Graduate student Laurel Suter has received three awards recently. The Nature Conservancy and the Michael and Faye Richardson Foundation each provided support for Laurel’s community and household surveys in Guatemala’s Petén region. Furthermore, she also was awarded a UCSB Affiliates Graduate Dissertation Fellowship – a Nancy Brown Environmental Graduate Dissertation Fellowship. She has recently returned from Guatemala with her fieldwork successfully completed and is ready to dive into her data analysis.
Regarding Laurel’s doctoral research, her faculty adviser, David López-Carr, says the following: “Her research interests align closely with my own, and, as such, she and I have been collaborating for the past four and a half years on several projects. Laurel led a group of undergraduate students creating a suitability map using the Geographic Information System (GIS) software ArcGIS, predicting future areas of agricultural expansion by frontier farmers in my previous research site in the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR) in Guatemala. She then assisted me in co-authoring a paper on the role of population as a factor in deforestation, published in the journal Population and Environment. During the spring of 2009, Laurel collected a follow up survey on the characteristics of land users and the human-environment impact in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, the largest remaining tract of lowland tropical forest in Mesoamerica. Very few studies examining the evolution of the agricultural frontier in a tropical environment have been conducted using longitudinal survey data to date and none to my knowledge in Central America. Given that virtually all deforestation in the region, indeed the world, is for agricultural expansion, much of it at the individual household level, follow-up case studies of this type are exceedingly important.”
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