Concordia University
Postdoctoral fellow candidate
Supervisor: Carly Ziter
Start: 2025-12-15
End: 2027-12-31

Project

Contributions of private versus public urban forests toconnectivity, biodiversity, and climate-related ecosystem services across Canadiancities
My postdoctoral research at Concordia University examines how land ownership structures—public, private, and institutional—shape urban ecosystem service provision, ecological connectivity, and equity outcomes across Canadian cities. Rather than treating ownership as a purely legal attribute, the project conceptualizes it as a structural driver that influences urban form, green infrastructure configuration, and the capacity of cities to generate and sustain ecosystem services under climate and development pressures. The project has three integrated objectives: (1) to quantify how land ownership regimes shape urban landscape structure and green infrastructure patterns using land-use data, remote sensing, and spatial metrics; (2) to assess how these ownership-driven landscape patterns influence the capacity and distribution of key urban ecosystem services, including climate regulation, carbon storage, and stormwater mitigation; and (3) to evaluate the implications of ownership-mediated ecosystem service patterns for ecological connectivity, equity, and urban planning.

Publications

1- Climate impacts of radiative forcing driven by agricultural land-use and land-cover changes in northern Canada
Pashanejad, Ehsan, Jiangui Liu, Bharat Shrestha, Kirsten Hannam, Shabtai Bittman, Raymond Desjardins, Bahram Daneshfar, Alexander Trishchenko
2026 Journal of Environmental Management

2- A functional connectivity approach for exploring interactions of multiple ecosystem services in the context of agricultural landscapes in the Canadian prairies
Pashanejad, Ehsan, Ali Kharrazi, Zuelclady M.F. Araujo-Gutierrez, Brian E. Robinson, Brian D. Fath, Lael Parrott
2024 Ecosystem Services

3- The application of semantic modelling to map pollination service provisioning at large landscape scales
Pashanejad, Ehsan, Hugo Thierry, Brian E. Robinson, Lael Parrott
2023 Ecological Modelling