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| Name |
Turner, B. L. |
| Location
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Arizona State University |
| Primary Field
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Human Environmental Sciences |
| Secondary Field
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Environmental Sciences and Ecology |
 Election Citation
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Turner has profoundly changed our view of how populations subsist, grow, and transform the Earth in field explorations of the Central Mayan lowlands, in tests of the Boserup hypothesis, in studies of long-term population dynamics, in synthesis of agricultural systems, and in reconstruction of human-induced global change. |
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Research Interests
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Turner is a human-environmental geographer examining land systems and sustainability science from prehistory to the present. He demonstrated the range of the agricultural systems undertaken by the Classic Period Maya, capable of supporting large populations by way of landscape changes that assisted in decline environmental services and the depopulation of the elevated interior of their homelands. Turner advanced the concept of induced intensification among contemporary subsistence and semi-subsistence cultivators, demonstrating how environmental conditions altered the basic relationship between population pressure and agricultural intensity. He and his students documented the drivers of tropical deforestation worldwide, and his research teams, operating in the Yucatán-Belize-Guatemala region, advanced the capacity to project land use and cover change through the integration of econometrics, ecology, remote sensing, spatial modeling. He and his student have also demonstrated how the land system architecture (spatial shapes and patterns) of housing and yardscapes at the micro-level affect urban heat the Southwest U.S. |
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