April 3rd | 3:30PM - 4:30 PM | BPB 130
Speaker: Dr. Susan Kotikot, Penn State University
Title: Investigating Climate and Human Induced Landscape Change for Improving Social-ecological System Resilience
Abstract: Globally, landscapes are threatened by climate extremes and associated environmental stressors along with human activities that collectively influence the structure and functioning of multifunctional landscapes in unknown ways. Given that these are the scales at which critical management decisions are made, place-based strategies are urgently needed that promote resilient and regenerative systems to support human and ecosystem health in a time of rapid change. The current research investigated landscape dynamics of the agropastoral landscape of Narok, Kenya – as a case study site, focusing on the nature and impacts of climate induced changes in rainfall patterns, and historical legacies of land policies to understand how the resultant landscape supports ecosystem services abundance and access to address local vulnerability.
Bio: Susan Kotikot is a postdoctoral scholar in the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State, working on land use modeling to explore agropastoral landscape dynamics. Her research investigates how multifunctional landscapes are shaped by interactions among climate variability, disturbances, and human activities. She explores spatial and temporal landscape dynamics to determine how the resultant landscape structure may intensify or diminish landscape regenerative capacity. She employs a range of methodologies, including multi-scalar remote sensing, Geospatial Information Science, spatial statistics and mixed methods.
For more information, contact: Grace Bennett at grace.bennett@uconn.edu