9405712 Netting Thiq project supports the research and training of a cultural anthropologist from the University of Arizona. As part of a project studying peasant agricultural production in Nigeria, the investigator, a senior professor, will study the use of Geographic Information Systems, mapping software, and the analysis of remote sensing imagery at Indiana University. The research questions involve explaining how peasant farmers exploited a newly farmed region in Nigeria with traditional hoe farming technologies, what their economic efficiencies are, and how they maintain food self-sufficiency as well as market production. The learning process will rely mainly on analysis of three Landsat scenes spanning a number of years using ERDAS (an imaging software), three series of aerial photographs from 1963, 1972, and 1978, and ARCINFO (a GIS program). The integration of ethnographic information with remote sensing is still experimental and innovative, rather than routine, for social scientists. The training will take place at the Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change at Indiana University. This project is important because it strengthens the scientific expertise of American social scientists in this new technology at the same time that the training involves dealing with critically important research questions involving food self-sufficiency in sub-Saharan Africa.
