CAREER: Land-Use and Land-Cover Change Impact on Biodiversity and Indigenous Peoples' Livelihoods

This CAREER award examines the drivers of fine-scale land-use and land-cover change and the impacts of these changes on biodiversity, ecosystem services and indigenous communities. Current methods to analyze biodiversity and ecosystem services use costly remotely sensed data at the spatial resolution of cities and urban centers that are not sufficient for analysis at a local scale. Working with Indigenous communities, this project develops novel remote sensing methods using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to collect data at finer spatial and temporal resolutions that enable the analysis of local land change processes while the changes are occurring. This project's use of co-production of knowledge of land-use and land-cover change identifies the processes that trigger land-use change and thereby makes a significant contribution to research on scaling up methods that inform sustainable global economic processes. The tightly integrated research and education plans coupled with a summer institute broaden participation of underrepresented students and provides exceptional training in STEM research methods. As land change scientists extend models for understanding the implications of change processes, it is essential to know how, when, and where the impacts of global level processes are manifested at local scales. To address these needs, this project catalogs change occurring at the local level using geospatial information technologies, including drones, and evaluates what forces drive change at the local level. Evaluation of local change processes will be completed in five different physical environments to determine whether and how policymakers respond to global-level drivers of change. This research fills a gap in the understanding of how local-level biodiversity, ecosystem services availability, and indigenous peoples' livelihood practices are shaped by forces located far from urban centers. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.