SUNY Cortland

Faculty Member, Geography

Assistant Professor

About

My research addresses the historical processes of long-term environmental transformation in the tropical highlands of central Mexico. In particular, I am interested in the origins of the region’s degraded vegetation, soils, and hydrology. Through archival and field work, along with the techniques of historical GIS, I am attempting to make substantive and methodological contributions to understanding the processes of landscape transformation within this region. Much of my research is directed towards uncovering how sheep overstocking, indigenous population decline, and climatic drying acted together to degrade the environment in the final two decades of the sixteenth-century.