"Sheona's research and academic interests are broad with most of her work in the past 30 years being at the interface between rural livelihoods and natural resource management. She has have undertaken research in such wide ranging areas as community conservation, natural resource governance, rural livelihoods and vulnerability, ecosystem services and human-well-being, non-timber forest product use and commercialisation, and climate change adaptation. She enjoys working in interdisciplinary teams, and has participated in several large international and inter-institutional research programmes, most of these culminating in several books as well as multiple journal papers. Her work is focussed at the nexus between environment/ecosystem services, people, change and sustainability, and she believes that the global environmental challenges we are encountering today can only be addressed through integrated, inter- and transdisciplinarity research approaches. She teaches these approaches and the theory of complex social-ecological systems in her undergraduate and postgraduate courses. In addition to research in the areas of vulnerability, adaptation and resilience, she has also worked with colleagues on Higher Education approaches to learning and research in sustainability and complexity issues, and has supervised students working in such diverse areas as ecoliteracy, conservation and development, natural resource governance, carbon markets, urban forestry, and non-timber forest product. Other areas of interest include social learning and gendered aspects of natural resources use and adaptation to climate change. She has some 100 peer reviewed journal, books and book contributions to her name, a similar number of research reports and she is a B3-rated scientist with the South African National Research Foundation. She has had a long collaborative association with the Centre for International Forestry Research in Bogor, Indonesia."

Rural livelihoods and natural resource management