January 3-8, 2002
Workshop Organizers: Jefferson Fox, Senior Fellow, East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii
Vinod Mishra, Fellow, East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii
Ronald R. Rindfuss, Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina
Stephen J. Walsh, Professor of Geography, University of North Carolina
Summary: We organized a workshop in Honolulu to address both theoretical
and practical issues involved in linking (and collecting) social science data from households
and communities with remotely sensed data to study land-use and land-cover change. In the past,
researchers have commonly used census-type data that are gathered at the household level,
aggregated up to some administrative boundary defined geographically and then linked this
aggregated data to land-cover data that were remotely sensed. In recent years, a number of
projects have begun to gather social science data at the household level and to link these
social science data to remotely sensed data. These projects have been independent of each
other and there has not been a careful review of the methods being used to actually link
people and pixels (the land parcels they use) as well as the associated challenges and
opportunities. This project will bring scientists from these projects together to produce
a publication that provides a state-of-the-art survey of methodology and issues for linking
social science data from households with remotely sensed data.
This project is designed not only to enhance the knowledge of the scientific community regarding
the interaction between human and natural systems, but also to provide decision makers with information
and tools to enable them to better understand human impacts on land-use/cover change and to predict
environmental responses to such changes. Understanding these processes is critical if policy makers
and planners are to create the conditions that promote environmentally sound and sustainable development.
More specifically, the proposed workshop will lead to a better understanding of methods of analyzing human
impacts on land-use changes and of how these changes influence land cover over time, and will lead to one
or more better informed research projects.
The eight invited projects completed and submitted their papers. The papers were forwarded
to three specialists (remote sensing, social sciences, and ecology) for review. The reviewers were invited
to the workshop to serve as discussants and each submitted and presented a response paper with perspectives
from their respective fields. In addition, two funding representatives, one from NASA's Land Cover Land Use
Change Program, and a second from the National Institute of Child Health
and Human Development, were invited, attended and provided their comments on the projects and the future of
population-environment research from a funding perspective. Please click on the links below
for further details regarding the workshop.
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