Christian Russell
A note of introduction:
Welcome to my webspace. I am a Research Scientist attached to the University of Florida's Land Use and Environmental Change Institute (LUECI), Department of Geography, and am affiliate faculty in the Department of Anthropology . LUECI is a multidisciplinary research center, developed cooperatively by the Departments of Geological Sciences, Geography, Anthropology, and the Center for Latin American Studies. LUECI promotes basic and applied studies of environmental changes associated with natural phenomena (e.g. climate shifts, volcanic eruptions, fire) and human activities (e.g. deforestation, soil erosion, lake eutrophication, pollution, introduction of exotic biota). LUECI also fosters development of courses that address complex interactions among climate, humans, and the environment, especially in tropical and sub-tropical regions.
I specialize in interdiscplinary apporaches to issues of environmental/climatic change and human adaptation to environmental variation. I serve as a liaison in collaborative agreements and negotiations in which political and cultural knowledge is required in dealing with stakeholders with divergent interests. I act as programmatic manager for the Land Use and Environment Change Institute, and as an advisor to senior administrative officials. I monitor, compile, analyze, evaluate, and draft reports on information related to advancements in scientific knowledge and emergent technologies (especially those related to climate science, resource security and management, GIS, and remote-sensing studies), mitigation and adaptation of human populations to climatic change, resource conservation and utilization, sustainable development, indigenous affairs, and the intersection of United States and international policy on these subjects from an interdisciplinary perspective (including historical, sociological, environmental, and political analyses). I advise on programmatic stances, policy options, and resource allocation based on the results of these analyses, and aid in coordinating organizational responses to shifting information regarding climatic change and human response in the academic, private, and public policy realms.
While classically trained as a field archaeologist, I've gravitated toward a more theroetical application of field technique (specifically remotely-sensed information sciences). In addition to assisting various faculty and graduate students with questions regarding both the implementation and integration of hardware and software solutions into their various research areas, I am currently pursuing my own research interests in the Upper Xingu. Some of the more pressing issues facing Amazonian anthropology today revolve around questions of the nature of human-environment interaction, and the impacts of human settlement in non-western tropical settings. The core of my research addresses issues relating to the nature of the landscape transformation that has occurred as a result of long-term prehistoric human occupation of the Upper Xingu region of southern Amazonia, seeking to assess the dynamic interaction of the Xinguano and local environments, and how to quanitfy how they transformed their landscape.
Through the implementation of both hardware and software components of RS and GIS, in addition to more formal archaeological techniques and ethnoarchaeological research methods, I redress antiquated methodological approaches and provide a process allowing more accurate modeling of potentially significant site locations. The paucity of data for this region makes it an excellent candidate for the use of new technologically-informed approaches to researching land use in tropical settings, providing an initial step towards an empirical understanding of landscape formation.
