EDWARD AMARA has been a researcher at the Sierra Leone Agricultural Research Institute (SLARI) since 2009. He earned his BSc in Agriculture General in 2005 and his MSc in Crop Science, focusing on tree crops such as cacao, in 2010 from Njala University, Sierra Leone.
He served as a junior scientist seconded to the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) for the BIODEV project, which was funded by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. During his time at ICRAF, he participated in a summer school organized by the Viikki Tropical Resources Institute at the University of Helsinki, where he graduated with a diploma in Managing Sustainable Forest Landscapes.
Later, he worked as a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki and successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on “Woody Aboveground Biomass and Its Drivers in Mosaic Landscapes in West and East Africa” in 2022, http://hdl.handle.net/10138/345308. His primary research interests include forest carbon, agroforestry, biodiversity, nature conservation, land use and land cover change, and climate change.