News

 

  • 19 May 2023: the first CNH2 project summit takes place at SDSU. The first day of the summit provides opportunities for investigators, students, and collaborators to present their research progress and ideas for future projects and papers. On the second day, members of the CNH2 team will join with 7 high school teachers from San Diego to discuss the possibility of incorporating the Chitwan project findings and methods into their instruction and curriculum.

 

  • 09 May 2023: My Thu Tran, CNH2 team member and Ph.D. student in Geography at SDSU, travelled to Chitwan, Nepal to visit our collaborators, NTNC and ISER-N, and conduct her field work. My Thu will also help us service the camera traps installed in Chitwan, as some units brought to Nepal by Dr. Bohnett need maintenance after a year. Gook luck My Thu!

 

  • 01 March 2023: CNH2 team members from the Pennsylvania State University, Dr. Jennifer Glick and Dr. Scott Yabiku, visited our collaborator ISER-N in Chitwan to pre-test a new round of social survey covering energy choice, child education, migration, human-animal relations, and perceptions about Chitwan National Park. The survey was designed and revised in 2022 with the help of team members Li An, Ren Cao, Tracy Liu, Jennifer Glick, and Scott Yabiku. Our team worked with ISER-N to finalize the questionnaire and sampling areas. Congrats!

 

  • 09 January 2023: CNH2 team members, Dr. Li An, Dr. Douglas Stow, Dr. Fang Qiu, and student Brenna Fowler visited Chitwan during the winter break. They met with local collaborators for ecological and social survey, including the National Trust for Nature Conservation (NTNC) for carrying out an ecological research and the Institute for Social and Environmental Research – Nepal (ISER-N) for the social survey.

 

  • 09 August 2022: Ph.D. student Ren Cao visited Pennsylvania State University and met two professors, Dr. Jennifer Glick and Dr. Scott Yabiku, to discuss the progress of designing his social survey questionnaire for the upcoming field work in early 2023. They finalized questionnaire and designed questions that cover energy choice, child education, migration, human-animal relations, and perceptions about Chitwan National Park for the CNH2 project. They also worked on delineating the sampling areas and chose sampling strategy for the social survey.

 

  • 13 July 2022: CNH2 team members submitted the annual report for the 2021-2022 year to NSF. Highlights for our activities included: establishing a new partnership with the National Trust for Nature Conservation (NTNC) for carrying out wildlife research, and strengthening our existing partnership with the Institute for Social and Environmental Research – Nepal (ISER-N) on household-level social surveys, and several field trips by team members to Chitwan, Nepal since December 2021 to collect ecological and social survey data, along with designing survey questionnaire for 2023.

 

  • 20 May 2022: Dr. Bohnett returned to San Diego after a six-month of field trip in Chitwan! Eve led fieldwork for collecting ecological data using drone and digital cameras; she also started a pilot test for surveying local community forest managers.

 

  • 17 May 2022: Ren Cao, CNH2 team member and Ph.D. student in Geography at SDSU, travelled to Nepal for fieldwork with collaboration with our local partner, ISER-N. Ren designed a social survey in Eastern Chitwan. This social survey will be conducted in community forest areas in Eastern Chitwan near Dr. Bohnett’s ecological survey sites in February 2023. After Ren’s field trip, he will meet with Drs. An, Glick, and Yabiku to finalize a social survey questionnaire on energy choice, child education, migration, human-animal relations, and perceptions about Chitwan National Park under payments for ecosystem services projects.

 

  • 20 February 2022: Tracy Liu, CNH2 team member and master student in Geography at SDSU, departed for her two-month field trip on social surveys and interviews about human-animal interactions in Chitwan, Nepal, in collaboration with our local partner, the Institute for Social and Environmental Research – Nepal (ISER-N).

 

  • 30 December 2021: Dr. Fang Qiu, CNH2 team member and Professor for Geospatial Information Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas, departed for Nepal to join the fieldwork led by another CNH2 member Dr. Eve Bohnett. Dr. Qiu will be staying in Nepal for three weeks to operate drone flights for our fieldwork in Chitwan. Good luck Dr. Qiu!

 

  • 15 December 2021:  First fieldwork trip to Chitwan Valley, Nepal since the start of the global pandemic kicked off! Dr. Eve Bohnett, postdoctoral research fellow in the CNH2 team, embarked on her fieldwork trip to collect camera traps and drone data, an essential part of the ecological component of the CNH2 project. Graduate students Ren Cao and Yanjing (Tracy) Liu helped with Dr. Bohnett during the preparation processes.

 

  • 10 December 2021: In preparation for fieldwork in Chitwan, Nepal, the CNH2 team had a half-day training on drone use at SDSU. Mr. Don Solleder from Enterprise UAS, Inc. gave a detailed instruction on the appropriate use of the DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced Drone. After the workshop, the team members performed a test flight at the SDSU campus to familiarize themselves with the equipment. Dr. Eve Bohnett, CNH2 fieldwork leader, helped to schedule and coordinate the training workshop; Doug Stow, Fang Qiu (via Zoom), Lloyd (Pete) Coulter, Jeff Fleckenstein, and Li An participated in the workshop.

 

  • 21 July 2020: Dr. Hsiang Ling Chen’s paper “Understanding the direct and indirect effects of Payment for Ecosystem Services on resource use and wildlife”  has been accepted for publication at Anthropocene. This paper is jointed sponsored by this project and our former NSF CNH project. Congratulations Dr. Chen!

 

  • 17 July 2020:  Our CNH2 team is pleased to announce that Eve T. Bohnett has joined us! Eve is currently a PhD candidate at Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Florida. She is working now as a part-time researcher and will join us as a full-time postdoctoral research fellow once she defends her dissertation in the fall semester. Welcome Eve!

 

  • 17 December  2019: Dr. Hsiang Ling Chen’ s paper “Assessing the effects of payments for ecosystem services programs on forest structure and species biodiversity” has been accepted for publication at Biodiversity and Conservation. This paper is based on Dr. Chen’s work for our NSF CNH project (2012-2017). Cheers!

 

  • 22 November 2019: An article “Cascading impacts of payments for ecosystem services in complex human-environment systems” (An et al.) has been accepted for publication. This article builds an agent-based model to study the complex interactions among human livelihoods, payments for ecosystem services, and the Guizhou golden monkey habitat occupancy over 20 years using data from Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve, China (jointly sponsored by our earlier NSF CNH project).

 

  • 12 November 2019: Two-postdoc fellows are being sought to join an interdisciplinary research team under this project titled “CNH-L: People, Place, and Payments in Complex Human-Environment Systems”. See this page for detailed information about the positions.

 

 

  • 14 October  2019:  Alexandra (Ali) Yost led a paper titled “Mechanisms behind concurrent payments for ecosystem services in a Chinese nature reserve” and was accepted for publication in a prestigious journal Ecological Economics.  Ali is an M.S. candidate at Department of Geography, San Diego State University (jointly sponsored by our earlier NSF CNH project).

 

  • 01 September 2018: The National Science Foundation Abstract (#1826839) “CNH-L: People, Place, and Payments in Complex Human-Environment Systems” is awarded to principal investigator Li An and colleagues at San Diego State University, University of Texas at Dallas, and Pennsylvania State University.

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