 My primary research interests include climate change adaptation, collective management of common-pool resources, and policy and practice related to conservation and sustainability. My current research, which is affiliated with the Coweeta Long Term Ecological Research program in western North Carolina, integrates political ecology and ethnoecology to more closely examine how people in southern Appalachia perceive and understand climate change, particularly how they use biodiversity as indicators of change. In addition to leveraging the Coweeta LTER, this work forms part of an international comparative project, the Programme Interdisciplinaire sur les indicateurs Autochtones de la Faune et de la Flore. In March 2016, Brian Burke (Appalachian State University) and I were awarded an NSF Cultural Anthropology grant for this work. Brian Orland and I have also recently received funding from both NSF and Georgia Sea Grant to examine the impacts of Hurricane Matthew on the population of coastal Georgia. We completed more than 60 interviews less than six months after the storm and are surveying an additional 1,000 residents. We hope to learn more about how people view their adaptation options, including migration away from the coast. In addition to working in the southeastern United States, I continue to be active in the Basque region of France. My dissertation research centered on the implementation of the European Union's Habitats Directive in the province of Xiberoa (Soule). This directive creates a pan-European network of sites, called Natura 2000, to be managed for ecological, social, and economic sustainability. For many years, however, it was strongly resisted by local land mangers and resource users. My dissertation explains the context of that resistance, discusses the particularities of implementing a conservation project in an area with a strong common property regime, and examines conceptualizations of success among various actors. Since that time, I have continued to work in Xiberoa, primarily looking at agricultural policy, multi-functional agriculture, and marketing of agricultural products in specialty markets. SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
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