Nicholas R. Malizia,
Class of 2005 |
Did Climate Change Do In the Maya?
Nicholas R. Malizia (Class of 2005) is undertaking contemporary research that may help solve an "ancient" problem: What were the factors that led to the collapse the Classic Maya civilization of Yucatán. Nick is working with NDVI data to determine if contemporary deforestation in the southern Yucatán is causing the regional climate to desiccate. This research, which will move him into a 5th-year MA program, is critical today because of the spread of smallholder farmers in the region whose need to cut forests may have the unintended consequence of reducing rainfall required to cultivate and maintain sufficient water during the long dry season. Interestingly, these dynamics are the same that confronted the ancient Maya of the region, who also deforested on a large scale before collapsing about 1000 years ago. Nick joins Clark's SYPR Project (research in Yucatán) after working on various sophisticated GIS-mapping metrics as a Clark's HERO Fellow, tutored by Gil Pontius, and working on central Massachusetts forests a Harvard Forest Fellow.
Nick ascending
a Mayan pyramid |
Nick discovered geography by winning a Thoreau Scholarship to study environment problems which he combined with a Presidential Scholarship to select Clark University as his institution of study. He then followed Rugg's high B.A.-degree ranking of the School of Geography (#1) to the environmental and GIScience tracts of the program.
Nick is from Hudson, MA. He is a Phi Beta Kappa and the 2004 recipient of Clark's Jefferson Prize,
and the 2005 Vouras Award, award for outstanding scholarship. He was selected as a GIScience 2004 Fellow (ESRI) and as the recipient of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society Scholarship Award (American Congress on Surveying and Mapping, 2005). He defended his honors thesis in geography during his junior year of study and will graduate a semester early to enter Clark's GIS-M.A. 5th year program.
Publications
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore, Anna J Versluis and Nicholas R. Malizia. 2006.
Visualizing certainty of extrapolations from models of land change. Landscape
Ecology 21(7) p.1151-1166.
Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore and Nicholas R Malizia. 2004. Effect of category
aggregation on map comparison. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3234 p.251-268.
in M J Egenhofer, C Freska, and H J Miller (eds): GIScience 2004.