Woods Hole Research Center

Education and international collaboration are central to the mission of the Woods Hole Research Center. Our Visiting Scholars Program has welcomed researchers from around the world, particularly from Brazil and the former Soviet Union, since the late 1980s. During a residency at the Center, the scholars work with WHRC staff on projects of mutual interest. The scholars are also encouraged to consider potential future collaborative projects with WHRC scientists, and are assisted in traveling to develop contacts and collaborations in the academic and scientific community throughout the United States.

The Center’s Russian Visiting Scholar’s Program, a key part of the overall Scholar’s Program, is currently funded by a grant from the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

(Scholars are listed alphabetically by last name. Unless otherwise noted, biographies are current as of Center residency.)

Ane Auxiliadora Costa Alencar (Spring-Summer 1997) is a geographer and researcher with Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM), based in Belém, Pará, Brazil. Her research involves the use of remote sensing techniques and geographic information systems to map the extent, nature, cause and history of fire in the Amazon region. In recent projects, she has worked with Landsat images to detect land cover changes in a century-old secondary forest agricultural frontier. During her six months at the Center, she tested the utility of radar imagery to distinguish different types of forest disturbance and the age of secondary forest for the purpose of quantifying biomass.

Vladislav Alexeyev (Spring 1996; Spring1997; Fall 1997) is a Senior Scientist in the Forest Ecology Laboratory of the Sukachev Forest Research Institute in Krasnoyarsk, Russia. He worked in the Center's RS/GIS lab extensively to convert his data on Russian forest area, forest stature, and forest growth rates into a spatially explicit form suitable for use in a GIS. While visiting the Center in 1996, Alexeyev traveled with Woods Hole Research Center scientist T.A. Stone to the University of New Hampshire to write a joint proposal with a UNH forest ecologist and colleagues at the U.S. Forest Service office in Durham that was submitted to NSF. The proposal was to examine with satellite data and field work an extensive area of forest decline in the Kemerovo region of central Siberia that is likely due to air pollution. Since then, Alexeyev has conducted preliminary fieldwork in this region.

Valerio Avitabile (Fall 2006) is a forest ecologist. While at the Center, he developed new methods for mapping biomass in Africa using satellite imagery. He is currently working in the land cover mapping unit at the Istituto Agronomico per l'Oltremare (IAO) in Florence, Italy, where he is involved in the CARBO-AFRICA project, funded by the European Commission. The goal of the project is to monitor greenhouse gas fluxes in Africa using a multi-disciplinary approach to quantify, understand and predict GHG emissions in sub-Saharan Africa. His residency may serve as a starting point for a longer collaboration with the Center on biomass and carbon studies in tropical Africa.

Andréa Azevedo (Winter-Spring 2007) is working toward her doctorate on an evaluation of a system of environmental licensing of rural properties in Mato Grosso, Brazil. Her research centers on why illegal deforestation has continued despite recent efforts of licensing systems and on ways to make those systems more effective. Her research is funded through grants from the Brazilian government and a public research foundation. She is president of a local NGO which entitles her to a seat on the environmental council of the state of Mato Grosso and also teaches at the university Faculdade Sul do Mato Grosso.

Lisia Vanacor Barroso (Fall 1990) is working with the municipality of Niteroi, near Rio de Janeiro, on land use planning. She is a researcher for the Brazilian Institute for Environment and Natural Resources and has presented her research prepared at the Woods Hole Research Center at various symposia in Brazil.

José Heder Benatti (Spring 1996; 2002-2003) is an attorney with a master's degree in Law and Environmental Legislation from the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), Brazil, where he is also a professor of agrarian law. His master's thesis discusses various forms of land possession including agroecologic possession and describes the land possession of rubber tappers and the descendents of escaped African slaves in the Amazon region. Mr. Benatti is currently a doctoral student at the Center for Advanced Studies of the Amazon (NAEA/UFPA) and a researcher at Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM). His doctoral research focuses on the juridical role of rural property in the 21st century, especially in the Amazon. While at the Center, he analyzed the influence of international conventions on biodiversity, global warming, and forests in relation to property acquisition in the Amazon.

Alexander Bondarev (Winter 1995; Fall 1996) is a Forest Ecologist at the Sukachev Forest Research Institute in Krasnoyarsk, Russia. He is an expert on the northernmost forests in the Taimyr Peninsula. While at the Center, he prepared his research results and planned more fieldwork in the Taimyr. His efforts resulted in a paper entitled, "Age Distribution Patterns in Open Boreal Dahurican Larch Forests of Central Siberia," which was published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management. During his visit, he met with forestry faculty at the University of Toronto to discuss future collaboration.

Silvio Brienza, Jr. (Spring 1994) holds a master's degree in plant nutrition and is a scientist at the Brazilian federal research agency EMBRAPA/CPATU, located in Belém, Pará, Brazil. He is one of the leading Amazon authorities on agroforestry production systems. While at the Center, he studied the effect of trees on soil fertility together with Dr. Eric Davidson.

Gina Cardinot (Fall 2000) holds a master's degree in ecology from UnB (Universidade de Brasília) and is a researcher with IPAM (Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia) based in Santarém, Pará, Brazil. She is currently working at the Center’s two experimental rainfall exclusion sites: the Amazonian forest ecosystem near Santarém, and the arid Cerrado near Brasilia. Her research in plant-soil-water relations involves measurements such as sap flow, leaf water potential, and leaf area index. She is attempting to better understand the level of water stress at which rainforest and cerrado vegetation begin to make physiological modifications, incur physiological damage, and die. During her time at the Center, she worked with staff members on advancing the data analysis on her project, and began her doctoral research proposal.

Oswaldo de Carvalho, Jr., (Fall 1996) is an animal ecologist, and holds an M.S. in environmental studies from UFPa in Brazil. In addition to studying primates, he conducted a survey of mammals at the Center’s study site in Paragominas. There, he discovered that this forest fragment still contains a surprisingly large number of large mammal species. During his visit to Woods Hole, Mr. Carvalho developed a research proposal to evaluate the effect of ground fires on Amazonia forests, which will serve as the basis for his doctoral dissertation.

Viacheslav Cherkashin (Spring 1993) is a Senior Research Associate at the Sukachev Forest Research Institute, Krasnoyarsk, Russia. A GIS expert, he is currently working with the Krasnoyarsk satellite receiving station to develop methods to map forests, study insect outbreaks, monitor urban pollution and evaluate the productivity of natural systems. In addition, he collaborates with the U.S. Forest Service to develop new methods to understand Siberian forests.

Samantha Caramori (Spring – Summer 2009) worked with Eric Davidson, Kate Bulygina, Kathleen Savage, and Sudeep Samanta. They collected soils from Harvard Forest and studied some enzymes produced by micro-organisms during the breakdown of organic matter. The studies tested b-glucosidase and phenol oxidase activities at five different temperatures and studied changes in enzyme behavior in terms of velocity and affinity.

Luciana Miranda Costa (Spring 1996; 2002-2003) is a professor in the communication department of the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), in Belém, Pará, Brazil, where she received a master's degree in developmental planning. During her 1996 visit to WHRC, Ms. Costa worked on her master's thesis on agrarian conflicts in Amazonia. In 1999, this thesis received second place at the Center for Advanced Studies of the Amazon (NAEA/UFPA). Ms. Costa is currently working toward a doctorate and analyzing her field data concerning the education and outreach programs of Brazilian governmental and non-governmental organizations for the prevention of forest fires. Her perspective as a resident, educator, and journalist from the Amazon frontier adds an important dimension to the Center's Amazon Scenarios Project.

Joan Mora Crespo (Fall 2002) is a doctoral student at Girona University (Spain) and works at the Spanish Scientific Research Council laboratory in Blanes, Costa Brava. He is studying land-use change on the Costa Brava, and is mapping that area using the Center's publication Losing Cape Cod as a guide. The Costa Brava's similarities to the Cape include a comparable year-round population, a seasonal economy heavily influenced by tourism, problems with growth, and a decline in forest cover. His goal is to develop new management tools to assess environmental changes in the coastal zone by developing a GIS-based comparison between Cape Cod and the Costa Brava.

Sergey Davidov (Spring 2010) is the co-founder of the Northeast Science Station near Cherskiy, Siberia. He is interested in the impact of climate change (past, present, and future) on Arctic ecosystems. He has lived year-around in the Siberian Arctic for over 20 years.

Anna Davidova (Spring 2010) manages the analytical facilities at the Northeast Science Station near Cherskiy, Siberia. While at the Woods Hole Research Center, she worked with analytical instruments that are identical to several that had recently been acquired for her laboratory in Siberia. The training and experience that she received at the WHRC will help insure that the Northeast Science Station’s laboratories continue to operate smoothly as the facility is expanded.

Olivier Desmet (Winter 2004) came from the Republic of Congo to expand his knowledge of remote sensing techniques for improving forest management. Olivier has been working since 2000 to improve forest management practices at the CIB logging company in the Republic of Congo, managing their Reduced Impact Logging Program.

Manuel Ferreira (Spring – Summer 2009) completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Woods Hole Research Center. He collaborated on the NASA-funded project “Impacts of Land-Use Change on Water Resources in the Brazilian Cerrado.” He conducted numerical analysis of the influence of land cover changes on the water resources of the Araguaia River system using satellite land cover and computer models

Dr. Evgeniy Gladyshev (Summer 2000) is a member of the Territorial Committee on Natural Resources and a remote-sensing specialist at the Far East Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has studied statistical comparisons between Russian and U.S. high and low resolution data with a special emphasis on developing methods for mapping vegetation cover classes from moderate-resolution Russian data. During his stay in Woods Hole, Gladyshev worked on the analysis of both high and low resolution satellite data of the Russian Far East. Gladyshev also prepared for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) exam as a pre-requisite for admission to graduate school. Evgeniy is now a Post-Doc at the Meselson Lab at Harvard University.

Gustavo Hees de Negreiros (Spring 1993; Spring 1995) is a Brazilian geographer who is mapping the distribution of deeply-rooted forests of the Amazon Basin using remotely-detected canopy seasonality and drought intensity. The map he developed while at the Center is part of a larger manuscript published in Nature, and this work will form his doctoral dissertation. He has played a key role in contesting the poorly designed kaolin mine planned for the Capim River region of northeastern Amazonia.

Vadim Kirichenko (Fall 2004) is a GIS expert at the Kamchatka League of Independent Experts in Petropavlosk. He has 15 years of fieldwork experience. While here, he worked to update vegetation maps of Kamchatka using satellite imagery and explored possibilities for additional collaborations. His travels here were co-hosted by the Big Sky Conservation Institute of Missoula, Montana. During his visit, Vadim attended a Society for Conservation GIS conference and received training in ESRI's ArcView software.

Boris Klimushin (Spring 1993) is a forestry database expert at the Sukachev Forest Research Institute, Krasnoyarsk, Russia.

Alexander B. Latyntzev (Spring 1993) is a highly skilled programmer who worked in the fire monitoring and modeling laboratory of Anatoly Sukhinin at the Sukachev Institute. He uses Russian and US satellite data to monitor fire, predict its path, and direct the operations of Russian aerial fire-fighting efforts.

Gennady Alexandrovich Lazarev (Winter 2003) has worked at the Kamchatka Forest Experimental Station since 1981 and has been the director of that station since 1990. He is a lecturer at four Kamchatka institutes and universities in ecology, general biology, biogeography, environmental studies, and soil biology. His research goals while at the Center were to define, identify, acquire, and ground true satellite imagery for Kamchatka forests. He hopes to identify primary conifer forests which have been untouched by logging and fire and to collect basic data about the locations of logging, fire, and other anthropogenic impacts, as well as secondary forests within "Conifer Island," the main conifer section of the Kamchatka Peninsula.

Alexander Lioubimov (Spring 1996) is a member of the Forestry Faculty of the St. Petersburg Forest Technical Academy in St. Petersburg, Russia. While at the Center, the focus of his work was to evaluate the forest inventory system of the Russian Federation as the basis for spatial accuracy assessment of forest resources. While here, he attended the 2nd International Symposium on Spatial Accuracy in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences and presented a paper jointly authored with Center scientist T.A. Stone entitled "A Forest Inventory System of the Russian Federation as the Basis for Spatial Accuracy Assessments of Forest Resources." As a result of this presentation, he was invited to the Michigan Technical University to discuss joint research programs which will likely involve exchange opportunities for Russian and American students.

Peter Litinsky (Fall 1999) is an expert on old growth forests and in the decline in regional forests due to ore smelting activities along the Finno-Russian border of the Russian territory of Karelia. While in Woods Hole, Dr. Litinsky used new data to continue his studies of forest decline in Karelia. He created maps of old growth forests and maps showing the increase in forest decline near the Kostomushka smelter along the Finnish border. He improved a GIS software package that he created in Russia and produced an English language companion user manual. He will use this package with IDRISI for teaching at his post at the Forest Research Institute in Petrozavodsk.

Urbano Lopes da Silva, Jr., (Winter-Summer 2000) is a mathematical ecologist and holds a M.Sc. in fisheries ecology. As a researcher at Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM), he has been concerned with the chaotic behavior of species population dynamics and modeling the energy flow in the Amazon floodplain food webs. During his Center residency, he worked on the Amazon fire risk model, developing a map of maximum plant available water (MPAW) for the Brazilian Amazon using advanced geostatistical analysis. He is currently focusing on a scenarios-generator model to track the environmental impacts of road paving in the Amazon.

Maxim Markov (Winter 2005) Maxim is with the Federal St. Petersburg Forest Research Institute. He has significant experience in Russian forestry practices, and he regularly makes field trips for ecological research to experimental forestry enterprises in the Leningrad, Pskov, Novgorod, Murmansk, Kirov and Caucasus regions. His current research is investigating air pollution damage to forests in Karelia near the Finnish border with Russia. While visiting the Center, he traveled to private and public forests in Massachusetts and Maine with colleagues from the New England Forestry Foundation. He was provided with a laptop computer and a GPS unit, several Landsat satellite images as well as funds to continue his research in the forests of Karelia. Recently, he successfully defended his doctoral thesis (aspirantura) about climate change and forest productivity.

Marli Maria Mattos (Spring 1994) holds a master's degree in plant genetics and coordinates the educational efforts of the Center's Amazon program. Together with Dr. Daniel Nepstad of the Center's staff and Ima Vieira, she developed a series of illustrated handbooks in Portuguese, which are now part of the forestry curriculum at two universities and has been distributed to more than 1000 users. At the Center, she developed a course in fire prevention by small-scale farmers.

Paola Mekui (Summer 2004) visited WHRC to further the development of a forest monitoring system for the Minkebé National Park in Gabon. Paola works with the World Wildlife Fund on protection and management of the Park, and used her time at WHRC to learn how satellite remote sensing and GIS can be applied to conservation in the region. Her trip was sponsored by the Central Africa Program for the Environment (CARPE).

Ana Cristina Mendes de Oliveira (Fall 1996) is an animal ecologist. She conducted her thesis research at the Center's study site in Paragominas, where she examined the role of the black tamarin in dispersing tree seeds from primary forest into secondary forest. During her visit to the Center, she prepared for her field research on the management of wild game species by the farm community of Rio Gelado. This work will be part of IPAM's larger project to help this farm community develop an integrated management plan for the mahogany-rich forests. She hopes to use this study for her doctoral dissertation.

Maria de Lurdes Mendonça Santos (Summer 1992) has published with Dr. Foster Brown of the Center's staff and has presented papers at the Brazilian Symposium on Remote Sensing. Her talk on teaching local residents how to use satellite images to map their lands was applauded as a pioneer effort.

Elsa Renee Huaman Mendoza (Fall 2000) is a Peruvian working on the effects of fire on forests and agricultural systems in southwestern Amazonia as a research assistant with the Institute of Environmental Research for Amazônia - IPAM. She completed her undergraduate degree in forestry in Peru and is now finishing her M.Sc. degree in Ecology and Natural Resource Management at the Federal University of Acre. She also advises the State Government of Acre in Brazil on fire monitoring and management. During her stay in Woods Hole, she analyzed the factors that cause western Amazonian forests to become vulnerable to fire. In the El Niño year of 1998, forests in Acre became especially vulnerable to fire due to reduced rainfall. She is also working to develop early warning indicators that can predict where and when forests become vulnerable to fire.

Nikolay Minko (Spring 2001) is an atmospheric physicist at the Institute of Solar Terrestrial Physics in Irkutsk, Russia, where he produces AVHRR satellite fire maps for central and far eastern Russia. In Woods Hole, he examined high and low-resolution satellite data of fires in eastern Russia. He was invited to NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., to attend the 11th Russian/U.S. Earth Sciences Working Group meeting where he presented his research on forest fires in the Russian Far East. He also traveled to New York City to meet with representatives of private funding agencies, and he presented papers and posters at the International Beacon Satellite Symposium at Boston College.

Paulo Roberto Moutinho (Fall-Winter 1996; Fall 1997) is a co-founder of IPAM and was IPAM's first executive director. He holds a doctorate in Ecology from Unicamp (Universidade Estadual de São Paulo, Campinas), and recently finished writing his dissertation on the biogeochemical influence of leaf cutter ants on soil and secondary forest growth.

Grace Nangendo (Fall 2006), is a forest ecologist currently employed by Wildlife Conservation Society Uganda. She has training in natural resource management, GIS and remote sensing, with interests in the dynamics of forest-woodland mosaics. She is working with the Center on conservation issues in the Albertine rift region. During her stay. she worked on developing new methods to map vegetation cover change for the northern part of the Albertine rift valley.

Igor Olennikov, Buryatia (March 2003; June 2003) He is from Russia's southeast Siberian region of Buryatia (on the Mongolian border) and holds a doctorate of Geography from the East Siberian University of Technology in Ulan Ude. His area of specialization is geoecology, and he has been working in the office of the Chair of the Department of Ecology at the University since 1996. His professional interests concern practical questions of environment and sustainable development of Lake Baikal region territories using GIS and remote sensing technologies. He has experience with the US Tahoe-Baikal Institute and was a member of the geography faculty of Buryatia State University from 1989-1994. He has worked extensively as a consultant to the Buryat Regional Department (BRD) on Lake Baikal in preserving unique boreal ecosystems of that territory, authoring maps estimating human impacts in southern boreal forest ecosystems. He is currently developing remotely sensed analyses for Protection of the Trans-Baikal Territory, a BRD project partly funded by the former W. Alton Jones Foundation.

Vincent Paul Onana (Summer 2004) visited the Research Center to discuss collaboration on monitoring of the coastal forests of Cameroon using radar imagery. Dr Onana is an Associate Professor at the University of Douala (Cameroon) and a radar expert. A proposal to support the work is planned.

Mikhail (Misha) Paltsyn (November 2005) is the director of the non-profit organization, Arkhar NGO, of the Altai Republic, Russia, a group working for the conservation of two highly endangered species, the snow leopard and Argali, a central Asian big horn sheep. He has a master's degree in zoology and ecology from Moscow State University. While at the Woods Hole Research Center, Misha acquired satellite images to help in the study of range degradation in Altai argali habitats due to intensive livestock grazing. The images will also be used to look for possible habitats of the highly endangered snow leopard. While in Washington D.C., he met with representatives of the Nature Conservancy, WWF-USA, International Snow Leopard Trust, Snow Leopard Conservancy, Denver Zoological Foundation, WildAid, International Fund for Animal Welfare, Wild Land Security, and the Foundation for Altai Sustainable Development. He provided the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) with information about his region and has proposed to do snow leopard research in the Argut River Basin, one of the most important snow leopard regions in the Altai-Sayan region. He is also planning to work with WCS to create a larger project for Altai argali and snow leopard conservation in Altai Republic, Russia.

Francisco de Paula (Fall 1990) is currently finishing his Ph.D. thesis studying the Praia do Sul Biological Reserve, one of the few pristine ecosystems remaining along the Atlantic coast of Brazil. He integrates field studies in this work through the use of satellite imagery and Geographic Information Systems. As a visiting scholar, he evaluated the radioactive exposure to consumers of Brazil nut consumption.

Cássio Alves Pereira (Fall 1996) holds a BS in agronomy and directs, together with Toby McGrath, IPAM's "Forests and Communities" program in Brazil. Mr. Pereira's work is addressing the critical question of how slash and burn agriculture can be changed to depend less on the clearing of primary forest. He has developed a novel approach to on-farm agricultural research, and 22 Rio Capim farmers have now established experimental plots that employ the technology that he developed.

Valeria Perreira (Winter 1991) is working on her master's thesis on environmental planning in the Brazilian Amazon at the University of New Hampshire, and is on leave from the Technological Foundation of the State of Acre, Brazil. Her work as a scholar focused on the use of satellite imagery to estimate the size of family clearings of rubber tappers.

Ivan de Oliveira Pires (Fall 1989) is director of the Laboratory of Remote Sensing in the Institute of Geosciences of the Federal Fluminense University, where he coordinates a study for ecological and economic zoning in Amazon regions. In a collaborative effort, he and Woods Hole Research Center scientists Foster Brown and Daniel Nepstad published an article on land use and carbon storage in extractive reserves in the journal, Environmental Conservation. He is engaged in studies of mapping the remaining Atlantic Coastal Forest in the State of Rio de Janeiro.

Claudia Azevedo-Ramos (Fall-Winter 1996) is Professor of Behavioral Ecology in the Center for Human Sciences at the Universidade Federal do Pará, and Coordinator of the collaborative agreement between the University (UFPa) and the Center. She received her Ph.D. through Campinas, and conducted her dissertation on tadpole community ecology in an Amazonian savanna, including Bufo marinus, an exceptionally large toad that is native to Amazonia, and has been introduced (and become a pest) in Australia. During her stay at the Center, she worked on a proposal to evaluate the effects of Amazonian land use on amphibians. These creatures are particularly vulnerable to environmental impoverishment and have been in decline around the world, but have not been systematically studied in Amazonia.

Sergio Luiz de Medeiros Rivero (Fall-Winter 2001-2002) is an economist and an assistant professor of macroeconomics in the Economics Department at the Federal University of Rondônia (UNIR), in Porto Velho, Rondônia, Brazil. He holds a master's degree in production engineering, specializing in artificial intelligence, from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil). Sergio's primary interest lies in the modeling of socio-economic systems using artificial adaptive agents. As a visiting scholar, he modeled the dynamics of land-use change in Amazonia using agent-based models as part of his doctoral research at the Núcleo de Altos Estudos Amazônicos, Federal University of Pará. His perspective as a native, resident, and educator from one of the most rapidly developing Amazon frontiers, and his expertise as an economist, add an important dimension to the Center's Amazon Scenarios Project.

Boris Romanyuk (Spring 1997) is a Senior Researcher at The Research Institute for Forest Management, St. Petersburg, Russia. He came to the Center for an extended stay in early 1997, where he continued his research on landscape approaches to forest management, planning, and protection. More recently, Boris has become the scientific director of the WWF-supported Pskov Model forest (near the Latvian Border). At the project, Boris has introduced new principles for forest inventory that have been developed by the Northwest Forest Inventory Enterprise based on ecological landscape planning. This approach is new in Russian forestry practices, so the Project experts have done a great deal of work to adapt the main elements of landscape forest planning to local conditions.

Henrique Oliveira Sawakuchi (Spring 2009) was a visiting masters student of Laboratório de Análise Ambiental e Geoprocessamento. Centro de Energia Nuclear na Agricultura, Universidade de São Paulo, Piracicaba. He studied the influence of land cover changes on the water resources of the Araguaia River system using satellite land cover analysis and computer models with Manuel Ferreira and Michael Coe.

Britaldo Soares-Filho (Fall 2002; Spring 2003; Fall 2006; Spring 2009) is a geographer and modeler. He has studied Amazon land-use patterns for the last 12 years, developing computer programs that simulate land-use change. He is a professor at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, where his teaching interests include ecosystem dynamics and modeling and digital cartography, and director of the Universidade's Center for Remote Sensing. He is also a Visiting Scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center. He earned his doctorate in Spatial Analysis from the Universidade de São Paulo in 1998. He also holds a master's in remote sensing from the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais. His interests focus on landscape dynamics modeling, especially the development of land use change simulation models and their applications to environmental assessment and regional planning in the Amazon region and elsewhere. In this way, his research consists in modeling scenarios of land-use and cover change for the Amazon basin and Brazil to assess future impacts on climate, biodiversity, natural resources, and regional economy. In addition, Dr. Soares-Filho develops economic studies for REDD markets and spatial analyses and modeling applied to various environmental studies, such as forest fire, urban dynamics, carbon fluxes, and land-use rents. A major product of his research consists of DINAMICA EGO software a platform for environmental modeling (www.csr.ufmg.br/dinamica).

Valentin Spektor (Fall 2007) is a scientist at the Melnikov Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk, Siberia. He studies many different aspects of permafrost, including its evolution and carbon content. He has also been a faculty member in the Polaris Project field course in Siberia (www.thepolarisproject.org).

Anya Suslova (spring 2008) is an undergraduate student at Yakutsk State University in Yatutsk, Siberia. She first met WHRC scientist Max Holmes in 2003 when she was 13 years old, and then became a key part of the Student Partners Project (insert some link here). During her time as a Visiting Scholar, she traveled to Washington DC for a scientific conference and to give a presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Suslova also traveled to Alaska to meet with the Director and staff of the Yukon River Intertribal Watershed Council. During Summer 2008, she participated in the Polaris Project field course in Siberia (www.thepolarisproject.org).

Michael Tarasov (Fall 1997) is a graduate student working with The Research Institute for Forest Management, St. Petersburg, Russia. He is constructing a portable field system for measuring CO2 respiration from soils. This "CO2 backpack" will significantly improve his and his colleagues' ability to conduct research in this area. Mr. Tarasov will return to Russia to begin a field program to study below-ground respiration and the decomposition of large dead woody components of the forest floor in the region of St. Petersburg and the Karelian Isthmus.

M. Angélica Toniolo (Summer 1997) is a Research Associate of IPAM. She graduated in the spring of 1998 from the Center for International Development Research at Duke University, with a master’s degree in International Development Policy with an emphasis on environmental issues. Her master’s thesis analyzed agricultural evolution in the Amazon over the last three decades and recommended policies for the sector. She has been working in the Brazilian Amazon region since 1989, mostly with small farmers, studying their production systems and performing analysis on ecological-economic impacts of their agricultural activities. During her time at the Center, Angélica analyzed data from this fieldwork with the advice of Dr. Eric A. Davidson and Dr. Daniel Nepstad and prepared a paper for publication.

Patricia Torres Cañabate (Fall 2006) is a doctoral student at the University of Jaén in Andalusia, Spain. She obtained a fellowship from the Ministry of Education and Science of Spain to spend three months at the Center, learning techniques in our soils laboratory applicable to her dissertation research, entitled "Nitrogen retention in pinsapo-fir (Abies pinsapo) forest floor along a gradient of N deposition." She is interested in discovering why much of the nitrogen in the rain seems to stay in the soil of fir forests rather than being leached off into groundwater and streams, and under what conditions more or less of this nitrogen is retained in the soil.

Ima Celia Vieira (Spring 1993) is an ecologist at the Goeldi Museum in Belém in northeastern Amazonia. She is studying the upland forests of the region and the impacts of land use on loss of plant species. Her doctoral research focused on determining those plant species threatened with extinction in the wake of slash and burn agriculture. At the Woods Hole Research Center she measured rates of forest clearing and regrowth in the Zona Bragatina, the oldest agricultural landscape in Amazonia.

Alexandra Volokitina (Fall 1998), of the Sukachev Forest Research Institute in Krasnoyarsk, central Siberia, is an internationally known expert on forest fires in Russia. Specifically, she works to develop forest fuel maps that predict fire severity and growth when combined with meteorological data. She is a graduate of the Arkhangelsk Forest Technical Institute and did post-graduate research at the Moscow Forest Technical Institute. She has worked at the Arkhangelsk Forest and Forest-Chemistry Institute and at the Institute of Forests of the Russian Academy of Sciences. She studies forest fire ecology, vegetation fuel classification and mapping, forest fire management, and the carbon budget of forests.

Nikita Zimov (Fall 2008) is director of Pleistocene Park, a whole-ecosystem experiment to investigate the impact of large herbivores on the land cover and carbon balance of the Siberian Arctic. While a visiting scholar, he traveled to San Francisco to present his research at the world’s largest meeting of earth scientists, the conference of the American Geophysical Union.

Sergey Zimov (Fall 2009) is the director of the Northeast Science Station in Cherskiy, Siberia. He has studied many aspects of the Arctic, including boreal forest, tundra, lakes and streams, and the coastal ocean. He is particularly interested in the potential positive feedbacks from the Arctic to global climate change and has published many high impact papers on this topic.