Batsto Village, Wharton State Forest, New Jersey
Focus Questions
Past:
How can we evaluate historic, human-caused environmental changes? Natural, social, and spatial history can be used to improve our understandings in landscape evolution, and make more informed decisions and practices for ecosystem restoration. I am interested in how we can evaluate and trace past human-caused environmental impacts/changes using historical GIS (HGIS), remote sensing, and maps, and the environmental humanities in conjuncture with traditional paleoecological methods as a way to observe legacy effects and biodiversity changes in through time in landscapes.
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Present:
How are current land-use/cover patterns affecting ecosystem/landscape function? Land-use/cover changes have numerous effects on soil and water chemistry. I am interested in how changes in land-use/cover and in floral biodiversity impact soils and water (bio)-geochemistry and services through runoff of metal contaminants, nutrients, and other anthropogenic pollutants, and from changes to erosion patterns. I am also interested in understanding how local soil and water quality impacts travel though landscapes, and how they can lead to regional-scale changes in ecosystem processes and services.
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Future:
How can environmental changes be mitigated, and systems be restored for a more resilient future? Policy at different scales play an important part in mitigating the impacts caused by land-use/cover changes (specifically, landscape homogenization and fragmentation), and in shaping how restoration practices fix, balance, and maintain ecosystem functions and services. I am interested in how current land management strategies (in terms of both theory and practice) support or hinder ecosystem function, biodiversity, services, and heterogeneity in the long-term, as well as exploring new ways to implement restoration practices for greater ecosystem resiliency and sustainability.
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My (very brief and very simplified) view on the stressors affecting environments (used here to define a modified system). Broadly, natural stressors (such as, non-discretely, biota, geology, and climate/geography) interact with human (such as, non-discretely, as land-use, degradation, and policy) to shape the environment. This idea can be applied at different time scales to examine landscape evolution.
Representative Research
Landscape Changes in the New Jersey Pine Barrens
from Historic Human Use
September 2019 - present
from Historic Human Use
September 2019 - present