This award supports travel costs for a 10-day planning visit to Beijing and the Three Gorges Dam Region in Yichang, China during the summer of 2006 to plan a collaborative spatial data study of the interplay of social demographics, land use, topography, ecosystem dynamics and biodiversity on populations living in the Three Gorges region of China. The planning visit will permit two U.S. researchers and two U.S. graduate students and their Chinese counterparts to jointly assess the feasibility for a large-scale study linking remote sensing and demographic analyses as a tool to fully examine landscape change and associated interaction effects among socioeconomic and biophysical systems. The PI is Dr. Marc Linderman in the Department of Geography at the University of Iowa. Dr. Shen, Zehao in the Department of Ecology at Peking University is the counterpart principal investigator. The U.S. and Chinese researchers will jointly conceptualize and refine the hypotheses and research methods during the planning visit.
Changes in water level from the recently completed (June 2006) Three Gorges dam in China have forced the resettlement of more than one million people from low lying areas throughout the region. This massive resettlement provides unique opportunities to examine the influence of rapid relocation of populations on the environment, and reciprocally, the landscape's influence on household characteristics. Understanding the influence of rapid changes in population, on changed patterns of land-cover and effects on biodiversity, is essential in predicting the ecological impacts of environmental changes and social demographics occurring around the globe.
