Faculty of the School of Environment and Sustainability Kathleen Bergen and Joshua Newell will provide insight into how logging, fire, and land use has impacted the globally-important forests and landscapes of Russia’s vast Far East. Despite the region’s importance, research to date has not tried to unravel the respective roles of human and natural in these magnificent landscapes. They will also discuss the growing influence of China, largely through trade in resources, on ecosystems in this region.

Associate Research Scientist Kathleen Bergen, PhD, works in the areas of land-cover/land-use change and human dimensions of environmental change. She uses remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS), and geospatial methods to study the drivers and consequences of forest and other land changes. She has worked since 2000 on NASA-supported projects using remote sensing to quantify forest and land change in Siberia and the Russian Far East in the context of changing socio-economic eras. She is lead author of the chapter “Human Dimensions of Environmental Change in Siberia” in Regional Environmental Changes in Siberia and Their Global Consequences, published by Springer, as well as contributor to the international NASA Northern Eurasia Partnership Initiatives (NEESPI and NEFI) science plans.

Joshua Newell is an associate professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. He is a broadly trained human-environment geographer, whose research focuses on questions related to sustainability, resource consumption, and environmental and social justice. He is recognized authority on environmental and resource use issues in the Russian Federation, especially the Russian Far East. Published work in this area has appeared in Eurasian Geography and Economics, Geoforum, and the International Forestry Review, among others, and he has published two reference texts on environment and development in Russia’s Far East. His work is supported by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and private foundations, and he has received a Fulbright Award to study Russian-Chinese-U.S. flows of wood and the environmental sustainability challenges they pose.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to attend this event, please reach out to us at weisercenter@umich.edu at least 2 weeks in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

Photo of a Russian militia inspection point for logging trucks by Joshua Newell.