My research interests focus on land-use and agricultural change, the urban-rural interface, food security, vulnerability and 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. Sustainability is (and has been) at the heart of my research projects. The lessons of the past 20 years’ international negotiations on sustainable development have been very clear; we must meet the intertwined goal of achieving sustainable livelihood and environmental stewardship at the grassroots level. While there have been numerous studies on individual research topics in and outside of academia, it is clear that sustainability science must do more to bridge the gap between academia and applied projects (or science and policy) by effectively translating some of the new developments in sustainability into the real world (e.g., systems thinking, anticipatory assessment, decision tradeoffs) and also by learning from the lessons and experiences of the grassroots level sustainability projects, such as action research, conservation and livelihood, climate change adaptation.

My research projects are ethnographically grounded and are motivated by my theoretically informed commitment to ecological and environmental anthropology as a foundation to study human-environmental relationships, particularly the human dimensions of land-use and land-cover change (LULCC). 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, focusing on the processes and patterns of rapid urbanization and its impacts on community building, agricultural land, desert biomes, and ecosystem services.

Among land change scientists, there is a growing recognition of the need for an integrative, multiscalar approach to study the impact of agricultural land-use strategies on LULCC. This is essentially a call to move beyond the existing LULCC framework, which tends to focus on "conversion" of land-cover (e.g, forest to agriculture). However, compared to the conversion mode of land-cover, land-use “modification” activities are too subtle and dynamic to be detected from ecological studies and remote sensing methods alone. Social scientists with qualitative research expertise and interdisciplinary approach are particularly well equipped to address this need. While I rely on historical facts, ethnographic and survey data, and thick narratives to understand the socio-cultural and economic changes, I strongly support the use of remote sensing and GIS as a "means of matching" to corroborate empirical evidence. Having remote sensing expertise, hence, has helped my research, providing me with a powerful tool to enable analysis and visualization of complex environmental data often hidden from field observations.

I currently am collaborating 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 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 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 a NASA Earth System Sciences Fellowship (Grant no. NNG04GQ16H) and a 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 of “Self-reliant Development of the Poor by the Poor” to support grass-roots 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, and agroforestry. 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, and CECI supported IIDS’s action research programs.