Project Overview
This collaborative project brings together researchers from the physical and social sciences to study the interrelationships among forest, agriculture and rivers in the Brazilian Amazon and develop a multifaceted understanding of the impacts of land-cover change on rivers, land-use change on household well-being and the combined human-biophysical system.
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Research Team
This project brings together researchers from the physical and social sciences including biogeography, remote sensing, fluvial geomorphology, environmental and natural resource economics, development economics, engineering, and complex systems science to study the interrelationships between land management and the hydrology of fluvial systems at several scales in the Brazilian Amazon.
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Study Region
The state of Rondônia lies in the southwestern Brazilian Amazon, bordering Bolivia, and is bisected northwest to southeast by federal highway BR-364. This state has experienced some of the highest rates of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, resulting in the current land cover patchwork of mature forest, secondary forest, and widespread pasture propagating northeastward and southwestward from the federal highway.
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Our project data include a panel survey of farm households undertaken from 1996 to 2009 in government-sponsored settlements in the Ouro Preto do Oeste region of Rondônia that has been combined with (1) an unbroken 27-year record of remotely sensed land cover data for the state of Rondônia; (2) geo-spatial data representing property boundaries and evolving market and transportation infrastructure; and (3) datasets representing initial biophysical conditions (e.g. soil type and topography).