Oleksandr joined GIST Lab in 2024 to work on his postdoctoral project, UkrAInability, which aims to catalogue, assess, and map the non-material impacts of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on people-nature relationships and landscape sustainability. Currently, he is a principal investigator in the project “RECIPRO-GIS: Participatory GIS 2.0 for Reciprocal Engagement and Recommending Cultural Ecosystem Services” funded by the Research Council of Finland.

His research leverages an integrated methodology based on participatory mapping, social media analytics and remote sensing to reveal shifts in people’s behaviours and landscape characteristics. He also develops a time-based approach to assessing cultural ecosystem services. Oleksandr contributed to the IPBES Transformative Change assessment.

Previously, Oleksandr was a member of the Landscape Geoinformatics lab at the University of Tartu (2020–21) and the Digital Geography Lab at the University of Helsinki (2021–24). He is passionate about making the intangible values of nature measurable and manageable, combining diverse data-driven perspectives—including digital anthropology, cultural analytics, GIS, and remote sensing—which formed the core of his PhD at the Estonian University of Life Sciences. Oleksandr enjoys museums, hiking, and is a friend to two lovely cats, Zefirka and Barbarysia.