As an Expedition Leader and Summer Mountain Leader, Lisa has led scientific conservation expeditions to track, trap and radio-collar wolves and lynx in the winter conditions of the Polish Carpathian Mountains; similarly tracking leopards, cheetah and related prey species in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia, living in wilderness for months at a time. Lisa’s combined love of wild places, ethnobotany and associated culture has led her to expedition through arduous climates and globally remote environments. She has guided scientific, anthropological, commercial, and private expeditions to a wide variety of wilderness regions, as well as undertaking personal journeys for anthropological and naturalist interest, or simply for the challenge.

Lisa has had numerous ‘close calls’ during her various travels; for example, she has come face to face with a mountain lion, become lost for several days on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau following a sand-storm in which she was separated from her guides and all of her equipment, she escaped armed smugglers deep in the Belizian jungle, has had so many close encounters with deadly snakes that she now 'expects them', has ‘gone through the ice’ during an unsupported traveling winter expedition, met with a jaguar whilst in the Belize jungle, had a six-foot crocodile accompany her canoe in remote jungle river on the border of Guatemala, has been chased through the African bush by an Ostrich, has milked cattle for the Himba people in a dangerously enclosed carral, has ‘rock-climbed’ using jungle vines' deep in Malay jungle (whilst looking for the rare Rafflesia flower) with a 40lb pack on her back and has become trapped by land-slides for days on the Rohtang-Pass at 4000m, in the Indian Himalayas.

Lisa has always sought out opportunities to spend extended ‘bush-time’ with indigenous peoples, such as the San Bushman, Tibetan nomads, the Himba pastoralists, and the Cree Indian Nations of Quebec. She is fascinated by the traditional skills of such groups, and she is looking forward to sharing her enthusiasm and ever-increasing depth of knowledge in this area with Woodsmoke students.

As an academic, Lisa completed an ethnobotany MSc in 2008 at Kent University in conjunction with Kew Gardens, gaining a ‘distinction’ for her final thesis on British wild  plant foods. Lisa is currently reading for a PhD in ethnobiology, researching ‘Bushcraft and Indigenous Knowledge Transmissions’. Her doctoral research has recently brought Lisa to remote areas of the USA, spending two and half months of 2011 tent-dwelling in desert, mountain and forest environments with her eight month old son in tow.

Through the combination of her extensive practical and real-life experiences in bushcraft and travel, with her more scholarly in-sights into ethnobiology, Lisa brings an extraordinary diversity of perspectives to Woodsmoke.  She is contagious in her enthusiasm for her subject area and is forever keen to pass on her accumulated knowledge and skills:

“As an ethnobiologist it is my passion to journey deep into cultural and natural landscapes to learn from those who still retain a skilled knowledge of how plants and animals can directly support human life, culture and spirit. I believe that through knowledge of the traditional practices of indigenous and local peoples we can re-connect to the human story, helping to understand and enrich our own experiences within nature. The scale, depth and future implications of such knowledge, for the entire human race, is almost as mind-blowing as the realization of how much has already been irretrievably lost or destroyed.”