This award will allow an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to receive technical training in geographic information systems and remote sensing. This training will be used to help analyze information gathered about agriculture, ecology and economics in two communities in the Peruvian Andes. The research seeks to understand how peasant populations use strategies such as field dispersion, storage and exchange to buffer production risk due to drought, frost and crop pests. This award will allow the investigator to analyze data on regional environmental variation that has been available but that he was not trained to use. The research that this training activity supports is important because the understanding of peasant survival strategies is critical to the dealings between the U.S. and societies which have large peasant populations. The training is also valuable in itself to increase the technical expertise of social scientists.
