A Summer Institute on Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Applications
2002

Purpose

The purpose of the Summer Institute is to share knowledge within the scholarly community about the human dimensions of global change research and how such interdisciplinary research programs are conducted. The participants come from around the world and range from research scholars who are already established in their fields to younger scholars just starting their research on these topics. No single discipline has the essential tools needed to undertake extensive, long-term efforts to monitor and assess how various patterns of human use affect environmental processes at local, landscape, regional, and global levels. Thus, it is essential to bring scholars from diverse physical, biological, and social sciences together to share with one another their relevant technical tools and skills for conceptualizing, measuring, and analyzing these problems.

 

The Location

The Summer Institute is located on the Bloomington Campus of Indiana University. Many sessions are conducted in Woodburn Hall, which houses the Department of Political Science and a suite of offices of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. Lab sessions are offered in the Student Building, which houses the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Geography, and the Anthropological Center for Training and Research in Global Environmental Change (ACT). One full day is also spent in the field.

The Faculty and Presenters

Dr. Emilio Moran, Co-Director of CIPEC; Director of the Anthropological Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change (ACT); James H. Rudy Professor of Anthropology; Professor, School of Public and Environmental Affairs; Adjunct Professor, Geography; and Lead Scientist of the Land Use/Cover Change (LUCC) Focus 1–Land Use Dynamics Office. Dr. Moran has 30 years’ experience in research in the Amazon Basin and other tropical countries. He is a specialist in tropical ecology, tropical soils, and the study of land-use and land-cover change. Since 1991, he has developed methods linking traditional field techniques of data collection to remotely sensed data from Landsat satellites. His work is currently supported by grants from the NSF, NOAA, NICHD, and NASA. He is the author of six books, nine edited volumes, and more than 100 journal articles and book chapters.

Dr. Elinor Ostrom, Co-Director of CIPEC; Co-Director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis; Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Government in the Department of Political Science; and Professor, School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Since 1965, she has pursued an active research program linking institutional arrangements at local, regional, and national levels to the actions of individuals and their outcomes. Since the mid-1980s, she has headed a major research program funded by NSF, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations on common-pool resources. She is the author of Governing the Commons and co-author with Roy Gardner and James Walker of Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources, as well as many articles in scholarly journals.

Dr. Jon Unruh, Associate Director, CIPEC; and Associate Professor, Department of Geography. Dr. Unruh’s applied, research, and policy work focuses on natural resources and agriculture in developing countries. He has spent a number of years in Africa and Latin America involved in work on land tenure, conflict resolution, irrigation, agroforestry, pastoralism, deforestation, local institutions, food security, environmental change, land law, and land policy; and has published widely on these issues. Prior to coming to Indiana University, he served as Country Representative to the Famine Early Warning System for Ethiopia and has worked with USAID, the University of Wisconsin’s Land Tenure Center and Institute for Environmental Studies, and the Woods Hole Research Center. His Africa work has focused on Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, and Madagascar.

Dr. Thomas Evans, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography; and Research Associate, CIPEC. His main area of research is in the application of GIS and remote sensing techniques to the study of population-environment interactions. In particular, his research has focused on developing GIS and spatial analytic techniques for land-use/land-cover change analysis and modeling. He has conducted fieldwork in Ecuador and Thailand and has collaborated with researchers from a variety of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, ecology, and planning. He is a past employee of Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), the developers of ARC/INFO and ARCVIEW.

Dr. Glen Green, Remote Sensing Postdoctoral Scholar, CIPEC. Dr. Green earned a Ph.D. from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. He has studied several of the prominent agents of anthropogenic change (grazing, salinization, and deforestation caused by subsistence farming and charcoal production) in a diverse array of vegetation types. In field and laboratory studies, he has relied heavily on quantitative methodologies such as GIS, remote sensing, and GPS technologies. His research interests include examining deforestation processes to determine environmental degradation associated with various resource management policies, and the use of models, together with remotely sensed mapping and monitoring, to study the biodiversity implications of land-cover changes and the future economic costs associated with various conservation and development strategies. He has worked in Madagascar, Egypt, and in the oak-hickory forests of the Midwest USA.

Dr. Vicky Meretsky, Assistant Professor, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Adjunct Professor, Department of Biology, and Research Associate, CIPEC. Her main areas of interest are conservation in managed landscapes and applied ecology. She conducts research both at the single-species level, working primarily with endangered species (California condor, humpback chub, Kanab ambersnail), and at the landscape level. She managed the vertebrate portion of the Arizona GAP analysis and is currently a member of the CIPEC Biocomplexity project. She previously worked with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service where she was part of the multidisciplinary team monitoring the first ecosystem-management flood in Grand Canyon; she has also conducted research for the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, the National Park Service, and the Bureau of Land Management.

Dr. Darla Munroe, Postdoctoral Fellow, CIPEC. Dr. Munroe is an economic geographer, with a focus on land use, spatial analysis, and spatial econometrics. She earned a Master’s degree from the University of Michigan, specializing in international economic policy and economic development, and a Ph.D. in Regional Science from the University of Illinois. She has conducted fieldwork in Poland, looking at the effect of historical factors on regional variations in land use on small farms, which is the subject of a forthcoming article in Regional Studies. She is currently conducting research on integrating remotely sensed data into a spatial econometric framework to study land-use/land-cover change in western Honduras (articles forthcoming in Professional Geographer and Agricultural Economics) and southern Indiana.

Dr. Harini Nagendra, Postdoctoral Fellow, CIPEC. Dr. Nagendra received her Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science and is a researcher in landscape ecology and remote sensing. Her past research in Southern India involved the development of a multiscale methodology, combining remote sensing with field studies, for biodiversity assessment. She is especially interested in the relationship between landscape pattern and processes leading to fragmentation, with a focus on tropical mountain landscapes. She is currently investigating patterns of land-cover change in Western Honduras and Nepal, with future planned research in India. As an ecologist, she is also interested in the use of the IFRI database to investigate changes in forest condition over time, and has initiated studies in Nepal. Some of her recent publications are in Biodiversity and Conservation, International Journal of Remote Sensing, and Landscape Research.

Dr. Dawn Parker, Postdoctoral Fellow, CIPEC. Dr. Parker received her Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California at Davis. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in modeling at CIPEC. Her current research is focused on constructing empirically parameterized and testable agent-based models of land-use decisions. Her general research interests include impacts of spatial externalities on land-use patterns, construction of integrated socioeconomic and biophysical models of natural resource exploitation, complexity theory, agent-based modeling, and sustainable agriculture.

Dr. Amy Poteete, Research Coordinator, International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) research program, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. After receiving her doctorate in political science from Duke University in 1999, Dr. Poteete spent a year teaching at Yale University before joining the IFRI research program. Her research focuses on natural resource management as a window onto the social, economic, and political position of resource-dependent populations. Current research projects explore how historical patterns of social organization affect possibilities for political mobilization by resource-dependent populations, how perceptions of natural resource systems affect the development of rules for their management, and when communities respond to perceived resource degradation through redistribution versus exclusion. Dr. Poteete is a member of the teaching team for the IFRI research seminar taught each fall at Indiana University.

Dr. J. C. Randolph, Professor, School of Public and Environmental Affairs; and Director of the Midwestern Regional Center of the National Institute for Global Environmental Change (NIGEC). Dr. Randolph's research interests are in ecosystem ecology and natural resources management with an emphasis on forests and agriculture. Much of his current research concerns climate change effects on agriculture and forests in the U.S. Midwest. He also studies carbon dynamics of temperate deciduous forests at the AmeriFlux site in south_central Indiana and has worked in tropical forests in Brazil, Guatemala, and Honduras. He has been actively involved in the applications of geographic information systems and remote sensing in natural resources and environmental management. Dr. Randolph has been at Indiana University since 1973 when he came from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He has held several administrative positions at Indiana University and currently is Director of the Ph.D. in Environmental Science program.

Dr. Catherine Tucker, Environmental Research Coordinator, CIPEC. Dr. Tucker received her doctorate at the University of Arizona in 1996. Her research investigates human dimensions of forest change, with a focus on the relationships between tenure arrangements, national policies, socioeconomic conditions, demographic factors, and management decisions. She is conducting a longitudinal study of forest change in western Honduras and in Oaxaca and Michoacán, Mexico. She has published articles in Mountain Research and Development and has forthcoming articles in Agricultural Economics and Landscape Research. Dr. Tucker also has two forthcoming chapters in edited volumes to be published by Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México In addition to interests in deforestation, institutional arrangements, and global environmental change, Dr. Tucker brings to CIPEC a background in team research projects, group administration and management, and broad experience with field work in Latin America.

Dr. Leah VanWey, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology. Dr. VanWey also teaches graduate courses for CIPEC and the Population Institute for Research and Training (PIRT). She earned her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she was a predoctoral trainee at the Carolina Population Center under the guidance of Barbara Entwisle. Her current research centers on population and migration studies in Mexico and Thailand. Dr. VanWey has published articles in American Sociological Review and Social Forces.

Dr. Richard Wilk, Professor, Department of Anthropology. Dr. Wilk’s fieldwork focus has been in Belize for 30 years, though he also has done research in West Africa and the USA. There are three major topical themes in his research: a focus on the social and economic organization of the household, an interest in consumer culture and the global media, and a continuing concern with ethical issues and practice in our discipline, with particular emphasis on the issues raised by archeologists= depictions of the past. He has co-edited a book on beauty pageants, with 14 case studies from around the world, which focused his attention on the naturalization of gender and on the ways beauty links previously isolated cultures into global hierarchies. In the long run, he hopes to bring these theoretical interests to bear on his household consumption work, looking at the way gendered experience is learned through processes of decision making and consumption of food and clothing. He has recently published a textbook entitled Economies and Cultures: Foundation of Economic Anthropology, which brings the field up to date.

 

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Last Updated: April 04, 2004
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