Land-use change

In my dissertation I applied a mixed-methods approach, using remote sensing and GIS, along with field work and interviews of farmers, to develop a spatially-explicit land-use change model for the southern Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. Modeling future land use change has been one of the central concerns of the global-change research community because changes in local and regional land use impact both biogeochemical cycles that sustain the biosphere and human-environment interactions locally and regionally. This study pushed the frontiers of land-use change modeling through the use of remotely sensed data and GIS, and demonstrated the possibilities of integrative modeling. It showed that valuable insights can be gained by combining field-based regional assessments of change with modeling and mapping sciences. Inspired by my research, Clark Labs developed several new analytical capabilities within the Idrisi® software in the late 1990s (Markov chain and cellular automata modeling tools). Results of my dissertation work and my connections with Mexican institutions laid the important foundation for a multi-million dollar research project: Southern Yucatan Peninsular Region Project (SYPR).  SYPR has been funded by NASA for the past 13 years, yielding numerous research papers that have contributed to the field of land-change science/GI-Science. As the project’s postdoctoral researcher in 1998-1999 I directed the remote sensing and GIS portions of the project.