About Us

The Center for Global Change and Earth Observations is an interdisciplinary research center sponsored by the Colleges of Social Science, Natural Science and Agriculture and Natural Resources, in collaboration with the Michigan Agricultural Research Station and the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies. Faculty from across the university participate in research focused on the study of patterns and processes of global environmental change, from global to local scales. Center research uses geospatial information technologies and earth observation satellites to measure, analyze and predict the human and physical processes of global environmental change. The goal of the Center is to strengthen interdisciplinary approaches for understanding global change at all scales using the tools of both the social and physical sciences.

The Center promotes basic and applied research on global and environmental change in several key areas including land use and cover change, coupled human and natural systems, coupled biological and physical systems, deforestation, biodiversity, sustainable development, environmental monitoring and natural resource management. While taking a global perspective, it also seeks to promote the coupling of global scale environmental research to local applications and problem solving.

The Center develops and uses new tools of geographic information sciences, including openly distributed geographic information systems, satellite remote sensing spatial and agent-based numerical modeling, field-based sampling, and Internet-based spatial spatial decision support systems. The Center conducts research around the world, but mostly centered in Brazil, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Russia, Africa, Southeast Asia, and China, as well as in the Great Lakes and throughout the rest of the United States. The Center provides support to graduate research, education, and training within the three collaborating colleges and provides academic support for curriculum in geographic information science, global change science and environmental science.