knowledge to gain a better perspective of the study area. This is important to assess different trade-offs between sustainability, agriculture productions, livelihood diversification, as well as other factors such as poverty eradication and well-being.
She is involved in teaching mainly at BSc level, leading two modules under the BSc Environmental Science programme: Environmental Management and Environmental Impact Assessment. She is deputy programme leader of MSc Global Environmental Change and she supervises students under this programme and MSc Agriculture for Sustainable development for their final independent project.
Dr Stefania Cerretelli has been associated to the following Funded Research Projects.
ALTER project - Alternative Carbon Investments in Ecosystems for Poverty Alleviation (2013-2017).
ALTER aimed to demonstrate the benefits for wide scale poverty alleviation by tackling soil degradation, from field to landscape, by carrying out studies in Ethiopia and Uganda, bringing together natural scientists, social scientists - along with local communities and decision makers - to improve our understanding of how human-environment linked systems respond to incentives and other change.
The project was an international consortium between The James Hutton Institute (UK), University of Aberdeen (UK), Hawassa University (Ethiopia), The Ethiopian Government's Southern Agricultural Research Institute (SARI, Ethiopia), Carbon Foundation for East Africa (CAFEA, Uganda) and the International Water Management Institute (Nile Basin & Eastern Africa Office, Ethiopia).
For the above-mentioned project, Stefania mapped the distribution of ecosystem services and the integration of social and economic aspects with the environmental factors in affecting the land degradation.
SEACAF - Sustainability-Intensification Trade-offs in Coffee Agroforestry in Central America (2019-2022)
“Sustainability-Intensification Trade-offs in Coffee Agroforestry in Central America” was a BBSRC/GCRF funded project with partners from Costa Rica (CATIE - The Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Centre) and Guatemala (Universidad del Valle de Guatemala).
Coffee agri-systems vary from intensive monoculture plantations to forest-like coffee agroforests and therefore provide a model system to evaluate the trade-offs and potential synergies between intensification and sustainability. Coffee agri-systems of Costa Rica where production has been more intensive even within agroforestry systems, and Guatemala where traditional coffee agroforestry systems predominate are compared. Provisioning, supporting and indicators of regulating ecosystem services are evaluated on around 80-90 coffee farms in each country representing different typologies of coffee production with a range of intensity of production (levels of fertilizer use) and sustainability (levels of shade trees). The results of this project will inform the best strategies and support for farmers to enable sustainable productive livelihoods while meeting the product demands of markets and environmental demands of society.
FAM-ESCR - Evaluating the interrelated impacts of commodity agriculture, market access and forest conservation on food security in tropical landscape (2023-2025)
The FAM-ESRC is an UKRI funded project with partners from Indonesia (Hasanuddin University, University of Papua, and National Research and Innovation Agency). This project aims to analyse the interrelated impacts of various forest conservation schemes and agricultural production models on food security and how this interacts with access to markets. The main objective of the project is to evaluate how forest conservation programmes (protected area and community-based land management), market accessibility, and commodity agriculture development (industrial-scale monocultures and polyculture and agroforestry smallholdings) collectively affect and impact rural livelihoods and food security.
Multiple secondary datasets from government censuses and remote sensing from four major islands of Indonesia (Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Papua) will be used. This research will be able to compare food security in different stages of economic development in different islands. The project will primarily involve desk analysis of secondary datasets; we will also conduct two workshops in Indonesia to obtain feedback from stakeholders on the results and interpretations of the analysis.
Nature based solutions for climate resilience of local and indigenous communities in Guatemala (2024-2027)
This project is funded by DEFRA UK for 3 years. It has local Guatemalan partners (specifically Universidad del Valle and FEDECOVERA, as well as CATIE in Costa Rica), and will assess nature-based solutions in two different areas in Guatemala (Alta Verapaz and Chiquimula).
Scientific and traditional local and Indigenous knowledge systems will be integrated in the design and assessment of nature-based solutions (NbS) to enhance their impact on the climate resilience and just wellbeing of rural communities in two regions of Guatemala. Local and national decision-makers will use guidelines and tools that integrate local and Indigenous Peoples’ values, knowledge and culture in the co-design of NbS for landscape climate resilience. Individual people, households and communities will be empowered to be at the centre of NbS planning and implementation through an enhanced awareness of the current and potential role of ecosystems in their lives and of the factors required for NbS to result in just and successful outcomes. The tools and evidence from application of this approach will be made available to inform landscape resilience planning across Central America.
NRI Representative at the ECR network for the Faculty of Engineering and Science
Dr Stefania Cerretelli obtained the Bachelor Degree in Natural Science, and the Master Degree in Environmental Biology at the University of Trieste (Italy) in the 2010 and 2013, respectively. During her Master’s and Bachelor’s Degrees she developed experience in planning and conducting environmental surveys (such as vegetation surveys as well as mammals monitoring).
She obtained a PhD in Ecology at the University of Udine (Italy) and The Hames Hutton Institute (UK) with the title “The role of ecosystem services in the spatial assessment of land degradation: a transdisciplinary study in the Ethiopian Great Rift Valley”. Her PhD was part of the ALTER (Alternative Carbon Investments in Ecosystems for Poverty Alleviation) project, a three years international and interdisciplinary project funded by ESPA (Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation) with partners from UK, Ethiopia, and Uganda.
For her PhD, she mapped the landscape capacity to supply ecosystem services (carbon storage, soil retention, and nutrient retention) integrating data from global datasets, as well as soil properties data from a local survey, and a supervised land use classification. Moreover, she developed and implemented a participatory approach (through single interviews, focus group discussions, and participatory mapping) that involved local stakeholders. The spatial data and the local participatory knowledge and information were finally integrated in a spatialised Bayesian Belief Network model to map land degradation risk in several land use scenarios.
She joined the Natural Resources Institute in July 2019 as a research fellow for the project “Sustainability-Intensification Trade-offs in Coffee Agroforestry in Central America”, to work on ecosystem services modelling through GIS techniques. She also worked and still work identifying relationship and trade-offs between productivity and biophysical aspects (e.g. soil characteristics, shade management, biodiversity). She became Senior Lecturer in April 2023 and she is involved in teaching, tutoring and supervising activities for the BSc on Environmental Science and the MSc programmes Global Environmental Change and Agriculture for Sustainable Development.
Since the end of 2023 she is involved in the project “Evaluating the interrelated impacts of commodity agriculture, market access and forest conservation on food security in tropical landscape” where conservation efforts, markets access and commodity agriculture are analysed to infer how they affect rural livelihoods and poverty.
Throughout her career, Dr Stefania Cerretelli gained good knowledge of and experience on Remote Sensing techniques and GIS-based systems (e.g. GRASS, QGIS, and ArcGIS), programming and statistical analysis skills including BBN statistics (mainly using R-Cran Software), good skills in managing large sets of data.
During her academic career she worked with important academics in her own field: Jeremy Haggar, Truly Santika, Alessandro Gimona, Laura Poggio, Helaina Black, Rolando Cerda
- Santika, T., Nelson, V., Flint, M., MacEwen, M., Cerretelli, S., and Brack, D. (2024) Leverage points for tackling unsustainable global value chains: market-based measures versus transformative alternatives. Sustainability Science, 19, pp. 285–305. (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-023-01430-0)
- Cerretelli, S., Castellanos E., González-Mollinedo S., López E., Ospina A., and Haggar J. (2023) A scenario modelling approach to assess management impacts on soil erosion in coffee systems in Central America. Catena, 228, 107182. (doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.catena.2023.107182)
- Katic, P.G., Cerretelli, S., Haggar, J., Santika, T., and Walsh, C. (2023). Mainstreaming biodiversity in business decisions: taking stock of tools and gaps.. Biological Conservation, 277(8), 109831. (doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2022.109831)
- van Oijen, M., Haggar, J., Barrios, M., Büchi, L., Cerda, R., Cerretelli, S., López, E., de Melo Virginio Filho, E., and Ospina, A. (2022) Ecosystem services from coffee agroforestry in Central America: Estimation using the CAF2021 model. Agroforestry System, 96, pp. 969-981. (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10457-022-00755-6)
- Cerretelli, S., Poggio, L., Yakob, G., Boke, S., Habte, M., Peressotti, A., Black, H., and Gimona, A. (2021) The advantages and limitations of global datasets to assess carbon stocks as proxy for land degradation in an Ethiopian case study. Geoderma, 399, 115117. (doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2021.115117)
- Haggar, J., Casanoves, F., Cerda, R., Cerretelli, S., González-Mollinedo, S., Lanza, G., López, E., Leiva, B., and Ospina, A. (2021) Shade and agronomic intensification in coffee agroforestry systems: trade-off or synergy?. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 5, 645958. (doi:https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2021.645958)
- Cerretelli, S., Poggio, L., Gimona, L., Yakob, G., Boke, S., Habte, M., Peressotti, A., and Black, H. (2018) Spatial assessment of land degradation through key ecosystem services: The role of globally available data. Science of the Total Environment, 628–629, pp. 539–555. (doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.02.085)
Her main research interest is in identifying trade-offs between different ecological as well as socio-economic aspects within different agro-ecosystems. Methods that help achieving sustainability without compromising communities’ resilience and adaptation to environmental changes are her main research focus.
She is interested in the integration of remote sensing data and field data to model important environmental factors and ecosystem services (soil retention, carbon storage, water yield); these models are an important means to inform decision-making processes that could help supporting the adoption of better management to foster a sustainable development without depleting ecosystem services. Another interest of Dr Stefania Cerretelli is to integrate biophysical data and stakeholders’ knowledge to gain a better perspective of the study area. This is important to assess different trade-offs between sustainability, agriculture productions, livelihood diversification, as well as other factors such as poverty eradication and well-being.
She is involved in teaching mainly at BSc level, leading two modules under the BSc Environmental Science programme: Environmental Management and Environmental Impact Assessment. She is deputy programme leader of MSc Global Environmental Change and she supervises students under this programme and MSc Agriculture for Sustainable development for their final independent project.
Dr Stefania Cerretelli has been associated to the following Funded Research Projects.
ALTER project - Alternative Carbon Investments in Ecosystems for Poverty Alleviation (2013-2017).
ALTER aimed to demonstrate the benefits for wide scale poverty alleviation by tackling soil degradation, from field to landscape, by carrying out studies in Ethiopia and Uganda, bringing together natural scientists, social scientists - along with local communities and decision makers - to improve our understanding of how human-environment linked systems respond to incentives and other change.
The project was an international consortium between The James Hutton Institute (UK), University of Aberdeen (UK), Hawassa University (Ethiopia), The Ethiopian Government's Southern Agricultural Research Institute (SARI, Ethiopia), Carbon Foundation for East Africa (CAFEA, Uganda) and the International Water Management Institute (Nile Basin & Eastern Africa Office, Ethiopia).
For the above-mentioned project, Stefania mapped the distribution of ecosystem services and the integration of social and economic aspects with the environmental factors in affecting the land degradation.
SEACAF - Sustainability-Intensification Trade-offs in Coffee Agroforestry in Central America (2019-2022)
“Sustainability-Intensification Trade-offs in Coffee Agroforestry in Central America” was a BBSRC/GCRF funded project with partners from Costa Rica (CATIE - The Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Centre) and Guatemala (Universidad del Valle de Guatemala).
Coffee agri-systems vary from intensive monoculture plantations to forest-like coffee agroforests and therefore provide a model system to evaluate the trade-offs and potential synergies between intensification and sustainability. Coffee agri-systems of Costa Rica where production has been more intensive even within agroforestry systems, and Guatemala where traditional coffee agroforestry systems predominate are compared. Provisioning, supporting and indicators of regulating ecosystem services are evaluated on around 80-90 coffee farms in each country representing different typologies of coffee production with a range of intensity of production (levels of fertilizer use) and sustainability (levels of shade trees). The results of this project will inform the best strategies and support for farmers to enable sustainable productive livelihoods while meeting the product demands of markets and environmental demands of society.
FAM-ESCR - Evaluating the interrelated impacts of commodity agriculture, market access and forest conservation on food security in tropical landscape (2023-2025)
The FAM-ESRC is an UKRI funded project with partners from Indonesia (Hasanuddin University, University of Papua, and National Research and Innovation Agency). This project aims to analyse the interrelated impacts of various forest conservation schemes and agricultural production models on food security and how this interacts with access to markets. The main objective of the project is to evaluate how forest conservation programmes (protected area and community-based land management), market accessibility, and commodity agriculture development (industrial-scale monocultures and polyculture and agroforestry smallholdings) collectively affect and impact rural livelihoods and food security.
Multiple secondary datasets from government censuses and remote sensing from four major islands of Indonesia (Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Papua) will be used. This research will be able to compare food security in different stages of economic development in different islands. The project will primarily involve desk analysis of secondary datasets; we will also conduct two workshops in Indonesia to obtain feedback from stakeholders on the results and interpretations of the analysis.
Nature based solutions for climate resilience of local and indigenous communities in Guatemala (2024-2027)
This project is funded by DEFRA UK for 3 years. It has local Guatemalan partners (specifically Universidad del Valle and FEDECOVERA, as well as CATIE in Costa Rica), and will assess nature-based solutions in two different areas in Guatemala (Alta Verapaz and Chiquimula).
Scientific and traditional local and Indigenous knowledge systems will be integrated in the design and assessment of nature-based solutions (NbS) to enhance their impact on the climate resilience and just wellbeing of rural communities in two regions of Guatemala. Local and national decision-makers will use guidelines and tools that integrate local and Indigenous Peoples’ values, knowledge and culture in the co-design of NbS for landscape climate resilience. Individual people, households and communities will be empowered to be at the centre of NbS planning and implementation through an enhanced awareness of the current and potential role of ecosystems in their lives and of the factors required for NbS to result in just and successful outcomes. The tools and evidence from application of this approach will be made available to inform landscape resilience planning across Central America.
NRI Representative at the ECR network for the Faculty of Engineering and Science