I am a land-use scientist, interested in finding new ways to use satellite data in describing land-use processes, as opposed to land-cover change which is a more common way of using remote sensing data in land system science. My current work here focuses on developing metrics that describe processes of frontier expansion (e.g., fast vs. slow, progressing vs. leap-frogging, active vs. suspended) in the Gran Chaco. Once frontier processes are identified, I am using quasi-experimental methods to establish causality between these frontier processes and the factors that drive these processes. I work mostly at the eco-regional scale, harvesting entire satellite image archives and other large geospatial datasets.
Themes
Telecoupling of land use systems, Land change trade-offs for ecosystem services and biodiversity , Land use and conflict
A session on the impacts of armed conflicts on landscapes has been opened as part of the International Association for Landscape Ecology (IALE) World Congress 10-15 July 2023 in Nairobi, Kenya. Deadline for submission of abstract: 15 March 2023.
A new study published in Science finds that between 90 and 99 percent of all deforestation in the tropics is driven directly or indirectly by agriculture. Yet only half to two-thirds of this results in the expansion of active agricultural production on the deforested land.
A new paper in PNAS demonstrates an approach to identify homesteads of forest-dependent people and to track their resource base over 30 years across the entire South American Gran Chaco (1.1 million km2). The transferable and scalable methodology puts forest smallholders on the map and can help to uncover the land-use conflicts at play in many deforestation frontiers across the globe.
