My research interests focus on land-use and agricultural change, the urban-rural interface, food and livelihood security, vulnerability/adaptation, local knowledge and institution, and mountain communities. These essentially reflect my background in environmental anthropology, agricultural sustainability, and community-based conservation and development policies.

I apply anthropological knowledge and methods to study land-use/cover change and decision-making at the household and the community level. While most of my research projects have been in the Nepal Himalaya, I have expanded my research in the US Southwest in the last three years, studying the sustainability implications of the human modifications of urban land-use due to rapid urbanization/sprawl, suburbanization or exurbanization, particularly in socio-cultural and ecological landscapes along the urban-rural gradients. The urban-rural gradients research, which exemplifies the complexity of agriculture-environment relationships, is an emerging field of interdisciplinary inquiry, which will be even more critical in the future, as 70 percent of the world’s population is expected to live in the urban centers by 2050. An increasing number of ecologists and social scientists are now systematically examining not only how urbanization affects the local ecosystem functions and services, but how it also influences the growing tele-connections between the urban centers and rural areas for ensuring various ecosystem services, including food provisioning and disposal. Whether in the urban-rural fringes of the Phoenix Metropolitan Area or in the Himalaya, this urban-rural intersection provides a fascinating case to study the socio-ecological consequences of land-use decision making and land-cover change. However, compared to conversion of land-cover (e.g., forest to settlement), modification of land-use is too subtle and dynamic to be detected from ecological and remote sensing methods alone. Social scientists with an interdisciplinary approach are particularly well equipped to address this need. My interdisciplinary approach in combining qualitative and survey research with remote sensing application has been quite useful in interdisciplinary research projects.

I currently collaborate with several colleagues from other universities in the US as well as in Nepal to study two research projects:  (1) land change along the rural-urban gradients in Nepal and in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area; and (2) the impact of climate change in the mountains (e.g. melting glaciers, adaptation and vulnerability, mountain agriculture, and migration). In the past, I have secured grant support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), Ford Foundation, World Bank and USAID.

My research projects:

SOCIOECOLOGICAL GRADIENTS AND LAND FRAGMENTATION IN THE US SOUTHWEST: A CROSS-SITE COMPARATIVE STUDY
This research project was part of my post-doctoral work with the Central Arizona – Phoenix Long-term Ecological Research Program (CAP LTER). My main focus was to analyze the patterns and drivers of land fragmentation in the select sites using social data, remote sensing images, and landscape metrics. Land fragmentation is a major concern in rapidly urbanizing cities of the Southwest, mostly caused by discontinuous, low-density development over the last few decades. It has negative consequences for socio-ecological systems through disconnecting habitat, destroying migration corridors, increasing costs of public service provision, and increasing transportation distances from home to work. This cross-LTER site research initiative funded by the National Science Foundation (Grant # DEB-0423704) examined land fragmentation across the five cities and metropolitan areas associated with the Central Arizona-Phoenix (Phoenix, Arizona), Sevilleta (Albuquerque, New Mexico), Jornada (Las Cruces, New Mexico), Short Grass Steppe (Fort Collins, Colorado), and Konza Prairie (Manhattan, Kansas) Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites.

SMALLHOLDERS, MOUNTAIN AGRICULTURE AND LAND CHANGE
My dissertation: Smallholders, Mountain Agriculture and Land Change in Lamjung District, Nepal integrated ethnographic and spatially-explicit survey data with remote sensing and GIS applications to study: (a) the household conditions and community contexts under which mountain smallholders change their agricultural land-use strategies, and (b) how their land-use strategies are linked to the district scale land-cover change patterns identified from multi-temporal (1976, 1984, 1990, 1994, 1999 and 2003) Landsat images. Although I targeted a particular culture and place—Gurungs living in the foothills of the Mt. Annapurna range—, my findings contributed to the general relationships underlying subsistence behavior of mountain smallholders, livelihoods and food security, their dependence on land and forest resources, and the extent to which their behaviors are historically influenced by the changes in demography, livelihoods, local economy, and institutions. This research was funded by the NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant (BCS 0350127) and my graduate training leading up to this research was supported through NASA Earth System Sciences Fellowship (Grant no. NNG04GQ16H) and University of Georgia Graduate School Dissertation Completion Award.

SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND VULNERABILITY IN NEPAL
I conducted this study back in 1999-2000 with the support from the Robert McNamara Fellowship of the World Bank. The study was based on the extensive fieldwork conducted in 25 different villages in five different districts dispersed across Nepal. It explored the complex relationships between land stress, forest resource degradation, food deficit and vulnerability and also analyzed the coping and adaptation strategies of these groups to offset the adverse impact. In this study I first characterized the systemic nature of social exclusion and its empirical evidence in the context of land and natural resource management in Nepal. Secondly, I contextualized the notion of social exclusion to explain why the impact of land stress and forest resources degradation are experienced differently by social excluded groups, particularly why some groups manage to respond to land stress and forest degradation better than others.

ACTION RESEARCH PROGRAMS: COMMUNITY-BASED CONSERVATION AND DEVELOPMENT
Earlier in my career, I worked at the Institute of Integrated Development Studies (IIDS)--a leading research organization--in Nepal. IIDS implements action research programs, which are based on the concept “Self-reliant Development of the Poor by the Poor” to support the grass-roots level institutions created by marginal and socially excluded groups. Depending on the needs and priorities identified by these institutions, the programs implement a wide range of participatory activities to support livelihoods, including community forestry, savings, micro-credit lending, food security, agroforestry, and so forth. These action research programs provided me with the opportunities to learn about rural livelihoods and local institutions, which I believe prepared me for further training in international development and eventually in anthropology. Several donor agencies, including the USAID, HELVETAS, SNV, CECI and so forth supported IIDS’s action research programs.