Research Group -Marion Adeney
Marion Adeney is a current graduate student of Professor Pimm
and Dr. Norm Christensen.
Fire in tropical forests is an issue of both conservation concern and ecological interest. My work addresses fire dynamics from several angles.
As part of my doctoral research I am engaged in two projects.
Fire incidence in protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon:
Fire is associated with land cover change in the humid tropics.
In the Brazilian Amazon, most fires are of anthropogenic origin
and contribute to the degradation of forests and the expansion
of savannas. One measure of the efficiency of protected areas
at preventing land cover change is the incidence of fire within
their boundaries. I am using satellite fire data to evaluate
the extent to which reserves have prevented fire over the past
seven years. Taking into account factors such as size, distance
to roads and land cover type, I am examining whether there are
differences in fire incidence between reserves of different designations,
such as protected areas (national parks, biological stations)
and limited use areas (indigenous reserves, extractive reserves).
Taking regional factors into account, this work will provide
one gauge of the effectiveness of reserves, particularly in areas
under severe development pressure.
Fire and flooding regimes in white sand campinas:
White sand campina and campinarana forests are distinctive vegetation
types that grow on nutrient poor white sand soils, scattered
in patches in humid tropical forests worldwide. Campina patches
are high in endemism and have received relatively little attention
from researchers. Mining for sand, anthropogenic fire, agriculture,
and roads are all immediate threats to these unique areas. With
collaborators from Brazil’s National Institute for Spatial Research
(INPE) and National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA) I
am using satellite imagery to map flooding and fire regimes in
campina areas in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. By correlating
this information with field data on vegetation structure/ composition,
and with data on bird communities, I hope to better understand
how these disturbances affect the ecology and conservation of
campina areas.
Past Work:
As a master’s student at Columbia University in NYC, I worked with
Joshua Ginsberg of the Wildlife Conservation Society. For my
thesis I used mist net and point count data to quantify the effects
of a gradient of burn severity on bird community composition
in a humid lowland rainforest in Sumatra, Indonesia. This work
has been submitted for publication.
E-mail: marion.adeney@duke.edu