Seminar: "Mapping Political Change and Deforestation Since 1500"

Join us at 1 p.m. on March 23 at River Road 325 for this seminar with Freg Stokes, postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany.

The advent of satellite photography and other remote sensing technology has enabled incredibly detailed mapping of the world's forests. But how can we apply these insights to reconstruct forest cover in earlier centuries? 

This talk brings together satellite photography, archival research and collaboration with Indigenous communities to study long-term forest cover changes in South America and elsewhere in the world. The study of commodity flows,  geopolitical dynamics and deforestation since the sixteenth century also offers a different lens to look at forest conservation today.

Speaker Bio

Freg J. Stokes is an Australian historian and postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. He is currently working on a project mapping the relationship between political conflicts, commodity frontiers and deforestation since 1500.