Dear Colleagues,

As Editor-in-Chief of Land, I am pleased to announce the two winners of the 2019 Travel Awards sponsored by Land:

The Travel Awards were granted to Dr. Catalina Munteanu, Postdoctoral fellow in the Conservation Biogeography Lab, Geography Department, Humboldt-University Berlin, Berlin, Germany, and Ms. Elizabeth Tellman, PH.D. student in the Arizona State University School of Geographical Science and Urban Planning, Tempe, AZ, USA.

Dr. Catalina Munteanu’s research aims to understand and disentangle the legacies of past human activities so that we can make better conservation and land management decisions for the future. Her work spans the disciplines of land use science, landscape ecology, and conservation science to address issues relevant at both regional and global scales. In her current project, EcoSpy She uses declassified historical, global, high-resolution spy satellite photographs from the Cold War era (Corona) at broad scales to extend the temporal scale of ecological and conservation remote sensing studies as far back as the 1960s.

Ms. Elizabeth Tellman seeks to understand the causes and consequences of environmental change. Her dissertation investigates illicit and clandestine drivers of land use change by examining electoral politics and urban expansion in Mexico City and narcotrafficking and deforestation in Central America. She will continue to shine a light on the hidden processes of change as satellites and data on land transactions increase in spatial and temporal resolution.

The prize consist of 800 Swiss Francs each to support travel for attendance at an academic conference in 2019.

It was a difficult decision with such high-quality applications for the awards and we would like to thank all applicants for submitting their diverse and fascinating range of research topics. We congratulate the
winners for their accomplishments.

Prof. Dr. Andrew Millington
Editor-in-Chief of Land