UA GRADUATE STUDENTS FORGING NEW APPROACHES FOR UNDERSTANDING THE DYNAMICS OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - The ongoing debate over global warming illustrates a telling point: the interactions of people with their environment through the centuries are typically complex and always difficult to trace. Rarely are environmental issues confined to national borders.

Yet graduate students and faculty in the Environmental Dynamics, or ENDY Program, in Fulbright College are attempting to trace those connections. In the process, they are revamping the traditional academic curriculum by using technology and by defining new fields of study through innovative combinations of coursework.

Only three core courses are required. Beyond those, students are allowed great freedom in deciding which courses best fit within the area of focus they have chosen for their graduate studies.

Dori Gould, during her research into the evolution of the Roman transportation network in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, became convinced that the multiple viewpoints and the technology she employed to study her subject would not translate well into the bound covers of the traditional printed dissertation. Instead, her dissertation resides on a server at the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies.

She received special permission to post the first fully electronic dissertation at the University. Using Web links, geographic information system models, and navigation tools, she offers her readers numerous threads of meaning to explore. Through the links they follow, they are able to create the version of the dissertation they will read (to view Gould's dissertation, go to http://www.cast.uark.edu/local/dagdiss/home.htm).

"You discover the inherent tensions between a traditional dissertation and the built-in exploration mode of a Web site. Attitudes and available technology helped shape the Roman roads in the same way that attitudes and available technology helped shape the dissertation," said Gould, whose experiment in form mirrors the multidisciplinary nature of her study.

She offers several navigation tools or cognitive maps that allow readers to explore her research by various theoretical routes.

The "Road Universe" contains historical and archaeological information, the "Dissertation Universe" offers links to pages with schools of theory as well as the technology that influenced the dissertation, and the Constellation Navigator offers pages that are linked to both universes. Other icons point to yet other presentations of the material from both linear and multiple points of view.

"Many doctoral programs are an inch wide and a mile deep," said Fred Limp, CAST director. In contrast, students in the ENDY program are expected to know several subjects in depth.

"People trained strictly in one discipline find it hard to step back and look at the larger picture. We recognized that we needed people who can work at the intersection of several disciplines, leaders who can manage or work with teams of scientists from different backgrounds," said Limp.

To examine water quality on Indian reservations in Nebraska, Shelley McGinnis needed expertise in four disciplines: chemistry, to analyze water supplies; sociology, to study the social customs that gave rise to current water systems; anthropology, to look at Native American attitudes toward water issues; and economics, to examine what resources exist for making needed improvements.

"Shelley is rather the epitome of what an ENDY student can be," said geography professor John Dixon. "Her background includes bachelor's and master’s degrees in anthropology, but she has shifted over to assessing water quality to understand other facets of water management."

Michael Garner, a recent graduate, employed sophisticated remote sensing technologies to study a matrix of landscape changes in Johnson County, Arkansas, from evolving economic patterns to the impact agricultural practices have had on forests over the years. Another, Rita Fisher-Carroll, discovered that major 16th-century droughts along the Mississippi and St. Francis Rivers changed the burial and hunting patterns among Native American societies in northeastern Arkansas.

"We have students working in such diverse geographic regions as Jordan, East Africa, Canada, Alaska and the South Central United States," said Director Allen McCartney.

The program began in 1998, based primarily in the departments of anthropology, geography, and geology. Participating faculty are also drawn from the Fulbright departments of biology, history, chemistry and mathematical sciences, the Arkansas Water Resources Center, the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies, and from agriculture and landscape architecture as well.

"As the program grows, we are constantly seeking new combinations of faculty to include, to address the unique focus of each student’s research," says McCartney.

Recent ENDY graduate Michael Garner is at Westark in Fort Smith, where he plans to set up a similar course of study, while Barnali Dixon has a position at the University of South Florida at Tampa. In her research, Dixon developed models to predict the likelihood of groundwater contamination, using "fuzzy logic" and mathematical modeling techniques which she developed at the U of A. Other researchers will be able to use the relatively inexpensive techniques she devised to predict when groundwater resources might become contaminated by agricultural practices.

"What makes this program work is the faculty. At many universities, you would have lots of committee meetings about why such an endeavor wouldn’t work. But here faculty are willing to experiment. They will come together and cooperate, based on a student’s academic interests," said Limp.

The program had 32 students enrolled during 2000-2001, and eight new students entered this fall. With four students already graduated, and three more supported through National Science Foundation enhancement grants for their dissertations, the program is clearly attracting and graduating a new generation of environmental experts.

"Jobs are beginning to appear out there, in the area of human-environmental interaction studies," said John Dixon.

A generation raised with an awareness of ozone thinning and concerned about depleting natural resources takes environmental issues seriously, McCartney said, and demands that solutions be found.

"I see a continually increasing need for us to understand the dynamics of change. We need better science, better policy decisions, and more people who have the breadth of background to make good decisions about managing resources," said McCartney.