Robert T. Walker
Professor of Geography
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Department of Geography
Biography: I am a Human Geographer, with a PhD in Regional Science from the University of Pennsylvania, which places me on the quantitative side of the field, with strong training in statistics and economics. Thus, I consider myself a quantitative economic geographer. Having said this, the topical focus of my research agenda has been on land cover change processes, especially tropical deforestation. My work has taken me away from conventional economic geographic themes, and at this point I could easily be described as a land change scientist, with strong interest in field ethnography. Nevertheless, my commitment to economic geography is strong, and my research always brings a spatial and human geographic focus to bear on processes of environmental change. Research Interests: My most characteristic work to date integrates remote sensing, spatial statistics, and ethnographic field data into studies of land cover change processes. Since the early 1990s, I have led a number of field activities in the Amazon basin, studying the land use decisions of households, the spatial-processes of road building, and, most recently, the impacts of land reform on tropical forests. In addition to this work, I maintain interests in classical land use theory, as well as spatial statistics. Although I have worked primarily at the household level in the tropical forests of Brazil, I am presently scaling up in order to take a political ecological view of environmental change in Amazônia and elsewhere. With NASA funding, I am modeling land-climate interactions at basin-scale in the Amazon, and with NSF funding I am addressing the globalization of the Amazon's cattle economy. E-mail: rwalker@msu.edu Office: |