Brian Napoletano's Research Interests

Much of my research tends to involve trying to understand patterns and processes in large, complex systems. The central focus of my PHD work, for instance, has been on the relationships between land use and biodiversity. Using the 1992 National Land Cover Dataset in conjunction with the North American Breeding Bird Survey results from the same year, I have attempted to correlate the concentration of different land cover types to estimates of species richness, and to identify landscape mosaics that tend to host higher and lower numbers of different species. I have also used the same survey data to examine trends in species richness over time, to determine whether overall richness at a particular location is stabilized by a dynamic balance between species immigrations and extirpations.

Me in the field in the spring of 2004.

Another topic that I have invested considerable time and energy into has been the analysis of sound signals collected from different landscapes, and the insight that they offer into biological processes impacted by human activities. This is a relatively new field of inquiry that was fairly unapproachable prior to the advent of portable digital recording technology, as observations must be made repeatedly over both time and space, and the scientific research is still at its preliminary stages. Much of my work in this field has been with other researchers to develop integrated signal visualization, identification and analysis systems capable of processing the large quantities of data that these observations generate. This topic is innovative enough to have caught the attention of the mainstream press on a couple occasions ("Calls of the Wild" in Scientific American and "A Listening Party for Nature" in WIRED).

As I prepare to graduate from Purdue and move to the next stage of my career, I am interested in expanding my research to include the socioeconomic dimensions of the systems that I study. With society on the brink of (or in some cases already in the midst of) multiple ecological crises, I have always wanted my research to contribute to the development of sustainable alternatives to our current consumption patterns. One topic of particular interest to me is the factors responsible for detrimental land use conversion such as deforestation in underdeveloped regions. While most ecologists recognize the growth of peasant agriculture in marginal agricultural lands is a significant contributor to tropical deforestation, very few of my colleagues have seemed willing to take the next logical step and consider what factors are driving people to pursue agricultural development in these poorly-suited habitats. This tends to lead to solutions such as harsher conservation enforcement or other largely ineffective solutions that usually just exacerbate the problem. My hypothesis, on the other hand, is that the monopolization of land suited for agriculture by export-driven production is driving the peasant growers into the marginal lands, and that this export-driven agriculture is in turn bolstered by local elites who work with multinational corporations to provide the raw materials produced in tropical regions to the industrialized centers of the globe for conversion into other commodities and largely internal or limited redistribution. Factors such as the large debts that many underdeveloped nations have to international agencies like the IMF and the World Bank compound these trends by forcing nations to increase their exports. Hopefully, I will have the opportunity to explore this concept and others like it in my future research.