About

I’m Martin Buchert — a geographer and conservation planner who designs and leads geospatial systems for land governance and biodiversity-focused planning. I hold an MA in Geography from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and completed doctoral coursework in vegetation remote sensing at Utah State University. I speak conversational German and have lived and worked across North America, Europe, Central Africa, and South America.

The tour has been wide-ranging. I’ve approached land as a geographer, a conservation biologist, a GIS practitioner, a planner, and at various points as someone with direct skin in the built environment — as a builder, an architectural drafter, and a real estate developer. That time inside the industries that conservation work is always negotiating against wasn’t incidental to my development as a conservation planner; it’s central to it. From the summer I helped my parents build our family’s new house in the boreal forest of Northern Ontario, my thinking about biodiversity and ecosystem function has always been informed by this perspective on the socioeconomic systems pressing against them — and my work shaping urban systems has been grounded in an understanding of the larger life-support systems those cities are embedded within.

That dual perspective runs through the applied record. Most recently, as GIS Manager at Medici Land Governance, I led geospatial operations for land titling programs, international boundary delineations, and large-area surveys in Zambia, Liberia, the DRC, Sierra Leone, St. Kitts & Nevis, and Guyana. I built complete spatial data infrastructures from scratch in environments where the margin for error was low, the institutional complexity was high, and the decisions being made had direct consequences for how land would be used and by whom. That work attracted over $1.5M in support from UN FAO, the World Bank, and GIZ, and involved directing drone and manned aerial surveys covering more than 18,000 km².

Alongside that international work, my academic and consulting research spans nine ecosystem types across four continents — from hypersaline terminal lakes in the Western US to the Brazilian Cerrado to montane mainland Southeast Asia — with over a dozen peer-reviewed publications. I’ve focused on ecosystem impacts of urban systems, habitat connectivity in fragmented peri-urban areas, and human land use and transportation drivers of landscape dynamics. Nearly a decade teaching GIS at the University of Utah kept me honest about how planners and developers actually reason about space and land value, an education that has paid dividends since the very first semester I taught.

Throughout all of it I’ve tried to take seriously Aldo Leopold’s seminal articulation: that the communities we participate in include far more members than just the human ones, and that the air, water, soil, and biota of a landscape have stakes in our decisions whether we account for them or not. For all my sincere passion for those other vital and beautiful elements of the landscapes I’ve worked in, humans are a social species — and one of the singular rewards of this work has been the people I’ve learned from along the way.

I’m not yet so full of conversation or intellectual company that I’d turn down more, so if any of this resonates with work you’re doing at the intersection of conservation, land governance, and spatial data, please reach out.