National Academies Press: OpenBook

Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements (2014)

Chapter: Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies

« Previous: Appendix B: Online Questionnaire
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18385.
×

C

Committee and Staff Biographies

Committee Members

DANIEL G. BROWN (Chair) is a professor in the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on land use and land cover dynamics and makes use of multiple methods, including geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, digital terrain analysis, ecological mapping, social surveys and statistics, and computer simulation. Specific projects focus on the interacting social and ecological aspects of land use and cover change in rural and periurban environments, land use in climate vulnerability and adaptation, and spatial and social effects on health. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and member of the Association of American Geographers, the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, and the International Association for Landscape Ecology. He has written numerous peer-reviewed articles and books. Dr. Brown is also a current recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation and NASA. He is the chair of the U.S. Carbon Cycle Scientific Steering Group and on the board of the Community Systems Foundation. Dr. Brown has served as a member of the National Research Council on the Panel on Human Health and Security and the Space Studies Board. Dr. Brown received a B.A. in geoenvironmental studies from Shippensburg University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

LAWRENCE E. BAND is a Voit Gilmore Distinguished Professor in the School of Geography and the Director of the Institute for the Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research primarily focuses on the structure, function, and dynamics of watersheds with an emphasis on the quantity

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18385.
×

and quality of surface water, and ecosystem cycling of carbon and nutrients. Dr. Band is currently working in a range of watersheds within forested, agricultural, and urban environments encompassing a set of Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites (Baltimore Ecosystem Study and Coweeta), as well as other watersheds in North Carolina. He is a member of the Association of American Geographers, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation, the Water Resources Research Institute of North Carolina, the Duke Energy Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Forest Service. He has published numerous articles and technical reports. Dr. Band received a B.A. in geography from State University of New York at Buffalo and an M.A. and Ph.D. in geography from University of California at Los Angeles.

KATHLEEN GREEN is the president of Kass Green and Associates, where she consults on geospatial strategy, technology, and policy issues to private, educational, and public organizations and the past President of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS). Ms. Green is former president of both Space Imaging Solutions and Pacific Meridian Resources, a geospatial services company she cofounded in 1988 and sold to Space Imaging in 2000. Ms. Green has given several hundred research presentations throughout the world at various conferences and has published articles in numerous journals. Her scientific service includes current membership on the National Geospatial Advisory Committee, past membership on three National Research Council panels for the National Academy of Sciences, authorship of several chapters of books, and coauthoring the textbook Assessing the Accuracy of Remotely Sensed Data. She is a 2011 ASPRS Fellow Award winner. Ms. Green received her B.S. degree in forestry from the University of California at Berkeley, her M.S. degree in resource policy and management from the University of Michigan, and advanced to Ph.D. candidacy at the University of California at Berkeley.

ELENA G. IRWIN is a professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at Ohio State University. Her research interests focus on land use economics and policy, urban spatial structure, and coupled human-natural systems. Her work includes the development of econometric and simulation-based spatial models of urbanization to examine the influence of policies on urbanization patterns and impacts on ecosystem services. Other work includes the integration of urban and agricultural land use models with hydrodynamic watershed models to study the impacts of landowner and household decision making on water quality outcomes. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Journal of Economic Geography, Annual Review of Resource Economics, and the Journal of Regional Science.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18385.
×

She is the 2008 recipient of the North American Regional Science Council’s Hewings Award for distinguished young scholars in regional science and corecipient of the 2009 Sustainability Science Award from the Ecological Society of America. She received a B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in German and History (1988) and a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of Maryland (1998).

ERIC F. LAMBIN (NAS) is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Louvain, Belgium, and the George and Setsuko Ishiyama Provostial Professorship at the Schools of Earth Sciences and Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Dr. Lambin has been a leader in the international development of land change science. He has developed novel methods to detect land change at subcontinental and high-temporal resolutions, demonstrated the causal dynamics for tropical deforestation and desertification, and explicated the conditions for transitioning to sustainable land uses. He leads a research team that is involved in several international scientific projects on human-environment interactions in different parts of the world. These projects combine remote sensing, socioeconomic data, and spatial models to better understand and predict terrestrial ecosystem dynamics and their impacts. Dr. Lambin was the Chair of the international scientific project Land Use and Land Cover Change (IHDP/IGBP) from 1999 to 2005. He also contributed to the United Nations program Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. He is consulted by international organizations on issues related to tropical deforestation, desertification, the potential role of tropical forests in mitigating climate change, and environmental impacts of biofuels. Dr. Lambin was awarded the 2009 Francqui prize, the most prestigious scientific prize in Belgium, and has published numerous scientific papers and two broad audience books. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Lambin received an M.S. and Ph.D. in geography from the University of Louvain, Belgium.

ATUL JAIN is a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois. Dr. Jain’s research focuses on understanding how interactions among the climate system alter the carbon cycle, and providing useful projections of future changes in global carbon and resultant future climate change. His research goal is to provide the required scientific understanding about how the components of Earth’s climate system interact; it is motivated by the practical and pressing issue of human-induced climate change. Dr. Jain has won numerous awards and honors, including the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Award. He has served as a lead and contributing author for major assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He is the author of over 100 scientific articles, including highly cited articles in Nature and Science, most relating to global climate change as affected by both human activities and natural phenomena. He also directs a number of research projects primarily oriented toward improving our understanding of the impacts

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18385.
×

that man-made and natural trace gases may be having on the Earth’s climate. Dr. Jain received a Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences from the Indian Institute of Technology.

ROBERT G. PONTIUS, JR., is a professor in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University, where he has advised over 100 theses since 1998. His research and publications focus on geographic information science, land change science, spatial statistics, ecological modeling, and coupled human & natural systems. Dr. Pontius has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed journal articles, has reviewed papers for more than 80 different journals, and is on the editorial board of 10 journals. Most of his grants derive from the US National Science Foundation’s Long Term Ecological Research network, which won the American Institute of Biological Sciences Distinguished Scientist Award. Dr. Pontius earned a Bachelors of Science in Mathematics from University of Pittsburgh, a Masters of Applied Statistics from The Ohio State University, and a Doctorate in Environmental Science from the State University of New York.

KAREN C. SETO is a professor of Geography and Urbanization at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. Her research focuses on the human transformation of land and the links between urbanization, global change, and sustainability. She specializes in understanding urbanization dynamics, forecasting urban growth, and examining the environmental consequences of land-use change and urban expansion. She is an expert in satellite remote sensing analysis and has pioneered methods to reconstruct historical land-use and to develop empirical models to explain and forecast the expansion of urban areas. Her geographic regions of specialization are China and India, where she has conducted urbanization research for more than fifteen years. Dr. Seto is Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Coordinating Lead Author for the Cities and Biodiversity Outlook of the UN Convention on Biodiversity, and Co-Chair of the IHDP Urbanization and Global Environmental Change Project. She is also a member of the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) Committee to Advise the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the NRC Geographical Sciences Committee, and the U.S. Carbon Cycle Scientific Steering Group. Professor Seto is a recipient of a NASA New Investigator Program Award, a NSF CAREER Award, and a National Geographic Research Grant. She was named an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow in 2009. Dr. Seto received an M.A. in international relations and resource and environmental management, and a Ph.D. in geography from Boston University.

B. L. TURNER II (NAS) is the Gilbert F. White Professor of Environment and Society in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. His research focuses on the study of human-environment relationships, distant past to present. Dr. Turner examines these relationships in the use of land and resources by the ancient Maya civili-

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18385.
×

zation in the Yucatán Peninsula region, the intensification of land use among contemporary smallholders in the tropics, land use cover change as part of global environmental change, foremost tropical deforestation, and the consequences of environmental tradeoffs resulting from the configuration of landscapes. He has contributed journal articles to the Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Ecological Applications, and many other publications. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Turner has served in several editorial positions, including the Editorial Board for Annals of the Association of American Geographers and Regional Environmental Science, and is an Associate Editor of PNAS. Dr. Turner received B.A. and M.A. degrees in geography from the University of Austin at Texas and a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

PETER H. VERBURG is a Professor of Environmental Spatial Analysis and head of the Department of Spatial Analysis and Decision Support at the Institute for Environmental Studies at VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He specializes in spatial analysis and simulation of human-environment interactions, with emphasis on land use and land cover change, ecosystem services, and scenario studies. Dr. Verburg is the developer of the CLUE model (the Conversion of Land Use and its Effects), which is currently used by more than 100 institutions worldwide for simulation for land use change scenarios and ex ante assessment of land use related policies. He chair of the scientific steering committee of the Global Land Project of International Human Dimensions Program on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and will lead the transition of this project into the new ‘Future Earth’ initiative. Dr. Verburg is involved in a wide range of research projects varying from local scale studies of land use decision making, regional scale spatial modeling, multi-agent systems and ecosystem service mapping to the development of novel global-scale land system change models. In 2012 Dr. Verburg was awarded an ERC independent researcher grant by the European Union. Dr. Verburg received both an M.S. in physical geography and a Ph.D. in land use modeling from Wageningen University, the Netherlands.

National Academies Staff

MARK D. LANGE (Study Director) is a program officer with the National Research Council’s Board on Earth Sciences and Resources and Director of the Geographical Sciences Committee. He is a geomorphologist with expertise in river and coastal processes, GIS, and science policy. He was previously a Tyler Environmental Fellow, a Merit Fellow, and a U.S. Congressional Fellow where he managed federal environment and natural resource policy for a member of Congress. His is the recipient of funding from the National Science Foundation,

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18385.
×

National Aeronautics and Space Administration, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Census Bureau, and U.S. Department of State. He is a member of the Association of American Geographers, the Commission on Coastal Systems of the International Geographical Union, the American Geophysical Union, and was U.S. representative to the 32nd International Geographical Congress. He holds a graduate certificate in geographic information sciences and a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Southern California.

NICHOLAS D. ROGERS is a financial and research associate with the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources, National Research Council. He received a B.A. in history, with a focus on the history of science and early American history, from Western Connecticut State University in 2004. He began working for the National Academies in 2006 and supports the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources on a wide range of areas from earth resources to geographical and mapping sciences.

JASON R. ORTEGO was a research associate with the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources at the National Academies until July of 2012. He received a B.A. in English from Louisiana State University in 2004 and an M.A. in international affairs from George Washington University in 2008. He began working for the National Academies in 2008 with the Board on Energy and Environmental Systems, and in 2009 he joined the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources.

ERIC J. EDKIN is a senior program assistant with the National Research Council’s Board on Earth Sciences and Resources. He began working for the National Academies in 2009 and has supported the board on a broad array of earth resource, geographic science, and mapping science projects.

CHANDA T. IJAMES was a senior program assistant with the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources at the National Academies. She received a B.S. in psychology and a M.Ed. in instructional technology from the University of Maryland University College. She began working for the National Research Council Board on Earth Sciences and Resources in 2011.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18385.
×
Page 137
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18385.
×
Page 138
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18385.
×
Page 139
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18385.
×
Page 140
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18385.
×
Page 141
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Committee and Staff Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18385.
×
Page 142
Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements Get This Book
×
Buy Paperback | $42.00 Buy Ebook | $33.99
MyNAP members save 10% online.
Login or Register to save!
Download Free PDF

People are constantly changing the land surface through construction, agriculture, energy production, and other activities. Changes both in how land is used by people (land use) and in the vegetation, rock, buildings, and other physical material that cover the Earth's surface (land cover) can be described and future land change can be projected using land-change models (LCMs). LCMs are a key means for understanding how humans are reshaping the Earth's surface in the past and present, for forecasting future landscape conditions, and for developing policies to manage our use of resources and the environment at scales ranging from an individual parcel of land in a city to vast expanses of forests around the world.

Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements describes various LCM approaches, suggests guidance for their appropriate application, and makes recommendations to improve the integration of observation strategies into the models. This report provides a summary and evaluation of several modeling approaches, and their theoretical and empirical underpinnings, relative to complex land-change dynamics and processes, and identifies several opportunities for further advancing the science, data, and cyberinfrastructure involved in the LCM enterprise. Because of the numerous models available, the report focuses on describing the categories of approaches used along with selected examples, rather than providing a review of specific models. Additionally, because all modeling approaches have relative strengths and weaknesses, the report compares these relative to different purposes. Advancing Land Change Modeling's recommendations for assessment of future data and research needs will enable model outputs to better assist the science, policy, and decisionsupport communities.

  1. ×

    Welcome to OpenBook!

    You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

    Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

    No Thanks Take a Tour »
  2. ×

    Show this book's table of contents, where you can jump to any chapter by name.

    « Back Next »
  3. ×

    ...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

    « Back Next »
  4. ×

    Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

    « Back Next »
  5. ×

    Switch between the Original Pages, where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text.

    « Back Next »
  6. ×

    To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter.

    « Back Next »
  7. ×

    Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

    « Back Next »
  8. ×

    View our suggested citation for this chapter.

    « Back Next »
  9. ×

    Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

    « Back Next »
Stay Connected!