Dr. Kathleen A. Farley joined the Center on Global Change as a Research Fellow in August 2003. She will be participating in a CGC working group that is assessing the carbon sequestration and other biogeochemical impacts of forest plantations. Kathleen received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2002, her M.A. from American University in 1995 and her B.A. from U.C.L.A. in 1992. Her dissertation, "Effects of exotic pine on páramo grasslands in the Ecuadorian Andes," examined the social, economic, and policy drivers behind the plantation of pine in Ecuador, and combined that with data on the biophysical changes in páramo ecosystems as a result of this landscape change.

Her current focus is on the use and management of natural resources and the response of ecosystems to those uses. I am interested in the socioeconomic and policy conditions that promote land use change and how the resulting modification or conversion of landscapes affects ecosystem processes, as well as ecosystem services that are important for society. Her research has been primarily in tropical Latin America, in particular the tropical Andes, but has recently begun to include southern South America. She is interested in interdisciplinary research, and her approach combines information on socioeconomic and policy components of land
use change with ecological data on the effects of those changes. Her current research is on the effect of converting grasslands to tree plantations, with a focus on the hydrological and biogeochemical response to this land use change and its effect on the communities living in the afforested regions. This research includes a global synthesis of existing data on water yield following afforestation and
field research in afforested regions in Argentina and Uruguay.
Read more about Dr. Farley's research here.