News
Ruth DeFries, and colleagues, including Maria Uriarte, E3B Professor and DGS, Marcia Macedo, DeFries Lab Alum, have work featured in The Phil Trans B issue on 'Ecology, economy, and management of an agro-industrial frontier landscape in the southeast Amazon. Please click here to see more.
Meha Jain, Pinki Mondal, Ruth S. DeFries, Christopher Small, and Gillian L. Galford, (former DeFries lab Post-doctoral fellow) have a new paper about to be published. "Mapping cropping intensity of smallholder farms: A comparison of methods using multiple sensors" Remote Sensing of Environment, Volume 134, July 2013, Pages 210–223 please click here
Megan Cattau, is co-author on a paper on lions in Mozambique Jacobson, A. P., Cattau, M. E., Riggio, J. S., Petracca, L.S., and Fedak, D. A. 2013. Distribution and abundance of lions in northwest Tete Province, Mozambique. Tropical Conservation Science Vol. 6(1):87-107. Click here to read more.
Ruth DeFries and Maria Uriarte are two of the authors on a paper selected by Nature Geoscience as one of their "ten favourite papers" in a web focus that celebrates the fifth anniversary of the journal linked here "Deforestation driven by urban population growth and agricultural trade in the twenty-first century" by Ruth S. DeFries, Thomas Rudel, Maria Uriarte & Matthew Hansen
Ruth DeFries and Victor Gutierrez-Velez were part of an interdisciplinary team at Columbia University's Earth Institute that published a paper "Depopulation of rural landscapes exacerbates fire activity in the western Amazon" in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The lead author of the paper is María Uriarte. Please see the Earth Institute's link HERE. The other authors of the study are Miguel Pinedo-Vaquez, also of Columbia's Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology; Katia Fernandes and Walter Baethgen, from Columbia's International Research Institute for Climate and Society; and Christine Padoch, of the New York Botanical Garden. Padoch and Pinedo-Vaquez are also associated with the Center for International Forestry Research. Additional international press attention can be read HERE ClimateWire and here Natureza el Globo and here UOL news and here Huffington Post
Tien Ming Lee has co-authored a paper in American Naturalist entitled "Positive Relationships between Association Strength and Phenotypic Similarity Characterize the Assembly of Mixed-Species Bird Flocks Worldwide" The findings highlight "the need to consider positive interactions along with competition when seeking to explain community assembly" Please see the link to the paper HERE
Ruth DeFries and Krithi Karanth have had a paper accepted for publication in PLoS entitled "Assessing Patterns of Human-Wildlife Conflicts and Compensation Around a Central Indian Protected Area"
Karanth, K., Gopalaswamy, A., DeFries, R., and Ballal, N. (2012). "Assessing patterns of human-wildlife conflicts and compensation around a Central Indian protected area." PLos One 7(12): e50433. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0050433
Victor Gutierrez-Velez and Ruth DeFries have had a paper accepted for publication in Remote Sensing of Environment entitled "Annual multi‐resolution detection of land cover conversion to oil palm in the Peruvian Amazon"
Gutierrez-Velez, V. and R. DeFries (2013). "Annual multi-resolution detection of land cover conversion to oil palm in the Peruvian Amazon." Remote Sensing of Environment 129: 154-167.
Ruth DeFries has been selected by The Ecological Society of America in their new Fellows program which aims to recognize and honor member contributions to the field of ecology. "The Fellows and Early Career Fellows programs will recognize the many ways in which our members contribute to ecological research and discovery, communication, education and pedagogy, and to management and policy," said ESA President Scott Collins. The complete list of first Fellows can be found on the Society´s webpage. Fellows are elected for life.
The research of Ruth DeFries, E3B Chair, and former Post-doc, Krithi Karanth -now Ramanujan Fellow and executive Director, Centre for Wildlife Studies (India) - is figuring prominently in the Supreme Court of India's potential ban on nature tourism in the vicinity of tiger reserves. Please see the New York Times India Ink blog HERE, and a posting on the site LiveMint HERE.
Miriam Marlier, a Ph.D. student, is coauthor of a paper with E3B Chair Ruth DeFries, just published in Nature Climate Change (August, 2012). The paper details health risks from landscape fire emissions in southeast Asia. Please click here for the paper, and click here for a news piece about the paper.
Victor Gutierrez-Velez, a Ph.D. student, made an oral presentation at the 49th Annual meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation in Bonito, Brazil, in June 2012. The title of his presentation was High-yield oil palm expansion spares land at the expense of forests. Victor made another oral presentation at the Seminário Clima, Dinâmica e Biodiversidade de Florestas Amazônicas. Embrapa - INPE in Belem, Brazil, in June 2012, entitled Expansión de palma en países amazónicos y lecciones de la experiencia en el sudeste asiático. Victor recently had a paper accepted by Environmental Conservation . BBC News had a media note on Victor's work in May, see here.
Megan Cattau, a Ph.D. student, has received a Fulbright Student Research Award and presented at the 97th Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America in August. Her talk was titled The Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) in a vanishing peatswamp forest: Increasing habitat connectivity in the former Mega Rice Project, Indonesia
Elsa Ordway , an M.A. student, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
Ming Lee , a postdoctoral fellow, has recently co-authored a short paper with Lian Pin Koh on "Sensible consumerism for environmental sustainability". This paper is part of a special issue: advancing environmental conservation: essays in honor of Navjot Sodhi. Navjot was a tropical conservation scientist, and dear mentor and friend of Ming. Please click here for Ming's article.