Jennifer Merten, PhD student at the Georg-August University Göttingen and affiliated with IRI THESys, spent some weeks in Indonesia for her last field research. Jennifer works on the dialectic relations between watershed degradation, land use and resource governance. Her research is part of the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Center ‘Ecological and Socioeconomic Functions of Tropical Lowland Rainforest Transformation Systems (Sumatra, Indonesia)’.