News in 2016
• December 15, 2016: Dr. Li An traveled to Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve (FNNR) between December 4 and 9. He met FNNR leaders and friends Director Zhang, Deputy Direcors Lei and Yang, Secretary Yang, and other people; both FNNR leaders and Dr. An show strong interest in continuing our partnership in research, education, and outreach in the future. Accompanied by Lei Shi, Haibo Li, and/or Qifang Li, Dr. An visited villages close to the former golf course project, Pianyan Resevoir, and Liziyuan Resevoir, and interviewed local villagers. The left photo was taken at Jinchang ELementary School and the right one at the previous golf course site.
• November 17, 2016: Doctoral student Jie Dai's book chapter "Time geography" has recently been accepted for publication. The book is entitled GIS Principles and Technical Designs of GIS (edited by T.J. Cova and M. Tsou), a volume in Comprehensive Geographic Information Systems (editor B. Huang), Elsevier. Congratulations Jie!
• October 28, 2016: Dr. Li An gave a talk at the SDSU Geography Colloquium Series. His talk is entitled "Unpacking space-time dynamics from multi-time (non-longitudinal) spatial data" with the slides here.
• October 20, 2016: SDSU College of Arts and Letters Dean Dr. Norma Bouchard, Geography Chair Dr. Piotr Jankowski, and Geography Professor Dr. Li An renewed the Research-Education-Outreach Partnership agreement with Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve in China. Read more about this exciting news.
• October 14, 2016: SDSU College of Arts and Letters Dean Dr. Norma Bouchard congratulated Drs. An and Jankowski for their recent award from NSF. Here is the letter.
• September 26, 2016: Invited by Dr. Li An, Profs. Weihua Xu from Chinese Academy of Sciences and Richard Bilsborrow from UNC Chapel Hill visited San Diego for the 2016 Summit Meeting of our PES project on September 23-24. Dr. Xu presented a wonderful research project entitled "Ecological effectiveness of nature reserve system in China", and Dr. Bilsborrow had his insightul presentation entitled "GFG, Migration and the Environment: Modelling FNNR Interactions: What we are learning and gaps to address". They shared their excellent ideas and made very useful recommendations and comments for our future plan, joyfully engaged in our project luncheon, the climax of the meeting--isn't it?
• September 24, 2016: The CHES research team has recently held a successful project summit meeting on Septermber 23-24, 2016 at San Diego State University. All project investigators, including Dr. Weihua Xu from Chinese Academy of Sciences and Dr. Richard Bilsborrow from UNC Chapel Hill, presented their research progress and findings. See more detail at this news site or this recent updates site.
• August 30, 2016: Warmest welcome to two new master's students Evan Casey and Judy Mak! Judy received her degree in Earth System Science from UC Irvine, and Evan his degree in Geography from San Diego State University. Welcome to join the SDSU Geography Department and the CHES group!
• August 19, 2016: Master's student Curtis Battle successfully defended his thesis ¡°Sex specific habitat models for Bengal tigers in Chitwan National Park, Nepal" on Aug 19th. His research showed that the probability of occurrence of male tigers was positively affected by prey abundance and water resources while occurrence of female tigers were affected by more variables, including human settlement and vegetation. The results highlight the importance of considering sex in habitat models and have significant contributions to conservation and management of Bengal tigers. Congratulations Curtis!
• August 07, 2016: Dr. Hsiang Ling Chen presented at the 2016 Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting. Read more here for her talk.
• June 23, 2016: Dr. Li An recently received an NSF grant entitled "ABM¡¯17: The usefulness, uselessness, and impending tasks of agent-based models in social, human-environment, and life sciences¡±. See this site for more information.
• June 03, 2016: Congratulations to Dr. Hsiang Ling Chen, who recently received a research grant to study wild mammals at Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve! Explore this site for more information.
• May 21, 2016: The CNH project team had a successful training workshop for San Diego K-12 teachers. See more here about this event.
• May 12, 2016: Dr. Li An organized a successful symposium and presented at The International Society for Ecological Modeling Global Conference 2016 (8-12 May 2016, Baltimore, Maryland). He also served as a member of the conference's Scientific Steering Committee and gave a talk titled ¡°Modeling human decision-making and their interactions with the Guizhou Golden Monkey habitat use". Read more about this event.
• April 29, 2016: PhD candidate Shuang Yang was recently awarded the Caldwell, Flores, and Winters Award in GIS Emphasizing Human Geography Applications for the 2016-17 academic year. Shuang creatively employed GIS technologies to solve human livelihood problems at Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve (China), which hugely supported Dr. An's NSF project "Impacts of Ecosystem Service Payments in Coupled Natural and Human Systems". He also creatively developed a set of google earth protocols to map human environmental use patterns in areas without Internet access, which made a big advance in understanding local FNNR people's resource use patterns. Congratulations Shuang!
• April 29, 2016: Master's student Jeanne Patton was recently awarded the McFarland Geography Scholarship for the 2016-17 academic year. According to Rose Pasenelli, Director of SDSU Office of Financial Aid and Scholarships, this scholarship is annually given to eligible students who meet all scholarship requirements, such as units enrolled, major, and GPA. Congratulations Jeanne!
• April 13, 2016: Invited by the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, Dr. Li An gave a statistics seminar based on his NSF, NASA, and NIH funded projects. His lecture is entitled "Geospatial Analytics in Human-Environment Research: Experiences and Opportunities". Around 25 faculty and graduate students attended the seminar, followed by questions, comments, and subsequent email communications about the methods and results.
• April 4, 2016: Dr. Guangming He will join the CHES group. See more here about this exciting news. Welcome Dr. He!
• March 25, 2016: PhD candidate Shuang Yang and two SDSU spring scholars Inka Cresswell and Michael Cassidy left SDSU and headed to Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve (FNNR) in China. They are recuiting and training four undergraduate students from Tongren College for social survey and geospatial mapping purposes. With help from FNNR staff Wang Hua, the team will conduct household survey and land use mapping until early May. Take a look at the project blog for more details about the fieldwork.
• March 24, 2016: PhD student Shuang Yang's proposal, entitled "Exploring reciprocal relationships between payments for ecosystem services (PES) and the associated coupled human and natural systems (CHANS): A case study of Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve (FNNR), China", was unanimously passed by his PhD committee: Drs. Keith Clarke, David Lopez-Carr (UCSB), Piotr Jankowski, and Li An (Chair). Congratulations Shuang!
• March 11, 2016: Postdoctoral Scholar Dr. Hsiang Ling Chen left San Diego heading to Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve (FNNR) in China. With help from FNNR staff and two botanists from Yunnan University (China), Dr. Chen is collecting camera trapping and on-site vegetation data. She and Shuang Yang (PhD candidate) will train the two SDSU spring scholars, Michael Cassidy and Inka Cresswell, from late spring to early-mid May. The two spring scholars will video-tape major research activities and produce a set of short movies.
• March 10, 2016: A geospatial modeling proposal, titled "ABM¡¯17: The Usefulness, Uselessness, and Impending Tasks of Agent-Based Models in Social, Human-Environment, and Life Sciences", was submitted to National Science Foundation's Geography and Spatial Science program with Dr. An as lead PI. This "leadership" project aims to organize a workshop under the goal of transforming the science, technology, and application of agent-based models (ABMs, or agent-based modeling¡ªABM) in the context of social, human-environment, and life sciences. If funded, over forty two exceptional agent-based modelers and/or ¡°users¡± (ranging from junior scholars such PhD students and postdoctoral fellows up to members of the National Academy of Sciences) of these models will come together and hash out strategic plans and actions to advance the science of agent-based modeling.
• March 07, 2016: Two undergraduate students, Michael Cassidy and Inka Cresswell, will go to the Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve in China as our spring scholars. See more here.
• February 25, 2016: Welcome visiting scholar Dr. Xuan Tian from School of Information Science & Technology, Beijing Forestry University, China! Her expertise is on efficient management and usage of individual context for information retrieval (especially individual cognitive modeling and cognitive language models). Dr.Tian will be at SDSU for one year.
• January 28, 2016: The CHES Group is recruting 2-3 SDSU excellent undergraduate students, as our spring scholars, to go to Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve (China) for education and training purposes. The field trip will be fully paid by our NSF project and take place in late March to mid-April. The spring scholars will participate in activities such as camera trapping of golden monkeys and mapping of local indigenous households. Dr. Hsiang Ling Chen and doctoral student Shuang Yang will lead the related activities. For more detail see this link.
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