Megan Cattau, DeFries Lab and E3B Ph.D. student, recently received a grant from the United States-Indonesia Society (USINDO) to support research for the fire probability modeling chapter of her thesis. In this chapter, she will evaluate the causes of large-scale, detrimental peatland fires in Indonesia. Megan is working in Indonesia this year, on her Fulbright.
Ruth DeFries has been teaching a class with fellow E3B Professor Kevin Griffin – Ecological and Social Systems for Sustainable Development. They challenged their students to prepare a “sustainable” meal. Click here to see how things turned out!.
Krithi Karanth, DeFries Lab Alumna, and Ruth DeFries are co-authors on a paper that has been receiving a lot of attention in the Indian press (Sept. 23, 2013). The article, “Living with Wildlife and Mitigating Conflicts Around Three Indian Protected Areas”, published in Environmental Management September 2013 LINKED HERE, with co-authors, Lisa Naughton-Treves and Arjun M. Gopalaswamy, looks at the economic toll that human-wildlife conflict takes on communities living and working near Protected Areas. Interesting coverage appears in The Hindu (please click here), FIRSTPOST.India (here) and The New Indian Express (here).
Meha Jain, E3B doctoral student working with Ruth DeFries and Shahid Naeem, posted a blog and video on the National Geographic site about her work in India — “Indian Farmers Cope With Climate Change and Falling Water Tables”. Meha’s work is sponsored in part by the National Geographic Society as part of the Young Explorer program. Please click here.
Matt Fagan and Ruth DeFries are lead authors on a paper in Environmental Research Letters “Land cover dynamics following a deforestation ban in northern Costa Rica”. The work assessed whether deforestation for conversion to pasture and cropland decreased in the lowlands of northern Costa Rica following the 1996 ban on forest clearing, despite a tripling of area under pineapple cultivation in the last decade. Results suggest that deforestation bans may protect mature forests better than older forest regrowth and may restrict clearing for large-scale crops more effectively than clearing for pasture. See the paper here.
The Council of the Association of American Geographers has appointed E3B Postdoctoral Research Scientist Giovani Graziosi to the International Research and Scholarly Exchange Committee for a period of 3 years, 2013-16. The formal charge of this advisory committee is to encourage participation of geographers in interdisciplinary conferences and in meetings dealing with international issues.
Meha Jain, E3B Ph.D. student, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant. Her thesis is entitled, The Impacts of Farmer Adaptation to Climate Variability on Groundwater Salinity and Soil Health in Gujarat, India
Ruth DeFries, and colleagues, including Maria Uriarte, E3B Professor and DGS, Marcia Macedo, DeFries Lab Alum, have work featured in The Phil Trans B issue on ‘Ecology, economy, and management of an agro-industrial frontier landscape in the southeast Amazon. Please click here to see more. Mongabay, a popular environmental science and conservation news site, has a interesting bit of coverage. Please click here
Meha Jain, Pinki Mondal, Ruth S. DeFries, Christopher Small, and Gillian L. Galford, (former DeFries lab Post-doctoral fellow) have a new paper. “Mapping cropping intensity of smallholder farms: A comparison of methods using multiple sensors” Remote Sensing of Environment, Volume 134, July 2013, Pages 210–223 please click here
Megan Cattau, is co-author on a paper on lions in Mozambique Jacobson, A. P., Cattau, M. E., Riggio, J. S., Petracca, L.S., and Fedak, D. A. 2013. Distribution and abundance of lions in northwest Tete Province, Mozambique. Tropical Conservation Science Vol. 6(1):87-107. Click here to read more.
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