Carl Salk
Guest Research Scholar
Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability Research Group
Advancing Systems Analysis Program
Biography
Carl Salk is a guest research scholar in the Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability Research Group of the IIASA Advancing Systems Analysis Program. In parallel, he works as a researcher at the Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education in Sweden. He studies forests and how people benefit from and impact them. His specific research interests include temperate tree phenology, forest governance by small communities, biodiversity assessment, and land-cover mapping. His research uses techniques like simulation modeling, field-based games, and online crowdsourcing.He first came to IIASA as part of the Young Scientists Summer Program in 2010 and then returned to join the former Ecosystems Services and Management Program in 2011 as a recipient of the Peccei Award. He continued his work as part of an IIASA Postdoctoral Fellowship, contributing to the evaluation of the quality of data collected through crowdsourcing activities such as Geo-Wiki.
In 2016-2025, he worked at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. He has also studied the management of community-owned forests with collaborators at the University of Colorado, the Center for International Forestry Research, and the University of Sao Paulo.
Salk received his PhD in biology from Duke University, USA in 2011. His dissertation research examined the environmental cues that determine when temperate trees grow and shed their leaves and how leafing dates will respond to a warmer climate. Before graduate school, Salk worked in forest research and management for the US Forest Service and National Park Service in California, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
Last update: 14 MAR 2025
Publications
Moorthy, I. , See, L. , Fritz, S. , McCallum, I. , Perger, C., Dürauer, M., Dresel, C., Sturn, T., Karner, M., Schepaschenko, D. , Lesiv, M. , Danylo, O., Laso Bayas, J.C. , Salk, C., Maus, V. , Fraisl, D. , Domian, D., & Mathieu, P.P. (2017). Crowd-driven tools for the calibration and validation of Earth Observation products. In: Earth Observation Open Science 2017 Conference, 25-28 September 2017, Frascati, Italy.
See, L. , Laso Bayas, J.C. , Schepaschenko, D. , Perger, C., Dresel, C., Maus, V. , Salk, C., Weichselgartner, J., Lesiv, M. , McCallum, I. , Moorthy, I. , & Fritz, S. (2017). LACO-Wiki: A New Online Land Cover Validation Tool Demonstrated Using GlobeLand30 for Kenya. Remote Sensing 9 (7) e754. 10.3390/rs9070754.
Fritz, S. , See, L. , Perger, C., McCallum, I. , Schill, C., Schepaschenko, D. , Duerauer, M., Karner, M., Dresel, C., Laso-Bayas, J.-C., Lesiv, M. , Moorthy, I. , Salk, C.F., Danylo, O., Sturn, T., Albrecht, F., You, L., Kraxner, F., & Obersteiner, M. (2017). A global dataset of crowdsourced land cover and land use reference data. Scientific Data 4 p. 170075. 10.1038/sdata.2017.75.
Salk, C., Lopez, M.-C., & Wong, G. (2017). Simple incentives and group dependence for successful payments for ecosystem services programs: evidence from an experimental game in rural Lao PDR. Conservation Letters 10 (4) 414-421. 10.1111/conl.12277.