George Perkins Marsh Institute

Robert Gilmore Pontius, Jr.
Research Associate Professor

The George Perkins Marsh Institute
Clark University
Worcester, MA 01610-1477
508.793.7761 phone
email: rpontius@clarku.edu

Curriculum Vitae
Faculty Page

Current Research Interests

• NSF-funded research to model how economic activity affects land-use change and hence nutrient flows in the Long Term Ecological Research site in Ipswich, Massachusetts.


• Development and use of GEOMOD2 to simulate land-use change in Costa Rica and two locations in India in order to examine how deforestation threatens biodiversity.


• Collaboration with Oxfam America to use GIS both to secure land rights for indigenous people in the Amazon and to carry out joint implementation projects to abate carbon dioxide emissions.


• Training of middle and high school teachers and students to use GIS for community development projects in order to address gang violence and urban pollution.

Selected Publications

Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore, Wideke Boersma, Jean-Christophe Castella, Keith Clarke, Ton de Nijs, Charles Dietzel, Zengqiang Duan, Eric Fotsing, Noah Goldstein, Kasper Kok, Eric Koomen, Christopher D. Lippitt, William McConnell, Alias Mohd Sood, Bryan Pijanowski, Snehal Pithadia, Sean Sweeney, Tran Ngoc Trung, A. Tom Veldkamp, and Peter H. Verburg. 2008. Comparing the input, output, and validation maps for several models of land change. Annals of Regional Science 42 no. 1: 11-47.

Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore, Olufunmilayo Thontteh and Hao Chen. 2008. Components of information for multiple resolution comparison between maps that share a real variable. Environmental and Ecological Statistics 15 no. 2: 111-142.

Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore, Robert Walker, Robert Yao-Kumah, Eugeino Arima, Stephen Aldrich, Marcellus Caldas and Dante Vergara. 2007. Accuracy assessment for a simulation model of Amazonian deforestation. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97 no. 4: 677-695.

Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore, Anna J Versluis and Nicholas R Malizia. 2006. Visualizing certainty of extrapolations from models of land change. Landscape Ecology 21 no.7: 1151-1166.

Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore and Christopher D. Lippitt. 2006. Can error explain map differences over time? Cartography and Geographic Information Science 33 no. 2: 159-171.

Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore and Mang Lung Cheuk. 2006. A generalized cross-tabulation matrix to compare soft-classified maps at multiple resolutions. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 20 no. 1: 1-30.

Pontius, Gil R., Jr., and J. Malanson. 2005. Comparison of the structure and accuracy of two land change models. International Journal of Geographical Information Science. 19 no. 2: 243-265.

Pontius Jr, Robert Gilmore and J. Spencer. 2005. Uncertainty in extrapolations of predictive land change models. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 32: 211-230.