New Direction in Environmental Anthropology

Human dimensions research addresses the working of social systems that manage environmental resources, market, property right regimes, treatises, legal and informal norms, and so forth, and potential to modify those institutions through policy and thus to mitigate global change or increase adaptive capability. Key research priorities for the first decades of the twenty-first century are:

1. Understanding the social determinants of environmentally significant consumption.
2. Understanding the sources of technological change.
3. Making climate prediction more regionally relevant and accurate.
4. Improving how human populations can better respond to environmental surprises.
5. Understanding the conditions favoring institutional success or failure in resource management.
6. Linking land-use and land cover dynamics to population processes, especially the role of human migration.
7. Advancing capacity to make social science data spatially explicit.
   There is a need to engage all of the social sciences in multidisciplinary research, jointly with each other and with the biophysical sciences. In this enterprise, anthropologist bring to the analysis of global change two main contribution: first, anthropologist are committed to understanding local differences and, second important contribution is related to data collection and methods.

Archeologists have taken advantage of remote sensing as a useful tool in their survey. Satellite remote sensing is an area of growing interest among environmental anthropologist. Analysis of land use intensification is one of the most promising topics addressed by anthropologist using remote sensing and GIS tools. However the differences of the term "large scale" in cartograpy and term of anthropologist still there is. It is important to develop research method that are explicitly multiscale and that are capable of nesting data and sampling strategy in such a way that scaling up or down is feasible and integral to the research strategy. The study of global change requires consideration of multiple levels of analysis and appropriately scaled methods and variables. The integration, high resolution satellite data with local data on economy, management, land-use-history, and site-specific vegetation/soil inventories aims to make it possible to understand ecological and social dimension of land use at local scale and link them to regional and global scales of land use.

Data collection at farm/household level can include a variety of internal and external aspects of this unit of analysis. It is important to collected demographic data on household composition to construct a demographic profile of this population and data related to subsistence economy. It is fundamental for the analysis of land use to understand resource use, economic strategies, market relationship, labor arrangements, and time allocation in productive and nonproductive activities. At this level, it is important to cover the basic dimensions of social organization, such as settlement pattern, labor distribution, resource use, and kinship. Georeferencing the household, farm boundaries, agriculture, and fallow field may be achieved through the use of Global Positioning System (GSP) devices. These are small units that permit precise location of any point on the planet to within a few meters. Mapping of vegetation has implications for understanding the impact of land-use practice on land cover. Also in general, vegetation structure, including height, ground cover, basal area, density of plant individuals, diameter of breast height (DBH), and floristic composition are important data. Those data can be linked to the image's spectral data. This kind of ethnoecological knowledge is very much site specific, or local, knowledge that does not extrapolate well to landscape, regional, or global analysis. Ethnoecological interviews also can elucidate many soil characteristics.

The landscape and regional level analysis provides a more aggregate picture of management practices and driving forces shaping a particular land use/cover at sub-regional scale. This level integrates information from vegetation class, soil, and farm/household levels. Satellite data are today the most important data sources for analysis at this level. The method of digital analysis of satellite images divided in four parts: preprocessing, spectral analysis, classification, and post processing. In this case, the use of a GSP device is necessary to provide reliable ground-truth information. Both social and physical aspects of the world system had to be coupled in so-called integrated assessment models. IMAGE 2 was the first global integrated model with geographic resolution. It is composed of three fully linked systems of models; the energy-industry system, the terrestrial environment system, and the atmosphere-ocean system.

Scientist interest in urban ecology as a part of general ecology has been present since the early part of the 1900s but is much less well developed as a field of study. Many problem impacts from rapid cites development in the last twenty years makes this field is important. Water and air pollution problems, heat-island effects, resources extraction and change in hydrology were impact of urban expansion.　　In recent years the direction of environmental anthropology there has been spread to be wider as a field of study. The common property resources and the study of institutions, political economy and human adaptability analysis is engage with this field. Lately, experimental approaches also introduce as a complement to other approaches usable in the field.