Conflict Ecology is a geospatial research lab led by Jamon Van Den Hoek, Assistant Professor of Geography at Oregon State University. Conflict Ecology is also part of The 22nd Century Survival Project.
Conflict Ecology is a geospatial research lab led by Jamon Van Den Hoek, Assistant Professor of Geography at Oregon State University. Conflict Ecology is also part of The 22nd Century Survival Project.
Our team is concerned with issues at the intersection of political ecology and landscape ecology. We employ mixed methods approaches to examine how political power and violent social conflict are manifest in land cover change from the settlement's edge to across countries and continents, how climate vulnerability influences short- and long-term land use decision-making, and how human agency persists throughout conflict, disaster, and climate change.
Our team is concerned with issues at the intersection of political ecology and landscape ecology. We employ mixed methods approaches to examine how political power and violent social conflict are manifest in land cover change from the settlement's edge to across countries and continents, how climate vulnerability influences short- and long-term land use decision-making, and how human agency persists throughout conflict, disaster, and climate change.
We work across spatial and temporal scales with Earth-observing satellite, climate model, conflict event, and human displacement data, and examine how power is embedded in these datasets.
We work across spatial and temporal scales with Earth-observing satellite, climate model, conflict event, and human displacement data, and examine how power is embedded in these datasets.
We collaborate with academics, humanitarian agencies, think tanks, and NGOs. Our work has been published in academic journals and policy reports, and has been funded by NASA Applied Sciences, NASA Land-Cover and Land-Use Change, and National Geographic.
We collaborate with academics, humanitarian agencies, think tanks, and NGOs. Our work has been published in academic journals and policy reports, and has been funded by NASA Applied Sciences, NASA Land-Cover and Land-Use Change, and National Geographic.
Recently...
Recently...
February 2020
February 2020
- We contributed to a group paper on conflict, migration, and climate change -- Empowering mobility when moving isn’t a choice -- published in the FutureEarth publication, Our Future On Earth
January 2020
January 2020
- Lab research led by Paulo Murillo-Sandoval (PhD candidate) was highlighted in Nature, "After Colombia’s civil war ended, so did ‘gunpoint conservation’"
- We have published two new papers this month on post-conflict landscape dynamics, both in Environmental Research Letters:
- The end of gunpoint conservation: Forest disturbance after the Colombian peace agreement (Murillo-Sandoval, Van Dexter, Van Den Hoek, Wrathall, Kennedy)
- Vegetation changes attributable to refugees in Africa coincide with agricultural deforestation (Maystadt, Mueller, Van Den Hoek, van Weezel)
December 2019
December 2019
- Our second paper on forest cover change in Nepal has been published in the Journal of Forest and Livelihood: Mapping and Understanding Changes in Tree Cover in Nepal: 1992 to 2016
- We have launched The Global Refugee Atlas funded by The National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration in collaboration with Bo Zhao
- Conflict Ecology research projects on display at the 2019 American Geophysical Union meeting:
- Breaking Ground: Automating the Detection of Refugee Settlement Establishment and Growth through Landsat and PlanetScope Time Series Analysis with a Case Study in Northern Uganda
- Disaster amidst Conflict: Navigating Disaster Risk Reduction across the Conflict Cycle
- Earth observations to assess SDG 16: monitoring coastal and terrestrial signals of conflict in Gaza using satellite imagery
- The Geography of Exclusion: Assessing Refugee Settlement Presence across Global Remote Sensing-Derived Settlement Datasets
November 2019
November 2019
- Jamon Van Den Hoek co-authored "People and Pixels 20 years later: the current data landscape and research trends blending population and environmental data" in Population and Environment. This article is a result of a PERN webinar in early 2018 titled, "People and Pixels Revisited: 20 years of progress and new tools for population-environment research".
October 2019
October 2019
- Jamon Van Den Hoek presented the commissioned immersive installation, Satellite Disparities, in collaboration with Steve Salembier at the inaugural Sharjah Architecture Triennial in Sharjah, UAE.
September 2019
September 2019
- Jamon Van Den Hoek co-authored new work in Geophysical Research Letters: "Northern Hemisphere atmospheric stilling accelerates lake thermal responses to a warming world"
- Lab research on mapping forest cover change across Nepal was covered in the Nepali Times
- Jamon Van Den Hoek and Laura Peters joined civil servant, academic, and humanitarian practitioners at a recent workshop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: The Effects of Migration on Settlements and Urbanisation in Ethiopia, Uganda, and Sudan.
- Hannah Friedrich presented lab research at the 2019 State of the Map and 2019 Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Summit meetings in Heidelberg, Germany. See videos here!
August 2019
August 2019
- Lab research on mapping forest cover change across Nepal was covered in the Yale e360 article, “In Nepal, Out-Migration Is Helping Fuel a Forest Resurgence”
- Jamon Van Den Hoek was interviewed on the Flash Forward podcast, CRIME: I Can See My House From Here!, about the ethical implications and practical limitations of remote sensing for surveillance and mapping of vulnerable populations
July 2019
July 2019
- Laura Peters co-authored a contributing paper for the UN Global Assessment Report (GAR) 2019, The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction as a vehicle for conflict prevention: Attainable or tenuous?
June 2019
June 2019
- Hannah Friedrich successfully defended her Master's thesis, Breaking Ground: Automating the Detection of Refugee Settlement Establishment and Growth through Landsat Time Series Analysis with a Case Study in Northern Uganda, in front of a packed room. Way to go, Hannah!
- Jamon Van Den Hoek presented on Remote Sensing Principles & Theory for Humanitarian Applications at Harvard Humanitarian Iniatiative's Remote Sensing for Humanitarian Programs Workshop
- The interactive platform on political landscape transformations across Palestine and Israel, Conquer and Divide, produced in collaboration with B'Tselem and Forensic Architecture is online
- Jamon Van Den Hoek joined Adrian Lahoud and Nidhi Mahajan in Wadi Rum, Jordan, in conversation around The Rights of Future Generations as part of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial in collaboration with Columbia University's Studio-X Amman
May 2019
May 2019
- Laura Peters contributed to Chapter 15: Disaster risk reduction strategies in fragile and complex risk contexts in the United Nations Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2019 (GAR19)
- Laura Peters co-authored two recent reports with the UK-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI): Disaster risk reduction in conflict contexts: the state of the evidence and Disaster risk reduction strategies: navigating conflict contexts
April 2019
April 2019
- Jamon Van Den Hoek is the Guest Editor of a special issue in Remote Sensing on "Remote Sensing of Geopolitics"
- Jamon Van Den Hoek was interviewed in The Atlantic on NASA evaluation of value of very high resolution Planet Labs satellite imagery for monitoring landscape change as part of the Mapping the Missing Millions project
- Paulo Murillo-Sandoval was interviewed in The Wall Street Journal about deforestation in Colombia following the recent peace agreement
Older
Older
- The crowdsourced data collection underlying our Mapping the Missing Millions project was featured in Terra magazine
- Jamon Van Den Hoek was interviewed in The Atlantic on using nighttime lights imagery for modeling poverty