The Nelson Institute Blog

“Greening the World,” a feature article in U.S. News & World Reports’ just-published annual America’s Best Graduate Schools issue, extensively quotes Nelson Institute professor Jonathan Foley and cites several of the institute’s students and alumni as examples of the growing number pursuing advanced degrees in sustainability science or sustainable development. Read the article.

Nelson Institute associate professor Nancy Mathews seeks a discussion of UW-Madison’s “core values and aspirations for the future” as she heads up the university’s once-a-decade reaccreditation effort. See news release.

Jack Williams (geography/environmental studies) will be featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered” this afternoon (not sure what time - check that link later for an online version if you’re not near a radio) [Update: Listen to the segment here.]
and on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams tonight. He is being interviewed about his work with climate change. Read the related news release, which also quotes our Center Climatic Research’s John Kutzbach.

The March-April issue of Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, profiles John Francis, who earned his Ph.D. from the Nelson Institute in 1991. See article. The Los Angeles Times featured Francis in a story of its own earlier this year, as previously noted in this blog.

On Monday, April 16, there will be 72 public hearings, one in each county starting at 7:00 p.m. [in Dane County, at the Alliant Energy Center] where residents interested with natural resources management have an opportunity to provide their input. . . on proposed fishing and hunting rule changes.

Information on the issues to be discussed at the meeting, which is hosted by the Wisconsin DNR and the Wisconsin Conservation Congress, is available at the DNR Spring Hearings page.

Two new UW-Madison faculty members will join the Nelson Institute and its Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) in August: Annemarie Schneider and Mutlu Ozdogan. Schneider will work full time here, while Ozdogan will split his time equally with the Department of Forest Ecology and Management.

“Both hires will add tremendous expertise in SAGE’s mission of understanding the links between global environmental change, natural resources, and human well being,” says center director Jon Foley.

Schneider is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Institute for Computational Earth System Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She earned her B.S. in geography from UW-Madison and her M.A. and Ph.D. in geography and environmental science from Boston University. Her research interests include land cover change, urban geography, the urban environment, and the human dimensions of global environmental change.

Schneider’s work focuses on transforming the study of urban areas from local investigation to one of comparative analysis in support of global change research. She leads the 40 Cities Project, an effort to compare and contrast the rates, patterns, and socioeconomic drivers of land use change in a global cross-section of metropolitan areas. Her work also includes mapping urban land-surface properties globally using a fusion of remote sensing data types to help better model the impacts of urbanization on the regional and global environment. Grants from NASA, the National Academy of Sciences, and the World Bank have funded her research.

Ozdogan is a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. He has a B.Sc. in geological engineering from Istanbul University in Turkey, an M.Sc. in geology from North Carolina State University, and an M.A. in environmental remote sensing and Ph.D. in geography and environment from Boston University.

His research focuses on land-use/land-cover conversion and climate change impacts on the global water and energy cycles and how they interact with ecosystem goods and services that are important to human well being. He is also interested in improving the information content of satellite observations through algorithm and model development.

While in Boston, Ozdogan worked at BU’s Center for Remote Sensing on projects related to water resource scarcity and satellite-assisted methods to search for additional water resources in the Middle East. He is currently developing a dataset on global irrigation extent with the help of satellite observations. This dataset, in conjunction with irrigation water use models, is used to assess irrigation feedback on climate and the sustainability of agricultural water resources that, by extension, affect global food security and human vulnerability. His research has been supported by grants from NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the governments of Oman and the United Arab Emirates.

Welcome, Annemarie and Mutlu!

By David Zaks for WorldChanging.com.

Rosamond Naylor is the Julie Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and is an Associate Professor (by courtesy) in Economics at Stanford University. Dr. Naylor’s research focuses on the policy and environmental implications of the global food system. She visited Madison last week as part of the Weston Global Distinguished Lecture series sponsored by the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment.

David Zaks: As reported by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, services such as crops, livestock and aquaculture have increased while many other services we depend on have decreased. How do we manage these trade-offs to provide both an adequate amount of food and services like clean air and fresh water?

Rosamond Naylor: The trade-off is inevitably there, but it doesn’t have to be as great as it is, and I think a lot of agriculturalists have promoted the development of crops and agriculture and aquaculture without really thinking about the external costs which are not paid by producers. Without an appreciation of how fundamentally important water is, the types of development path that we have been on have been fundamentally flawed. If the integration of ecosystem goods and services and agricultural development were improved, some of the implication of that would be to have agricultural systems that were much more water efficient. Agriculture is the biggest water user, because we use water recklessly without having to pay a price for it. Water use could be improved in virtually every system on the planet except for the very highly tuned drip irrigation systems that already exist, and then it is a matter of cost and incentive.
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Nelson Institute Social Studies Faculty Members:

The Genevieve Gorst Herfurth Award Committee encourages you to nominate your doctoral student(s) for the Genevieve Gorst Herfurth Award. The committee awards $600 to a doctoral student who has demonstrated outstanding research and scholarly writing accomplishments in the social studies while a graduate student at UW-Madison. One or two students may also be identified by the committee for honorable mention.

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I am happy to announce that Adrian Treves has accepted our offer to join the Nelson Institute as a tenure track assistant professor, effective March 29, 2007. Adrian’s strengths as an interdisciplinary researcher interested in both the behavioral ecology and conservation of carnivores in human-dominated systems and the human dimensions of wildlife conservation will bring new energy to this area in the Nelson Institute and will help to fill the gap created by Stan Temple’s and Tim Moermond’s retirements and Nancy Matthews’ temporary secondment to head up the re-accreditation process in the University. Welcome Adrian!

I am also pleased to announce that Lisa Naughton, who is currently chairing our graduate program in Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development (CBSD), will bring her energy and creativity to the Land Tenure Center, as its new director. Lisa plans to explore new directions for the Land Tenure Center, linking its rich history of scholarship on land and resource access in developing countries to the environmental science perspectives of CBSD. The Land Tenure Center recently received a USAID grant (”Translinks”), in collaboration with the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Earth Institute at Columbia University, to seed a Summer Institute for training students and professionals from developing countries in environmental governance and interdisciplinary methods. Lisa plans to make this, and collaboration with other international environmental NGOs, the center pieces for LTC. We are delighted that Lisa has taken on this challenge and welcome her expanded role in the Institute.

– Frances

Frances Westley this week announced her resignation as director of the Nelson Institute, effective June 30. See news release and a summary of accomplishments (in PowerPoint format) since January 2005, when she became director.