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Geographer Bill Turner and economist Jackie Geoghegan teamed up to examine the impact of changing land use in Mexico's Southern Yucatán. Melissa Floyd '01, working with Turner and several graduate students, developed a method to classify protected land based on levels of biodiversity. |
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Land-Cover and Land-Use Change in the Southern Yucatán Peninsular Region Project (LCLUC-SYPR)
Professors Bill Turner (geography), Jackie Geoghegan (economics) and several graduate
students at Clark are conducting research in support of the Land-Cover
and Land-Use Change in the Southern Yucatán Peninsular Region
Project. The project uses remotely sensed imagery and spatially explicit probability
approaches for modeling and projecting deforestation and land conversion in this region of
Mexico.
LCLUC-SYPR is a joint endeavor of the George Perkins Marsh Institute at Clark University, Harvard
Forest at Harvard University, and El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR), Mexico.
- Click here to see a Power Point
presentation describing the project
- Click here to see a Power Point
presentation explaining use of remotely sensed imagery
Below is the project overview presented on the LCLUC-SYPR web site:
This project has several integrative goals central to understanding and monitoring
deforestation and land-use intensification in Yucatán specifically and for modeling and
projecting LCLUC in general. The project uses that study of LCLUC in the former
old-growth, tropical forests at the base of the peninsula to determine the trajectories of
change for longer-term monitoring and assessment there and to develop new LCLUC models of
change linking remotely sensed imagery directly to socioeconomic factors that drive land
management decisions. A fuller description of this project may
be found here.
The project integrates two, hitherto discrete, modeling approaches, attaching each to
ecological studies of land-cover change. The first approach "socializing the
pixel", draws on land-cover analysis from TM (and MSS) data to develop empirical
diagnostic (Markov chain) models for projecting near-term cover change in the region. The
second approach "pixelizing the social" employs empirical-theoretical
(econometric) models of land managers in the region. A major aim is to compare the
sensitivity and robustness of the approaches and merge them for scenario assessments. The
subsequent projections not only assess use-cover change, but the impacts of these changes
on biodiversity, productivity and biomass, and ecological structure and function.
The project provides a way of linking social, natural, and policy science interests to
serve the LCLUC, global change, and sustainability communities. It is undertaken by such
units: social scientists and remote sensing/GIS specialist at GPMI; ecologists at Harvard
Forests; and social and natural science researchers and planners at ECOSUR-Chetumal.
Participating current geography graduate students:
Rinku Roy Chowdhury: Landscape
ecology and institutions of conservation in the southern Yucatan peninsular region .
Eric Keys: Chile cultivation and
forest preservation in the Southern Yucatan Peninsular Region.
Steven Manson: Integrated
assessment and projection of land use/land cover change in the southern Yucatan peninsular
region of Mexico.
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Additional Resources
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Black rectangle indicates area of Professor Turner's research.
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Detail of study area. Enlarge.
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1987 land cover map created from satellite imagery. Enlarge.
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1997 land cover map created from satellite imagery. Enlarge.
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