Scott Hetrick, Research Associate and GIS Specialist, ACT, "Report from ASTER User’s Workshop"

Workshop Objectives

This workshop will provide a comprehensive summary of the ASTER instrument, data products, data ordering, and applications. Members of the ASTER Science Team and the Land Processes DAAC will cover step-by-step details of the processing, distribution, analysis and interpretation of ASTER data. The workshop will also include a hands-on computer tutorial to take participants through the details of data searching, ordering and other technical tools.

The 150,000 plus private non-industrial owners of forest land in Indiana are the objects of a multitude of federal and state programs. A bewildering array of management advice, cost-sharing, tax incentives, and educational programs are available. After providing an overview of the sponsors, objectives, and interaction of these programs, Professor Hoover will discuss whether they are meeting the needs of owners, the resource, or the “communities” in which the owners and their land are embedded. He will advocate a program framework based on institutions that motivate individual landowners to make decisions within the context of their “land-based community.” He will suggest that these yet-to-be-developed institutions should be less than conservation easement programs but more than self-centered utility maximization.

**Please note the change in day and location.

Many agri-environmental programs fail to meet expectations due to enforcement difficulties. One response has been devolution of enforcement rights and responsibilities to industry organizations,

As so many others, I want to try to understand what makes cooperative management of common-pool resources work or fail. The focus of my research is on cooperation, rather than on the outcome of the participants’ cooperative efforts, and on how the participants’ ability to cooperate is connected to various factors. In this presentation, I will give you an overview of my research, focusing on giving you a picture of the data I am using, the results I have arrived at so far and some questions the analysis has evoked. The data set comprises broad yet detailed information regarding the historical development of ten irrigation systems in the Terai region of Nepal. There is time-series data for a wide range of variables (participants, socio-economic status, infrastructure, external support, physical environment, leadership, institutional structure etc.) as well as the respondents’ explanations for the changes that have taken place over time.

In the analysis I combine statistical (panel data) methods with case studies based on the narrative information. The results indicate that cooperation works better when there is an individual taking on the role as leader, when there is a strong ethnic majority, when the participants’ average income level is not too low and when the income is evenly distributed. Interestingly, the presence of a Water Users’ Association, which is often a requirement for getting external support, seems to have a negative effect on cooperation, and so did the Nepali democratisation process. Neither the age of the system or the number of participants were found to be strongly correlated with cooperation. In the narrative information, both low and high water reliability were said to improve cooperation.

Anthropologists have embraced the concept of transnationalism. This is nowhere more evident than in the discussion of Mexican-US migration patterns. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to defining methods that can aid in measuring, explaining and predicting transnational outcomes. In this paper we use data from an ongoing investigation of migration in 11 rural communities located in the central valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico to show that we can measure and quantify transnational outcomes; and explain community and household variation. The data for this study comes from an ethnosurvey conducted with 590 randomly selected households located in 11 randomly selected communities located in the central valleys of Oaxaca, the intermountaine region surrounding the state’s capital

The literature on decentralization of natural resource management often portrays forest tenure security as a necessary condition for achieving sustainable forest use. However, if local forest users' discount rates are high, which is frequently the case among forest users in Latin America, better forest tenure security may not produce more sustainable forest management practices. Even in the event that decentralization reforms have enabled local governments to be effective at facilitating better access for forest users to de jure rights to forest resources, the net effect of these interventions will not necessarily be improved forest conditions. Reforms may, in some cases, even spur increased forest degradation. This possibility raises a serious concern about the potentially negative environmental impact of decentralization reforms.