Research Projects in Nepal
During the Fall of 2009, upon my return from two months of fieldwork in Botswana and Namibia and while I was working on my dissertation research, I had the wonderful opportunity to join Dr. John All, associate professor of environmental geography at Western Kentucky University, as a research field assistant on his Fulbright research fellowship to Nepal. The goal of the project was to understand the impact of climate change on alpine vegetation dynamics and we spent five months trekking through six of Nepal’s national parks and protected areas collecting ground control data and socio-economic interviews with students and collaborators from Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu. My personal interest during the project was to collect slope failure and landslide incidence data that can then be integrated into a landscape-level soil erosion model to understand slope failure risk and impacts on water security in the Himalaya region. This project is still under development. Currently, I do not have active research work in Nepal but I am in the process of accepting a graduate student from Nepal who will continue to work on projects in the region.