My research focuses on the decades-long collective action problem of agricultural nonpoint source pollution. I am particularly interested in the role of collective action in agricultural landscapes, especially how farmers, government, and society cooperate to navigate tradeoffs between agricultural production and conservation. In addition, I study the influence of biophysical conditions, infrastructure, and monitoring data in shaping feedbacks between social and natural systems. I study these aspects of environmental governance using mixed methods of semi-structured interviews, spatial analysis, and inferential statistics.
I also participate in several interdisciplinary research communities: the American Association of Geographers, the Global Land Programme, and the International Association for the Study of the Commons. At IU, I’m also affiliated with the Environmental Resilience Institute.
