About

My professional life has traced what I often think of as a Lorenz attractor through disciplinary phase space — a complex, looping trajectory that keeps bending back around two fixed themes: human elements and non-human elements in changing landscapes. I’m Martin Buchert — geographer, conservation planner, and someone who has spent a career moving between ecosystems and the human systems that shape them.

The tour has been wide-ranging. I’ve approached land as a geographer, a conservation biologist, a GIS practitioner, a transportation 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. I’ve never been able to think about conservation without also thinking about the human systems pressing against it, nor about urban development without accounting for what it’s pressing against.

That dual perspective runs through the applied record. Most recently as GIS Manager at Medici Land Governance, I led geospatial operations across land titling programs in Zambia, the DRC, and Guyana — building 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 aerial surveys across more than 18,000 km². Alongside that international work, my research spans nine ecosystem types across five continents — from eelgrass meadows in Puget Sound to the Brazilian Cerrado to Amazonian rainforest — with over fifteen peer-reviewed publications across that range. 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 ever since.

Throughout all of it I’ve tried to remain conscious of what Aldo Leopold would have recognized: that the communities we participate in include far more members than 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 hold an MA in Geography from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and completed doctoral coursework at Utah State University. I speak conversational German and have lived and worked across North America, Europe, Central Africa, and South America. 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, please feel free to reach out.