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WKU Faculty Member, Students Spend Month In Chile
Bowling Green, Ky. - A Western Kentucky University geography and geology faculty member and two graduate students spent their winter break in Chile working on three research projects.
Dr. John All, an assistant geography professor, was in Chile and parts of Argentina for five weeks for a climate change adaptation project funded by a National Science Foundation grant. Dr. All is looking at the impacts of climate variability and change over the past 30 years on vegetation and agriculture. The goal of the research is to find ways to help society and institutions cope with climate change in a sustainable way. “Chile is really a great area to study,” he said. “It’s got so much variability in a very long, narrow country – this research took me from one of the world’s driest deserts to places where it rains 350 days of the year – all within a few hundred miles of each other.” What he’s learning in Chile can be applied to other developing countries and to regions with similar climate types such as California or the Mediterranean Sea region of Europe. WKU geoscience graduate students Daniel Reeder and Cari Bourette also spent a month in Chile studying globalization and its impact on the environment, sustainability and indigenous people. The students traveled the South American country interviewing fishermen, farmers, environmental NGO’s, industry executives, government officials and native groups. “Winter Term allowed many of our faculty and students to travel internationally for research and courses,” said Department Head David Keeling. “The department offered two study abroad programs, in Tanzania and the Bahamas, with faculty also conducting research in China and Italy.” The department had students and faculty conducting research and taking courses on five of the planet’s seven continents (Asia, Africa, Europe, North America and South America). “Internationalization and student engagement are key to the type of research that Dr. All and his students are doing in Chile,” Dr. Keeling said, “and they are central to the department’s mission of preparing students for success in a global society.”
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