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1123 Derby Hall 154 North Oval Mall Columbus, OH 43210 (614) 247-8382 fax: (614) 292-6213 email: munroe.9 AT osu.edu |
updated: August 5, 2008 |
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I am an
economic geographer with interests in land use, broadly defined. I have been
working in four main research areas, described below: ·
Modeling
spatially-explicit land-cover change ·
Patterns
of land-use change at the rural-urban interface ·
Open-space
amenities, land markets and regional development ·
Relating
land use pattern and process All
share a similar focus on the ways in which economic processes shape, and are
shaped by, the landscape. In other
words, the landscape is the setting in which economic activity – enabled and
mediated by social relations and the biophysical environment – takes place. Modeling spatially explicit land-cover
change I have
long been fascinated by the ways in which land-use changes (due to new
production techniques, changing product prices, or infrastructure development)
lead to land-cover changes, such as deforestation, forest regrowth or urban
conversion. Moreover, it is clear that certain changes, such as the paving of
a seasonal road, can result in cascading effects on local and regional
returns to land use, depending on how such changes affect prevailing land-use
systems. I have developed spatially explicit statistical models that combine
land-use theory with remote sensing and ethnography, in order to estimate the
relative contribution of various factors in shaping land-cover patterns
through space and time. In addition, spatial autocorrelation in spatially
explicit models is a vexing problem for researchers. I have used a variety of
techniques to test and correct for spatial and temporal non-stationarity in
categorical land-cover models and also explored the role of geovisualization
and geocomputation as research tools to address this problem. In 2006, I was an awarded a NASA Land-Cover/Land-Use
Change grant along with collaborators in Geography and Statistics to develop
methodologies to model the spatio-temporal dependence structure of regional
carbonaceous aerosol concentration in mainland Southeast Asia, given
atmospheric circulation processes, and observed fire occurrence and
land-cover change. For more information, see the FLAMES Project web page. Relevant publications Munroe, D.K., S.R. Wolfinbarger, C.A. Calder, T. Shi, N. Xiao, C.Q. Lam,
and D. Li. The Relationships Between Biomass Burning, Land-Cover/Use Change,
and the Distribution of Carbonaceous Aerosols in Mainland Southeast Asia: A
Review and Synthesis. Forthcoming in Journal
of Land Use Science. Xiao,
N., T. Shi, C. Calder, D.K. Munroe,
C. Berrett, S. Wolfinbarger, and D. Li. Spatial Characteristics of the
Difference between MISR and MODIS Aerosol Optical Depth Retrievals over
Mainland Southeast Asia. Forthcoming
in Remote Sensing of Environment. Müller,
D. and D.K. Munroe. In Press. Changing Rural Landscapes in Albania:
Cropland Abandonment and Forest Clearing in the Postsocialist Transition.
Forthcoming in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Munroe,
D.K. and D. Müller. 2007. Issues in
spatially explicit statistical land-use/cover change (LUCC) models: Examples
from western Honduras and the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Land Use
Policy 24: 521-530. Tucker,
C.M., D.K. Munroe, H. Nagendra and J. Southworth. 2005. Comparative
spatial analyses of forest conservation and change in Honduras and Guatemala.
Conservation and Society 3(1): 174-200. Müller,
D. and D.K. Munroe. 2005. Tradeoffs between rural development policies
and forest protection: Spatially-explicit modeling in the Central Highlands
of Vietnam. Land Economics 81(3):412-425. Munroe,
D. K., J. Southworth and C. M. Tucker.
2004. Modeling spatially and temporally complex land cover change: the case
of western Honduras. The Professional Geographer 56(4): 544-559. Southworth,
J., D. K. Munroe, and H. Nagendra. 2004. Land cover change and
landscape fragmentation: comparing the utility of continuous and discrete
analyses for a western Honduras region. Agriculture, Ecosystems and
Environment 101(2-3):185-205. Munroe,
D. K., J. Southworth and C. M. Tucker.
2002. The dynamics of land-cover change in western Honduras: exploring
spatial and temporal complexity. Agricultural Economics 27(3):
355-369. Patterns of land-use change at the
rural-urban interface In the
US, conversion of formerly agricultural or forest landscapes to urbanized
uses is the greatest source of land-use change. Cities have continued
to decentralize over time, as new urban growth continues to happen beyond
traditional suburban boundaries. This trend is referred to in a variety of
ways, including urban expansion, urban dispersion, urbanization,
exurbanization, counterurbanization or “population turnaround”: faster
population growth in nonmetropolitan than metropolitan areas. I hypothesize
that the rural-urban interface is a complex, dynamic landscape, where urban
and rural processes meet and interact through the land market.
Moreover, the patterns of urban growth that result reflect the nature of
these rural-urban interactions. Lastly, as pattern affects the
structure and function of both environmental and social processes, current
patterns of urban land use will shape future changes. Relevant publications Munroe,
D.K., C. Croissant and A.M. York. 2005.
Land use policy and landscape fragmentation in an urbanizing region:
assessing the impact of zoning. Applied Geography 25:121-141. Croissant,
C. and D. Munroe. 2002. Zoning and fragmentation of agricultural and
forest land use on residential parcels in Monroe County, Indiana. Geography
Research Forum 22: 91-109. Open-space amenities, land markets and
regional development There
is much attention given to the rise of the "New Economy", in which
both firms and households have become increasingly footloose.
Employment in traditional extractive sectors of the economy has declined,
often concomitant with extractive land uses. As activity in the
high-technology economy has grown, some researchers have asserted that demand
for rural and environmental amenities has accelerated. If high-income
residents place a premium on perceived quality-of-life in determining where
to locate, and more and more jobs follow people, such amenities will continue
to play an important role in longer term regional development. My work
in this area attempts to explore these processes within North America.
An added wrinkle of this relationship is that such processes include complex,
cross-scale interactions. For example, amenities can be regional in
nature (as a greenway system), or local (as a neighborhood park). Labor
markets are regional, because residents move to a larger area for a new job,
but then select a residential location based on the relative mix of specific
desirable attributes of that property. Relevant publications H.S.
Campbell, Jr. and D.K. Munroe. 2007. Greenways and greenbacks: the
impact of the Catawba Regional Trail on Property Values in Charlotte, North
Carolina. Southeastern Geographer 47(1): 118-137. Munroe,
D. K., 2007. Exploring the
determinants of spatial pattern in residential land markets: amenities and
disamenities in Charlotte, NC, USA. Environment and Planning B 34:
336-354. Munroe,
D. K., and A. M. York. 2003. Jobs,
houses and trees: changing regional structure, local land use-patterns, and
forest cover in southern Indiana. Growth and Change 34(3):
299-320. Relating land use pattern and process Within
the land use community, there is increasing interest in relating land-use
pattern and process. The pattern, or spatial composition and
configuration, of various land-use categories reflects the outcome of past
processes. Particular sets of users, institutions and the underlying
spatial framework of the landscape will lead to a variety of patterns.
For example, exurban growth occurs as a result of the interactions between
land users, policy, infrastructure and overall economic growth or decline of
a region. The
pattern of that growth (fragmented, compact, connected, distant) will have
implications for the future environmental, economic and social processes in
the region. In a tropical setting, new patches of deforestation affect
in turn the structure and function of the forest ecosystem as well as the
land-use systems underlying the forest clearing. Relevant publications Munroe, D.K., H.
Nagendra and J. Southworth, 2007. Monitoring Landscape Fragmentation in an
Inaccessible Mountain Region: The Case of Celaque National Park. Landscape
and Urban Planning 83: 154-167. Parker,
D.C. and D.K. Munroe, 2007. The geography of market failure: spatial tests
for edge-effect externalities and external scale economies in California
Certified Organic Agriculture. Ecological Economics 60(4): 821-833. Munroe,
D.K., J. Southworth, and H. Nagendra,
eds. 2004. Agriculture,
Ecosystems, and Environment (special issue "From Pattern to
Process: Landscape Fragmentation and the Analysis of Land Use/Land Cover
Change"). 101(2-3):111–328. Nagendra,
H., D.K. Munroe, and J. Southworth 2004. Introduction to the Special
Issue From Pattern to Process: Landscape Fragmentation and the Analysis of
Land Use/Land Cover Change. Agriculture,
Ecosystems, and Environment (special issue "From Pattern to
Process: Landscape Fragmentation and the Analysis of Land Use/Land Cover
Change." 101(2-3):111–115. |
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Autumn 2008 GEOG
240: Economic and Social Geography GEOG
840: Applying Social Science to Global Environmental Change |
Winter 2009 GEOG
240: Economic and Social Geography GEOG
883.01: App of Quant Methods in Geog. |
Spring 2009 Not
teaching |
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