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The mission of CGCEO is:
To specifically address the international aspects of the coupled social, land and climate systems in global environmental change studies using advanced geospatial tools, models, and observations.
The overarching goal of CGCEO is to contribute to the understanding of the interrelations among human, land, and climate systems in an international context, as reflected in MSU’s Boldness by Design. Building on existing strength in interdisciplinary approaches to understand the social processes, land use and land cover patterns and processes, and environmental impacts and responses at regional to global scales, the Center addresses the following key science questions:
How are social processes altering and impacting global environmental dynamics? How do these changes, in turn, respond to and affect land and human systems?
The research activities at the Center attempt to identify, understand and model land surface processes; determine and quantify socioeconomic root causes of and responses to global change, and assess human/animal health and ecosystem services.
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The research at the Center focuses on geospatial technologies, climate and land interactions, environmental and health relationships, land use and land cover change patterns and processes, ecosystem services and functions, and socioeconomic drivers and climate forces of global change. As reflected in the many research projects conducted by faculty members in CGCEO, the Center focuses on developing integrated approaches, a mix of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, to address complex environmental issues. The research themes center on the overlapping areas of intersection among the coupled social, land, and climate systems to produce new knowledge of the interactions of social and physical processes in the international context. The research methods concentrate on the quantification of the intrinsic linkages between and among coupled social, land, and environmental systems. Specifically, the CGCEO research themes include the following:
- Social Processes, Land Use/Cover Dynamics, and Global Environmental Change
- Socioeconomic modeling including social and economic drivers.
- Regional climate modeling effort in East Africa and expand to include Asia, Central Asia and Eurasia.
- Quantitative assessment of socioeconomic drivers and consequences of globalization in developing countries.
- Understanding the complexity and patterns to process of tropical ecosystems in Brazil, Ecuador, Costa Rica, China and Southeast Asian countries, with a global perspective.
- Research on dryland degradation assessment, monitoring, and socioeconomic consequences and drivers in the Southwest, and the Central Asian and African regions.
- Geospatial Technologies Cutting across all Disciplines
- Research on sensors and sensing technologies, including traditional remote sensing and acoustic sensors for advanced environmental assessment and monitoring.
- Geospatial analysis and modeling using advanced tools in GIS and remote sensing
- Development of advance digital image processing development for quantitative information extraction.
- Linking Social and Land Processes
- Link socioeconomic drivers to physical patterns and processes, such as land use change modeling with socioeconomic deterministic models or neural network or cellular automata approaches using GISs, remote sensing technologies and other methods.
- Understand deforestation/fire and their ecological consequences, including impacts of forest fires and fragmentation on bird species.
- Linking Social Processes with Global Environment
- Incorporate socioeconomic processes such as land use and policy in regional climate models and vice versa.
- Examine the socioeconomic drivers of global change such as CO2 release from industries and from land use and land cover changes (fires, agricultural intensification, and management practices for carbon credit).
- Develop and apply biogeochemical models focusing on green house gas emissions and controls and quantify non-source environmental pollution.
- Coupling Social, Land, and Global Environmental Systems
- Quantify social and natural causes of and responses to climate change, including human responses to extreme climate events such as droughts and hurricanes, and natural responses such as shifts in agricultural productivity and migration of biomes.
- Develop sustainable strategies and decision support systems to transfer data into products, into information, into knowledge and into sustainability under various global change scenarios.
- Developing Conceptual and Methodological Approaches
- Develop quantitative methodologies based on cases studies and develop models and methods to link social, land and climate systems.
- Develop qualitative and statistical approaches to determine cause-response relationships at varying spatial and temporal scales to identify social processes that are responsible for and sensitive to global environmental changes.
- Design and implement conceptual framework to link social processes with physical processes in the international context.
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