This award supports the research of a team of cultural anthropologists, biologists, and remote sensing experts to study the sociocultural and environmental change in tropical forests of Papua New Guinea. The project will develop a database of geographic images of a highland area occupied by indigenous farmers. Using ground surveys of agricultural activities and of tree forms along with remote sensing images, the investigators will try to explain the patterns of stability and change in the tropical forest as an interaction of indigenous farming activities and ecological processes that do not involve humans. This projects is important because understanding the interaction of human and non-human processes in the change and stability of tropical forests is critical if the biological resources represented in these tropical forest areas are to be conserved.
