Tor-Gunnar Vågen is Senior Scientist and head of the GeoScience lab at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF). His has a varied background of soil science, hydrology, landscape ecology, statistical modeling and remote sensing. Dr. Vågen has been leading the development and application of the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF), which has been implemented in a range of projects across the global tropics. He currently leads research initiatives to establish global data-driven networks of sites for comparative assessments of ecosystem health, including linkages between biophysical and socio-economic variables in order to understand drivers of deforestation, land use change and land degradation across the global tropics.