The diversity of expertise and scientific approach among CASEL's faculty, students, and affiliates allows us to work on multiple concurrent projects. The projects listed here provide a sampling of the research conducted by CASEL associates.
Banner image: Lucy Miller (right) helps prepare açaí berries for pulp processing in Gurupá, Pará, Brazil. | Photo courtesy of Lucy Miller
The Amazon basin hosts locally and globally important environmental services, social-cultural diversity, and economic activities. Governing this region amid accelerated changes is a pressing challenge for Amazonian countries. While government programs are often more visible and certainly important, most sustainable forest and land use management initiatives are locally initiated.
Building upon long-term research of team members, the AGENTS project integrates geospatial analyses and participatory methodologies to assess non-state conservation efforts and challenges via stakeholder engagement, in-depth field research, modeling of land change and conservation, and participatory scenarios. The project is mapping where and how non-state actors sustainably use and conserve forests, agricultural systems, and ecosystems in social-ecologically diverse areas across the region. We will analyze 25 years of land use change in watersheds shared by communal, state, private, and protected lands to identify interactions and conservation patterns. We will define governance problems, research questions, analyze initial results, and draft scenarios in collaboration with diverse land users sharing common watersheds. Support: NSF-USA, FAPESP-Brazil, Vetenskapsrådet-Sweden, NOW-The Netherlands.
Project contact: Eduardo Brondízio
Modeling the ecohydrological interactions among land use change, climate variability, and forest condition in the Yadkin-Pee Dee River Basin: This project will synthesize research in hydrology, forest ecology, LULC (land-cover/land-use), and water resources systems to explain and predict the future vulnerability and susceptibility of freshwater supply systems under the climate change along the Mountain-Piedmont-Coastal Plain gradient in the southeastern U.S.
Project contact: Tae Hee Hwang
The integrated approach of this project seeks to understand sustainable food system development, from farm to fork, by studying the leverage points that can be used to build more resilient and sustainable food systems that support food justice, public health and well-being, sustain more livelihoods, and improve civic and community life.
More information: SFSS website
This project examines the impact of increased rural-urban circulation on rural livelihood change and young people's engagement with forest management in the Brazilian Amazon. Miller explores generational shifts in work preferences, rural identity, and community engagement to determine the implications of these changes on community-based conservation initiatives.
Project contact: Lucy Miller
How do poor citizens seek legal representation and navigate the legal system in Brazil? This project addresses this question by looking at collective action taken against the floods aggravated by climate change in Brazil’s urban Amazon. Drawing upon the scholarship of climate justice, Dias has conducted mixed-methods research on how individuals who endure climate hazards, as well as the lawyers who should serve them, recognize this issue as a matter of rights and responsibilities.
Project contact: Vitor Martins Dias
McDonell's project uses an emerging place-based quinoa from the Peruvian highlands, “Quinua Puneño,” as a case study to examine collective action in efforts to commercialize traditional products for global markets and the ways efforts to create place-based foods articulate with identity politics at multiple scales. The title for her dissertation research is After the Boom: The Politics of Race, Value, and Development in Peru’s Quinoa Bust.
Project contact: Emma McDonell
This project approaches the new Brazilian Forest Code, particularly the alternatives to landowner’s compliance with the law, either restoring the native vegetation cover within their properties or compensating its deficit to a different property. Massoca investigate how distinct landowners' cohorts make decisions in different socioeconomic contexts, as well as the effect of such decisions on land-cover at larger scales within the Amazon.
Project contact: Paulo Massoca
This project documents long-term changes in the ways humans modified and used land in the mountainous rural region of Quiechapa, Oaxaca, Mexico from the Classic to Postclassic Periods (A.D. 200-1521). Badillo's goal is to determine how political and economic transformations and conflict in neighboring urban areas affected rural land-use in southern Oaxaca.
Project contact: Alex Badillo
The Brazilian semiarid region has been subject to climate-based hazards, including numerous droughts and famines. It has been historically associated with social poverty. The federal government devised institutions to solve this social drama and combat drought impacts through strong financial support. In this context, public investments in water supply have legitimated social inequalities in the Caatinga Deciduous Forest, which has been directly managed by a large number of small farmers highly vulnerable to droughts. The main question of this research is: How has the conservation of a ecosystem deemed hostile, and held as the main cause of social problems, been framed and disputed by different actors?
Project contact: Amanda Sousa Silvino
This project investigates the impact of the Brazilian government’s family cash transfer program, the Bolsa Família, on the diets and nutrition of mothers and adolescents residing in the rural Middle Solimões region. In particular, de Lima investigates the associations between management of the benefit by mothers in households with different food provisioning strategies and food intake.
Project contact: Ana de Lima
This project explores how farmers in the Everglades Agricultural Area have worked together and with regulators to reduce phosphorus enrichment, given that irrigation canals and subsurface water flows mix phosphorus levels together in the area’s shared drainage water. Thus, the phosphorus enrichment or reduction of one farm impacts the compliance of all farms. By exploring the institutional dimensions of water management—the combination of both formal regulations and informal codes of conduct—Yoder's research will contribute to understanding how regulatory monitoring and enforcement and farmer collective action overcome the dilemma of water quality impairment.
Project contact: Landon Yoder
