Spotlight Archive

Drs. Gaughan and Stevens, along with UofL graduate students, work with an interdisciplinary team to study how communities and their households, land use, and climate interact to create or mitigate vulnerability in the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Area of Southern Africa. The primary outcomes of this work makes important contributions to advancing the land system science field by conducting a comparison of land use/land cover change in the broader context of socio-ecological vulnerability for Africa’s largest transboundary conservation area.

Find out more about the project, including recent publications, here.

A new collaboration will bring together Geography and Geoscience and Biology faculty with foresters from Berea College. Drs.Rochner, Gaughan, Stevens, and Gunter will work with colleagues from UofL Biology and Berea College Forestry to examine the influence of controlled burning on forest biodiversity and productivity, local wind patterns, and more. Look for more information to come as fieldwork to collect initial sets of pre-burn data is underway.

Dr. Maegen Rochner was recently awarded funding from the Kentucky Academy of Science for her project titled: “Urban Dendrochronology and Anthropogenic Influences on Forests Across the Urban-Rural Gradient.” This research will use methods in dendrochronology to investigate tree growth and climate sensitivity, forest community structure, and potential natural and human influences across the urban-rural gradient in Louisville, Ky.