2012 Spring Colloquium Series
All colloquia are held in Student Building 150 unless otherwise indicated. The colloquia start promptly at 4:00 pm. For the most up-to-date schedule and for contact information to meet with speakers, please email Susan White or phone: 812-855-6303.
Marc Simard (February 15, 2012)
Title: 3D mapping of forests from space
Abstract: To understand the role of forests in regulating Earth’s climate and maintaining biodiversity, it is critical to assess its geographical distribution, biomass and productivity. Rather than sending tens of thousands of undergraduate students (although some may be pleased) to measure height and biomass of forests globally, this can be achieved more efficiently and systematically through active remote sensing: LIght Detection And Ranging (Lidar) and RAdio Detection And Ranging (Radar). The airborne version of such sensors exists in many flavors, however there are very few active spaceborne systems that allow measurements of canopy height. New instruments will open a Pandora’s box for the terrestrial ecology and climate change science communities. In this presentation, I will discuss the potential and limitations of Lidar and Radar methodologies to map forest canopy height and biomass, and show examples of 3D mapping of forests at local and global scales.
Biography: Marc Simard is a Senior Scientist in JPL's Radar Science & Engineering Section. During the last 13 years, he led and managed several NASA sponsored research projects at JPL. In particular he was the PI of NASA Interdisciplinary Science Program managed by LCLUC (2004-2006) successfully developing methods to map coastal forests 3D structure. He is currenltly a NASA Principal Investigator for both the Terrestrial Ecology (TE) and the Land Cover Land Use Change (LCLUC) programs. His TE research focuses on the development of radar interferometry and lidar remote sensing methods to measure the 3D structure of vegetation and to estimate biomass and ecosystem productivity. The LCLUC research aims to assess the vulnerability of mangrove forests to anthropogenic activity and sea level change throughout the Americas. More info can be found at his research website.
Gabriel Filippelli (March 2, 2012)
Title: Determining Continued Exposure Pathways of Lead (Pb) Exposure to Urban Children
Abstract: While significant headway has been made over the past 50 years in understanding and reducing the sources and health risks of lead and lead poisoning, the incidence of lead poisoning remains shockingly high in urban regions of the US. At particular risk are poor people of color who inhabit the polluted centers of our older cities without the benefits of adequate nutrition, education, and access to health care. To provide a future with fewer environmental and health burdens related to lead, we need to adopt a completely different paradigm of the exposure pathway of children to lead, namely the understanding that the cause of chronic lead loading to urban youth is mostly their continued contact with dust derived from lead-enriched inner city soils. This soil acted as a highly efficient absorber of human-emitted lead over about 100 years of urban development, now returning that lead to the next generations of people unfortunate enough to be a member of the urban poor. This new paradigm, verified by our recent research in deciphering the causes of a seasonal swings in children’s blood lead levels, points to a relatively simple and cost-effective way forward in reducing the lead load for urban youth.
Biography: Gabriel Filippelli is a Professor of Earth Sciences at IUPUI and the Director of the Center for Urban Health. He specializes in environmental geochemistry and climate change science, developing and interpreting geochemical records of climate and climate change extracted from oceans and lakes, and he has studied heavy metal distributions, geochemistry, and human health impacts in wetland, soil, and riparian environments. He is a current Associate Editor of Applied Geochemistry, recent past Chair of the Science Planning Committee for the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, and the recent Past Chair of the Geology and Health Division of the Geological Society of America. His current projects related to urban health include (1) determining the spatial and temporal relationships between lead contamination and exposure to children, and (2) determining the source, transport, and fate of mercury in proximity to coal-fired electrical utilities. He earned a B.S. in Geology from the University of California, Davis, spent two years in the Republic of Kiribati as US Peace Corps Volunteer, then earned a PhD in Earth Sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1994. He has been at IUPUI since 1994.
Stephen Aldrich (March 9, 2012)
Title: Forests and Conflict: Contentious Land Change in the Amazon
Abstract: Land conflict and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon have increased dramatically since the early 1980s, with a variety of driving factors being responsible. One driver which has been neglected in previous research is the role of contentious social processes, including contention over land resources. As conflict over land has become stronger, forests are often involved, either as a site for, or cause of, conflict. By employing a case study of land conflict over a largeholding in Southeastern Pará, Brazil and a regional-scale statistical model, I show that contentious land change (C-LC) -- land change as an outcome of land conflict -- has occurred in an area with a long history of antagonism between largeholders and the rural poor. In addition to being a casualty of conflict, forest cover may actually increase the risk of conflict, raising serious environmental concerns and challenging current thinking about land management in the region.
Biography: Steve Aldrich is a New England native, born in Massachusetts, though spending his childhood in Vermont. As a homeschooled GED recipient, it was a small miracle that he was able to study Geography at Clark University as an undergraduate (BA, 2002). More recently, he received his graduate education in Geography at Michigan State University (PhD, 2009), writing a thesis and a dissertation on different aspects of land change in the Brazilian Amazon. He moved to Indiana in 2009 to work as an Assistant Professor of Geography at Indiana State University, and has recently had the good fortune to receive NSF support to continue to study Contentious Land Change in Brazil.
Anup Saikia (March 23, 2012)
Title: Tribes, tigers and forests in India’s Far East
Abstract: Situated at the north eastern corner of India, north east India is populated by a multiplicity of tribes speaking numerous Tibeto- Burman languages and dialects. Stretching over 255,000 square kilometers the largely rugged landscape is a global biodiversity hotspot, with turbulent rivers and the world’s wettest spot. Within India, its ethnic and linguistic diversity is unmatched. The talk focusses on: tribes, that exist in varying degrees of transition and is limited to a brief look at the Karbi tribe of Assam and the Konyak tribe of Nagaland. Tigers are one of the flagship species in the area. Unfortunately they are representative of the ills facing the region: a rich biodiversity situated against a rapidly eroding habitat. The forest cover of the region that has consistently declined in recent decades and the quantum and drivers of forest loss are considered in the last part of the presentation.
Biography: Anup Saikia is Associate Professor at the Department of Geography, Gauhati University,Guwahati, India. His interests lie in the fields of use of GIS in population and environment studies in relation to North East India. He is a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Geography, IU,Bloomington.
Shane Greene (April 6, 2012)
Title: Punk is a global mode of under-production goddamnit
Abstract: Based on historical and ethnographic work into Lima, Peru's "underground" punk scene I seek to develop a theory of punk as a space and mode of under-production. The theory is inspired by anthropological context; unlike punks in most parts of the world Peruvian punks call their movement "la movida subterranea" ("the underground movement") and thus give rise to a specific subcultural identity known as a "subte" (an "under"). Parting from this ethnographic premise, and drawing on several examples from punk in Peru, the US, the UK, and elsewhere, I develop a multi-layered theory of punk as a global mode of under-production: a. punk (DIY) ethics and practice as an alternative form of sociality that stands against over-production, that which Marx identified as crucial to the moment of crisis in capitalist social relations; b. punk as an "underground" network of globally counter-circulated and explicitly under-produced material goods (music, fanzines, art etc.); c. punk as a space where under-produced persons are made, persons who purposely under-produce themselves as a means to represent the decadence of a system explicitly organized to fetishize the production of commodities at the cost of the production of persons.
Biography: Shane Greene is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. His research interests lie at the intersection of urban subcultures, ethnicity, environment, and the politics of culture in Latin American. His recent book about the indigenous Amazonian movement, “Customizing Indigeneity: Paths to a Visionary Politics in Peru,” draws on extensive fieldwork in the upper Peruvian Amazon to construct an ethnographic history of the Amazonian movement in Peruvian politics and culture, and offers a novel theoretical reading of indigenous politics and anthropological engagement with subaltern populations. He has further investigated cultural politics and social movements at a broader national level in Peru, examining complex negotiations between indigenous Andean, Amazonian, and Afro-Peruvian activists in response to state multicultural policy. His recent research examines the unique position of punk rock musicians and artists in Lima during Peru's historical period of massive political violence between the state and two armed groups in the 1980s and early 1990s. In this work, Dr. Greene relocates punk subcultures from their theorization as symbolic expressions of class rebellion by "first world" urban youth, to the intensely insecure context of Peru in the 1980s. In so doing, he illuminates how Peruvian punks ultimately deliberated both the possibilities and inherent contradictions of using armed action to protest social inequalities and pursue social transformation as a result of the historical and geo-political context in which they built their scene.
Michael Prentice (April 20, 2012)
Title: A Climate Puzzle in the Highlands of New Guinea and Its Implications for Global Change
Abstract: The history of air temperature in the tropics above the atmospheric boundary layer (~2 km) is critical information for understanding climate-system feedbacks and reducing uncertainty in climate predictions. The information is especially vital for the major centers of tropical convection, the largest of which is driven by the sprawling western Pacific warm pool, the largest single source of heat and water vapor to the global atmosphere. Unfortunately, the instrumental temperature record for the free troposphere in the tropics and over the western Pacific warm-pool in particular, prior to the period of satellite measurements, is sparse, short-lived, and fraught with uncertainty.
Adjacent to the Pacific warm-pool, the mountains of New Guinea rise above the tropical boundary layer and are immersed in warm-pool convection. An amazing finding in these equatorial mountains is the extensive evidence for past glaciation. Even today, small ice fields remain in the remote highest peaks of western New Guinea. Glaciers reliably record climate change and, therefore, evidence of past glacier change can inform reconstructions of climate history above the Pacific warm-pool.
In this talk, several details about glacier changes over the last 70 years and the last two glacial cycles will be presented. The changes in glacier size and, more importantly, snow-line altitude, across New Guinea attest to major changes in lower tropospheric temperature above the warm-pool. Given that contemporaneous changes in warm-pool sea-surface temperature are more moderate, the temperature changes inferred from glaciers attest to a warm-pool convection system that is more sensitive and variable than conventionally thought. A variable Pacific convection system has the potential to amplify otherwise minor climate forcings through the water vapor feedback and play an important role in global climate change.
Biography: Dr. Michael Prentice is a Research Scientist in the Indiana Geological Survey and adjunct faculty member in the Department of Geological Sciences at IUB. He is a geologist who studies glacier, lacustrine, and marine sediments in order to reconstruct environmental change primarily in the Midwest, Antarctica, and New Guinea. In addition to twelve expeditions to Antarctica, he has led five research expeditions to New Guinea, working in the highlands of Papua Province, Indonesia, (western New Guinea) and also Papua New Guinea. He participated in an Ocean Drilling Program cruise to the western tropical Pacific and led a leg of the International Marine Global Change Study along the north coast of Papua Province aboard the French RV Marion Dufresne.
