SOCORRO, N.M. – Dr. Haoying Wang, assistant professor of management at NMT, recently published two papers in the Environmental Research Letters journal.

His single-author paper is titled “Change of Vegetation Cover in the U.S.-Mexico Border Region: Illegal Activities or Climatic Variability?”

The Southwest border region is mostly a sensitive semi-arid/arid ecosystem. Dr. Wang’s study is the first of its kind to integrate large-scale remote-sensing data with multiple layers of socio-economic data. He aims to inform critical policy issues related to natural resources management and border security enforcement in the region. His publication shows that both illegal and legal activities have statistically significant impacts on the border region vegetation cover between 2008 and 2017.

For the full publication, click here.

Wang has found that within a three mile buffer of the border, a one-standard-deviation increase in illegal border-crossings would lead the vegetation cover index to decline by 4.1 percent. A one-standard-deviation increase in border patrol agent staffing would lead the vegetation cover index to decline by 19 percent of its standard deviation. These findings provide important implications for natural resources management and border security policy in the region, as well as for the quality of life in the local border communities.

He is the second author on the paper, “Unpacking the Climatic Drivers of U.S. Agricultural Yields.” This paper is the result of a seven-year effort that Dr. Wang joined in 2014. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the paper’s first author is Dr. Ariel Ortiz-Bobea of Cornell University.

Click here for that paper. 

Wang and his co-authors link state-of-the-art land surface model data and fine-scale weather information with a long panel of county-level yields for six major U.S. crops from 1981to 2017. They developed a statistical approach that flexibly characterizes the distinct intra-seasonal yield sensitivities to high-frequency fluctuations of soil moisture and temperature. The new models project the direct effect of temperature as the primary climatic driver of future yields under climate change.

For an article from Cornell University, click here.

 

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