Highlight
Land use in NW Yunnan
IGERT trainees building yak exclosures in NW Yunnan
Achievement/Results
Students in geography (Jamon Van Den Hoek), botany (Michelle Haynes), and forest and wildlife ecology (Jodi Brandt) have joined forces to study land use and land use change in NW Yunnan. They have found two alarming trends: continued logging and shrub encroachment on alpine rangelands. While initially their research projects were not directly related, they are finding complementary research questions as they work in the field. Jamon is researching village-level impacts on deforestation rates, and Jodi and Michelle are collaborating on a project to look at the effects of fire history on shrub encroachment on alpine plant diversity. Combining the disciplines of landscape ecology and applied ethnobotany allows them to synthesize knowledge concerning 1) traditional land use practices, 2) patch scale community diversity trends, and 3) landscape-scale habitat heterogeneity and change.
Address Goals
In terms of discovery, they are combining multiple disciplinary approaches to understand the changing environment in one of the most biodiverse places on earth and providing information that can ultimately help to conserve it. In terms of learning, they are learning to work collaboratively with researchers in other disciplines to answer questions that are important for the long-term existence of humans in fragile landscapes. It is important to train scientists capable of asking, researching, and answering questions in a holistic, collaborative, and interdisciplinary fashion.
