"Causes and Consequences of Forest Change in Tropical Mountains: A Social-Ecological Analysis from Southern Mexico"
537 Heller Hall and livestream
Mountains exhibit the highest levels of biodiversity on Earth, capture vast amounts of freshwater, and stock large amounts of carbon. Many of these features are enhanced in mountains located in the tropics. Tropical mountain regions are undergoing significant transformations due to current global environmental change, including land-cover, land-use, and climate change. Analyses of forest change in the tropics however, focus primarily on lowland tropical forests, overlooking the unique dynamics that occur in montane systems, which are greatly shaped by topography. Understanding the trends and patterns of forest change in tropical mountains is crucial for protecting these ecosystems. In this talk I will share my ongoing research on the causes and consequences of forest change in tropical mountains. I will focus on an example from southern Mexico, the Northern Mountains of Oaxaca, where satellite products show forest loss increasing in the last decade despite the development of community-based forest conservation projects. I take a social-ecological approach to analyze this contradiction by integrating remote sensing and socioeconomic data. Ultimately, this example is part of a larger research project where I seek to understand processes of forest change in tropical mountains around the world.
About the Speaker
Dr. Adriana Uscanga is an assistant professor in the Department of Forest Resources at the University of Minnesota. Adriana is a landscape ecologist that integrates field and remote sensing data to analyze patterns of vegetation change over space and time. Adriana earned her undergraduate degree in Biology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she discovered her passion for ecological spatial analyses after making her very first map showing the distribution of wild cotton populations with different leaf shapes. She then pursued a master’s degree in Ecology and Evolution, also at UNAM. Her research focused on examining the role of topography and geologic history in shaping the distribution and evolution of arthropod communities within tropical sky-islands. Although this was the end of her career as an entomologist, it marked the beginning of her journey as a geographer and landscape ecologist. Adriana went on to earn a PhD degree in Geography from the University of Oregon, where she analyzed the interacting effects of environmental gradients and land-use intensity on tropical forest structure and tree diversity. Beyond her academic pursuits, Adriana has engaged with small-scale farmers on topics related to agroecology, land use, and natural resource management. Currently, her interdisciplinary work seeks to improve our understanding of the influence that disturbance, land use, and land management have on forest structure, composition, and function across scales.