René van der Wal

Environmental citizen science: learning and working together, with others in society, to understand and address pressing environmental issues - that's the power of citizen science if done well https://play.slu.se/qc/?id=j8a83k. 

By studying ongoing initiaves and develop new ones, we are trying to work out where to improve and innovate. This, we hope, will allow citizen science to become a participatory research approach with the power to broker new contracts between science and society, through which environmental issues can be addressed. 

Interdisciplinary approaches: not much beats learning-by-doing from working with passionate researchers in fields fundamentally different than yours. I have thoroughly enjoyed working with, for example, social scientists and computer scientists to understand Digital Innovation in Nature Conservation http://link.springer.com/journal/13280/44/4/suppl/page/1. 

Community ecology: Working with social scientists has helped me reflect on my own discipline, Ecology, which has been immensely valuable and led to an increased emphasis on the role of humans in the ecology of a place;  be this in people's gardens, working out how best to plant for pollinators; on the smallest of islands (http://chronicle.com/article/A-Path-for-Puffins/125578/) to unravel the complexities of an invasive plant species and its management; or in the remote archipellago of Svalbard (http://link.springer.com/journal/13280/44/4/suppl/page/1) to work out how climate and grazers (reindeer and geese - both increasing in response to human factors) drive plant productivity and species change in High Arctic tundra.

For publications, see: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=RYN4F8QAAAAJ&hl=en