Dr. Mark Cochrane of SDSU conducts interdisciplinary work that combines remote sensing, ecology and other fields of study to provide a landscape perspective of the dynamic processes involved in land-cover change. He is an expert on wildfire in tropical ecosystems, documenting the characteristics, behavior and severe effects of fire in tropical forests that are inherent to current systems of human land-use. His research focuses on understanding spatial patterns, interactions and synergisms between the multiple physical and biological factors that affect ecosystems. Recently published work emphasizes the human dimensions of land-cover change and the potential for sustainable development, and has been instrumental in the Brazilian government's recent program to expand its national forest system in the Amazon to 50 million hectares. In his ongoing research program, Dr. Cochrane continues to investigate the drivers and effects of disturbance regime changes resulting from various forms of forest degradation, including fire, fragmentaion and logging. He currently has funded projects in Brazil through NASA and USAID and in China (NASA). He holds a Ph.D. in Ecology from Pennsylvania State University and a S.B. in Environmental Engineering from the Massachusetts Institue of Technology.

Fig. 1. Spatial distribution of fire regimes. Black areas are previously deforested while other colors represent standing forests suffering different levels of fire impact. Forests in red are burning too frequently to persist as tropical evergreen forests and are transitioning to grassland and scrub. Graph shows both cumulative percentage of remaining forests and fire frequency (average return interval in years) as a function of distance from deforested edges in the eastern Amazon.
Fig. 2. Map of forests in the Brazilian Amazon which could be designated as National Forests (FLONAS) without conflict with existing conservation lands or human inhabitants.