Firooza Pavri
Assistant Professor of Geography
Email:
fpavri@usm.maine.edu
Firooza's personal web page
Biographical Sketch
Hello! I'm Firooza Pavri, Assistant Professor of Geography, and joined USM in 2004. Originally from Bombay, India, I came to the US in 1992 for graduate studies in geography. Prior to joining USM, I spent time getting my M.A. and Ph.D. at universities in the Midwest, and taught at Emporia State University in Kansas where I also co-directed the GeoSpatial Analysis Program. I have taught a variety of geography courses over the past few years and this semester I am teaching World Regional Geography and Human-Environment Geography.
Education
Ohio State University, Geography, 1999, Ph.D.
University of Toledo, Ohio, Geography and Planning, 1994, M.A.
University of Bombay, Geography, 1991, B.A.
Courses Taught at USM
Fall Semester, 2004:
GEO 103J: Human-Environmental Geography
GEO 104J: World Regional Geography
Research Interests
My research focuses on aspects of society-environment interaction. More specifically, I use an institutional approach to explain environmental change and focus my attention on state-managed resource regimes in South Asia and other forest and wetland resources across the American Midwest. My research on India elaborates on the conditions that promote the efficacy of forest and other state institutions in sustainable resource management. This work is based in the tropical forests of India's Western Ghats. I am currently also collaborating on a NASA funded project that uses high (spatial and spectral) resolution aerial and space-based imagery to examine changes in land use and land cover across the American Midwest and Great Plains regions. At present, this work involves refining remote sensing techniques that will enable our team to analyze changes in wetland environments brought on by both, climate and human influence. This research focuses on the Cheyenne Bottoms wetlands in central Kansas and preliminary Landsat TM time-series analysis has enabled us to document change in wetland cover over a period of 15 years. In the past, we have examined forest use and forest cover change in a part of northeastern Kansas. Both these efforts have resulted in professional paper presentations and publications.
Selected Publications
Pavri, F. 2004. “Feminism and Ecology;” “Joint Forest Management;”
“Brundtland Commission;” “Caste”
Encyclopedia entries in Forsyth, T. J. (ed.), Encyclopedia of
International Development, London and New York: Routledge.
Pavri, F., with S. Deshmukh.
2003. Institutional
efficacy in resource management: temporally congruent embeddedness for forest
systems of western India, Geoforum, V34(1): 71-84.
Pavri, F., J. Aber, J. Wallace and M. Novak. 2003. Monitoring forest cover trends in northeastern Kansas through historical and multi-temporal satellite-image analysis, Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Sciences, V106(1/2).
Pavri, F., J. Aber and C. Banman. 2003. Landscape change detection analyses for wetland environments, Papers of the Applied Geography Conferences, V26: 276-285.
Pavri, F., and J. Aber. 2002. Assessing Wetland Use and Management: the case of Cheyenne Bottoms, Kansas, Applied Geography Conference Proceedings, V25: 93-99.
Aber, J.S., Aber, S.W. and Pavri, F. 2002. Unmanned small-format aerial photography from kites for
acquiring large-scale, high-resolution, multiview-angle imagery. Pecora 15, Land Satellite
Information IV and ISPRS Commission I Conference Proceedings, Denver, CO,
Nov. 10-16, 2002.
Brown, L.A., F. Pavri, and V. A. Lawson. 1998. Gender, Migration and the Organization of Work Under Economic Devolution: Ecuador, 1982-90, International Journal of Population Geography, V4: 259-274.
Recent Grants/Awards
Co-Investigator, NASA - EPSCoR (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) grant in rural resources with Kansas State University and Kansas University for “HYSPIRE: Hyper-resolution Remote Sensing of Kansas Rural Environments,” 2002-2004.
Kansas NASA Travel Grant for faculty visit to NASA Johnson Space Center, May, 2004.