FOREIGN SCHOLAR TRAVEL AWARD

Announcement for US-IALE FSTA 2007 Awards

FSTA Annual Report - 2006

Past Recipients of the US-IALE FSTA Award

US-IALE FOREIGN SCHOLAR TRAVEL AWARD
for the 22nd Annual Symposium of Landscape Ecology
Tucson, Arizona
9 - 13 April 2007

PURPOSE

The United States Regional Association of the International Association for Landscape Ecology (US-IALE) has a program to support attendance at the annual meeting by landscape ecologists from foreign countries and to foster international exchange about advances in landscape ecology.

THE AWARD

The award recipient will receive US $1,000 at the Annual Meeting. It is the recipient's responsibility to make all transportation arrangements and cover all transportation and lodging costs associated with participating in the meeting.

ELIGIBILITY

1. Applicants are NOT eligible if:

•  the applicant is a citizen or current resident of the United States or Canada.
  
•  the applicant is a citizen of a G7 country (France, US, Britain, Germany, Japan, Italy).
  
•  the applicant (of any nationality) is currently studying in the United States or Canada.
  
•  the applicant (of any nationality) received a Master's or Doctorate at an institution in the United States or Canada.
  
•  previous recipients are also ineligible.

2. Applicants must submit a abstract for a paper or poster presentation at the 2007 conference. You must submit your abstract to the conference organizers by 15 November 2006.

SELECTION CRITERIA

1. Scientific merit and application to landscape ecology. We will favor applicants who demonstrate that their research (i) advances the scientific basis of landscape ecology, and/or (ii) the application of landscape ecology for natural resource protection or management. New and established landscape ecologists are encouraged to apply.

2. Financial need. Applicants must have demonstrated financial need and show that without FTSA support, they would not be able to attend the Conference. Applicants currently studying or residing in G7 countries must demonstrate the extent to which they have pursued travel funding from their host institution.

3. Professional development. Applicants must demonstrate that attending the US-IALE Conference will represent a significant professional opportunity for developing their expertise in landscape ecology and establishing working relationships with landscape ecologists from other countries. We may favor applicants in earlier career stages.

4. Geographical representation. Selection may be made to maximize the number of countries and regions represented.

5. Clarity of English and expression.

HOW TO APPLY

All application materials must be in English.

Incomplete applications will not be reviewed. A complete application contains the following:

1. Name, Institution, Email address, Postal Address, Citizenship.

2. Curriculum vitae (maximum 4 pages).

3. Title and abstract of the paper or poster you will present at the Conference. The abstract should also be independently submitted to the conference organizers.

4. A summary of your research (750 words maximum) explaining how your research extends the scientific basis or application of landscape ecology (see Selection Criteria listed above).

5. Statement on what you hope to gain professionally from attending the US-IALE Conference (200 words maximum).

6. An explanation (200 words maximum) of why you need financial assistance to attend the conference (see Selection Criteria listed above).

Submit your abstract to the conference organizers by 15 November 2006 at the conference website.

Submit your FSTA application materials to the address below by 15 November 2006.

Submit FSTA application materials by email to: sriffell@cfr.msstate.edu, or by post (please include disk copy) to:

Sam Riffell
Department of Wildlife & Fisheries
Box 9690
Mississippi State, MS
39762-9690

Acceptable formats include Microsoft Word, Wordperfect, Rich Text Format and Adobe Acrobat (pdf). Please put all materials into a single file.

Awards will be announced on or before 31 December 2006.

MORE INFORMATION

US-IALE: http://www.usiale.org

2007 Annual Conference: http://www.usiale.org/tucson2007

Other questions -- email us at sriffell@cfr.msstate.edu

U.S. IALE FOREIGN SCHOLAR TRAVEL AWARD COMMITTEE

Members: Sam Riffell (Committee Chair, Mississippi State University), John Bissonette (Utah State University), Sarah Gergel (University of British Columbia), Jianguo Wu (Arizona State University). Ex Officio Members: Robert Gardner (University of Maryland), Margaret Livingston (University of Arizona).

Past Recipients of the
US-IALE Foreign Scholar Travel Award

2007 Recipient

Diana Useche is a landscape ecolgist with the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center in Costa Rica. Diana's research focuses on ecological connectivity in grazing systems of Central America.

Presentation title: Ecological connectivity networks for biodiversity conservation in a pastoral landscape in Central America

2006 Recipient

Solomon Gebeyehu is a post-doctoral fellow at the Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute at the University of Pretoria (South Africa). Dr. Gebeyehu's research focuses on the interactions among insects, grazing and land use in South Africa the implications of these interactions for managing biodiversity.

2005 Recipient

Pavel S. Ktitorov is a scientist with the Zoological Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences and is a Ph. D. candidate at the Institute of Avian Research in Germany. Pavel's research focuses on the landscape ecology of birds, especially stop-over ecology and migration.

Presentation Title: Body mass gain at stopover sites depends on the area of habitats in an adjacent landscape: evidence from a study of the European – African songbird migrants

2004 Recipients

Dror Hawlena is a Ph. D. candidate in the Ecology Program at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Dror’s investigations of desert lizard communities have been recognized by multiple awards from the Blaustein Institute for Desert Research.

Presentation Title: The effects of anthropogenic changes in landscape physiognomy on a desert lizard assemblage

Na Zhang teaches at the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and has taught landscape ecology to over 340 graduate students since 2002. Her research program focuses on exploring interactions between landscape pattern and terrestrial ecosystem processes. Dr. Zhang hopes to establish connections to help further both her research and teaching of landscape ecology. Dr. Zhang was unable to obtain a visa and so was unable to attend the 2004 meeting.

Presentation Title: Landscape patterns of ecosystem net primary productivity: A case study in the Changbai Mountain, China

2003 Recipients

Tadesse Gole is a doctoral student at Center for Development Research (ZEF) of the University of Bonn, and is a citizen of Ethiopia. The goal of Tadesse's research is to conserve wild Coffea arabica genetic resources in Ethiopia.

Presentation Title: Forest reserve planning using GIS-based multicriteria decision method

Note: Tadesse was unable to obtain a visa. This funds from this award will be rolled over into next year's funds.

Siarei Kaptsuih is a doctoral student in the Department of Zoology at the Belarusian State Pedagogical University. Siarhei is investigating the effects of climate change on the spread of insects in Eastern Europe.

Presentation Title: Zoogeographical analysis of the effect of climate change on insects' distributions

Miriam E. Presutti is from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Miriam is interested in using remotely-sensed data to monitor seasonal vegetation changes at regional scales in Argentina. Miriam uses MODIS imagery and NDVI indices monitor these changes.

Presentation Title: Monitoring phenological changes and seasonal response in vegetation pattern within Buenos Aires province landscape, Argentina

Severine Vuilleumier is a research assistant and doctoral student in the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Severine is developing movement models that incorporate cognitive ability of organisms. She is working to understand the relationships among connectivity, fragmentation and animal behavior

Presentation Title: A landscape model of animal movement and connectivity.

Silvio Ferraz is a doctoral student in the Forest Resources Program at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Silvio is studying the effects of landscape structure on water quality in the western Amazon.

Presentation Title: Incorporating temporal land use data in assessing deforestation impacts on water quality in Rondônia State, Brazil.

2002 Recipients

Fabio de Castro is an environmental scientist (Ph.D., Indiana University, USA) currently holding a post-doctoral position at the State University of Campinas, Brazil. In the last three years, he has been carrying out spatial analyses using remote sensing data, GIS, and patch analysis to explore social and ecological factors driving land use/land cover change in the tropical forests of Brazil (Amazon and Atlantic Forest). Dr. de Castro collaborates with colleagues from Indiana University (Anthropological Center for Training and Research in Global Environmental Change - ACT and Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change - CIPEC). Dr. de Castro observes that research in landscape ecology in Brazil has grown in both governmental and non-governmental agencies, mostly on issues related to deforestation and habitat degradation; "Yet, limitations in technology, communication across research groups, academic training, and interdisciplinary approach are some of the challenges that Brazilian landscape ecologists still have to overcome."

Presentation Title: Multi-scale Analysis of Land Use/Land Cover Change in the Ribeira Valley (Atlantic Forest, Southern Brazil).

Crispen Marunda is the final year of his Ph.D. program in the Department of Environment at the University of York, UK. His interests in landscape ecology include studying the effects of spatial heterogeneity (a function of biophysical and anthropogenic factors) on the hydrology of semi-arid catchment areas. Mr. Marunda uses GIS based in ARC/INFO to create thematic information and statistical packages (SSPS and Genstat) to conduct quantitative data analyses for landscape metrics and hydrological variables. With regards to the status of landscape ecology in Zimbabwe, Mr. Marunda notes: "This is still a relatively new field. Whilst there is a strong base for GIS products (maps and information), the application of landscape ecology principles to study the landscape level problems such as loss of biodiversity, forest fragmentation, species movement and water quality has not yet been fully explored."

Presentation Title: Application of landscape ecology to examine the relationship between spatial heterogeneity and change in residual surface runoff of the Save River Catchment Area in Zimbabwe

K. Ramesh is pursuing doctoral research at the Wildlife Institute of India (WII). An admitted novice in the field of landscape ecology, Mr. Ramesh has a strong interest in applying the principles to wildlife conservation issues, with plans to model and map resource utilization by local peoples and populations of Galliformes in the Himalayan region as a step toward developing conservation policy for this group of birds and other forest wildlife. Mr. Ramesh observes that although India has been one of the leading countries to utilize remote sensing data and GIS facilities, the technology has not yet been embraced at the practical level in natural resources management. However, WII is an important institution for effecting principles into practices.

Presentation Title: Modeling spatial distribution of western tragopan (Tragopan melanocephalus) in the Great Himalayan National Park, India: where do we go from here?

Kerrie A. Wilson is a doctoral student at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Ms. Wilson is currently a visiting research scholar at the United Nations Environment Programme-World Conservation Monitoring Centre and the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge, UK. Her research interests in landscape ecology focus on quantitative methods for selecting conservation reserves and for identifying forest areas within a landscape that are most vulnerable to loss or conversion. Ms. Wilson observes that "Landscape ecology is rapidly emerging as a central discipline in Australia and many GIS applications of landscape ecology have been developed by Australian researchers."

Presentation Title: Incorporating vulnerability into the selection of conservation reserves: south central Chile as a case study

Eulogio J Chacón-Moreno obtained the M.Sc. degree in Tropical Ecology in the University of Los Andes and pursued his doctoral research program at the ITC, The Netherlands. Mr. Chacón-Moreno is an Aggregated Lecturer in the Instituto de Ciencias Ambientales y Ecológicas (Institute of Environmental and Ecological Sciences) of the Universidad de Los Andes, Mérida, Venezuela. His work focuses on modeling human impacts on natural ecosystems and landscapes. Regarding the state of landscape ecology in Venezuela, Mr. Chacón-Moreno notes that many descriptive studies have been conducted and current investigations in landscape ecology are focused in two directions: the study of landscape transformation and the application of landscape studies in modeling ecological processes.

Presentation Title: Ecological and spatial modeling: An analysis of the plant species distribution in the flooding savanna landscape, Venezuela.

2001 Recipients

Huayong Zhang, Department of Plant Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing, China). Mr. Zhang is plant ecologist and is just finishing his Ph.D. dissertation. Unraveling ecological patterns and their relationship with processes has been his research focus for the past decade. Although landscape ecology in China has been developing rapidly since the late 1980s, there is a serious lack of effort to integrate empirical studies with theoretical ones. Mr. Zhang is hoping to make this integration. This is Huayong's first professional conference in America.

Presentation Title : Vegetation Pattern and Climatic Conditions: A Statistical Thermodynamics Theory.

Linhai Guo, Environmental Research Institute, University of Wollongong (Gwynneville, New South Wales, Australia). Dr. Guo's research focuses on multiscale analysis of landscape connectivity (fragmentation or isolation). He also develops predictive models of the occurrence of the brush-tailed Rock-wallaby, a threatened species of marsupial in New South Wales. Dr. Guo's research has important implication in assessing the conservation value of remnant habitat islands to assist landscape designers in assigning conservation priority to habitat patches based on their contribution to connectivity.

Presentation Title : Multi-scale Analysis of Landscape Connectivity in Kangaroo Valley, NSW Southeastern Australia in the Context of Landscape Ecology.

Shlomo Brandwine, Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research, Ben Gurion University (Meiter, Israel). Mr. Brandwine is finishing up his PhD dissertation and is studying the effect of soil moisture patchiness on productivity, abundance and migration of invertebrate populations in desert ecosystems. Shlomo was anxious to come to these meetings where he "wishes to exploit the opportunity of being in the company of so many landscape ecologists, and to meet, in person, people that so far I correspond with, only by letters."

Presentation Title : Binding Ideas In the Response of Populations To the Dynamics of Landscape Mosaics.

AbuBakr AbdelAziz Mohamed, International Rice Research Institute (Makati City, Philippines). AbuBakr's research focuses on integrating spatial variation of land unit boundaries and composition into the land use planning process. He is particularly interested in land use planning in highly productive tropical environments where microspatial heterogeneity is extreme.

Presentation Title : Modelling Spatial Heterogeneity for Planning Land Use in Rainfed Environments.

Noorizan Bte Mohamed, University of Putra Malaysia (Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia). Noorizon is a landscape architect and works with the problem of balancing growth and economic development with the protection of biological and social resources of Malaysian landscapes. He is particularly interested in contributing to the development the National Landscape Policy for Malaysia.

Presentation Title : The Revitalisation of the Malaysian Urban Landscape.

YuFu Chen, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing, China). YuFu is a plant ecologist whose research centers on the analysis of ecological patterns of the landscape units in the Mu Us sandy land, a semi-arid area of China. He is a few months away from completing his dissertation. This is his first overseas ecology meeting and he welcomed the opportunity to meet colleagues from other parts of the world and learn of the latest advanced in landscape ecology.

Presentation Title : Quantifying Spatial Pattern of A Sandy Landscape in North of China By Lacunarity Analysis.