UM Geography Professor and Climate Change Scientist DeFries Wins 'Genius Award'

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation today named Ruth DeFries, an environmental geographer at the University of Maryland who studies how humans are transforming the Earth's surface, as one of its 24 MacArthur Fellows for 2007. DeFries will receive $500,000 in "no strings attached" support over the next five years.

Professor DeFries, who has a joint appointment in the Department of Geography and the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, and the other new fellows "were selected for their creativity, originality and potential to make important contributions in the future," according to a foundation news release.

"The MacArthur Foundation supports highly creative individuals and institutions with the ability and the promise to make a difference in shaping and improving our future," said MacArthur President Jonathan Fanton. "These new MacArthur Fellows, extraordinary men and women of all ages and in many fields, honor and inspire us with their talent, their courage, and their deep commitment."

"The University of Maryland is extremely proud that the MacArthur Foundation has recognized the extraordinary accomplishments and remarkable talent of Professor Ruth DeFries," said University of Maryland President C. D. Mote, Jr. "This award will support her continued investigations of human impact on the earth's ecosystem."

DeFries is an environmental geographer who explores the relationship between the Earth's vegetative cover, human modifications of the landscape, and the biochemical processes that regulate the Earth's habitability, using both satellite data and field work. "I study land cover change and what people are doing to the landscape. I look at the role of land cover changes in climate, in terms of effects on the carbon cycle, as well as the implications for conservation and other services people derive from ecosystems," DeFries explained in a 2006 interview.

"Ruth is an exceptional person and scientist who manages to combine these different areas of science and different approaches to research and do all of them very well, said John Townshend, professor and chair of the Department of Geography.

Defries is a leader in the use of satellite data, or "remote sensing," to help solve one of the greatest uncertainties researchers face when analyzing the world's carbon balance, the extent of tropical deforestation. "She pioneered new satellite methods for measuring deforestation, working with other scientists of course, but she is the first author for all the key papers," Townshend said.

In the past, the deforestation rate had been cobbled together using national statistics on forest cover and coarse-resolution satellite imagery that cannot detect changes finer than the level of individual pixels. Recognizing the limitations of those strategies, DeFries and a team of collaborators developed a more precise approach to mapping land cover that views the landscape as a continuum of land cover characteristics rather than as discrete classes of forests. With this method, DeFries has compiled datasets that have significantly changed the scale and focus of ecosystem research, enhanced her and other researchers' ability to make more plausible projections of future climate change, and contributed to understanding how human activities are altering habitat needed to conserve biodiversity.

At the regional level, she has played a key role in exploring the impact of human-induced changes in land cover, initially focusing on central Africa and moving on to map areas in Southeast Asia and the Brazilian Amazon. Combining expertise with sophisticated satellite-imaging systems, a love of on-the-ground environmental science and a deep understanding of the environmental effects of agriculture and urbanization, DeFries is providing a clearer picture of the processes transforming our planet.

DeFries, who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2006, is co-author, with Cheryl Simon Silver, of One Earth, One Future: Our Changing Global Environment, published in 1990. In 2004, she edited the book Ecosystem and Land Use Change, published by the American Geophysical Union. DeFries is the executive editor of Environment magazine, a "peer-reviewed magazine that analyzes the problems, places, and people where environment and development come together, illuminating concerns from the local to the global."

DeFries co-teaches the undergraduate course "Cause and Implications of Global Change," which integrates physical, chemical, geological and biological sciences with geographical, economic, sociological and political knowledge. She also teaches upper level undergraduate and graduate classes.

DeFries received a B.A. (1976) from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. (1980) from Johns Hopkins University. She was a research scientist (1980-1983) at the India Institute of Technology in Bombay and senior project officer (1987-1991) at the National Research Council.

For more information about Ruth DeFries and her work see:

IMPACT profile on Professor DeFries

Large-Scale Farming Causes Substantial Forest Loss in Amazon

A Conversation with UM's Ruth DeFries, Newly Elected to the National Academy of Sciences

Maryland-Led Research Revises Estimates of Tropical Deforestation

UM Research Points the Way to Better Monitoring of National and Global Deforestation