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Dr. Bob Walker joins the Department

Dr. Bob Walker has joined the Department in a joint position with the Center for Latin American Studies, and was previously a Professor at Michigan State University. Dr. Walker is a Human Geographer, with a PhD in Regional Science from the University of Pennsylvania, which places him on the quantitative side of the field, with strong training in statistics and economics. Thus, he considers himself a quantitative economic geographer. The topical focus of his research agenda has been on land cover change processes, especially tropical deforestation. His work has taken him away from conventional economic geographic themes, and at this point he could easily be described as a land change scientist, with strong interest in field ethnography. Nevertheless, his commitment to economic geography is strong, and his research always brings a spatial and human geographic! focus to bear on processes of environmental change. His most characteristic work to date integrates remote sensing, spatial statistics, and ethnographic field data into studies of land cover change processes. Since the early 1990s, he has led a number of field activities in the Amazon basin, studying the land use decisions of households, the spatial-processes of road building, and, most recently, the impacts of land reform on tropical forests. In addition to this work, he maintain interests in classical land use theory, as well as spatial statistics. Although working primarily at the household level in the tropical forests of Brazil, he is presently scaling up in order to take a political ecological view of environmental change in Amazônia and elsewhere. With NASA funding, he is modeling land-climate interactions at a basin-scale in the Amazon, and with NSF funding he is addressing the globalization of the Amazon’s cattle economy.