SOCORRO, N.M. – A recent study by Dr. Haoying Wang of NMT’s Department of Business and Technology Management has been making headlines recently.

Physics World, a leading physics magazine, recently published an article on the Mexico-US border environmental issue titled “Human activity damages Mexico–US border.”  The Albuquerque Journal also published an article summarizing Dr. Wang’s project. Click here for that article.  

Wang’s study was published in Environmental Research Letters. He has found that both illegal crossings and associated legal activities in the border region have significant impacts on the vegetation cover.

 

Click here for the journal article.

The findings carry important policy implications for both the federal policy-making processes and the local stakeholders. The Physics World article, contributed by award-winning U.K. science journalist Kate Ravilious, focuses on vegetation cover change in the border region.

Ravilious wrote, “By understanding the impacts of illegal crossing and border security activity, and identifying the hotspots for vegetation change, Wang believes it will be possible to stem some of the damage. He is currently in discussion with the U.S. National Park Service to see what kind of policymaking and public communication measures might be used to protect these fragile lands.”

Wang, an environmental economist by training, works on a wide range of issues concerning the Southwest environment and natural resources. In this particular study, he assessed the impact of human activities on border region vegetation cover on top of the changes already in the background – a process called woody plant encroachment.

Wang used the open-access Crop Data Layer from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He examined a variety of data layers from the agency’s remote-sensing data repository which focuses on more than 200 different crops. He also incorporated data that classifies landscapes, such as desert, forest and grassland. He matched ground-based data with remote-sensing data to examine the 10 border patrol sectors from Texas to California. Much of the land along the border is federal land, including Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, and National Park Service.

Physics World is the membership magazine of the Institute of Physics, one of the largest physical societies in the world. It is an international monthly magazine covering all areas of physics, both pure and applied, and is aimed at physicists in research, industry, and education worldwide.

Physics World has also featured NM Tech’s research included a new telescope planned for the Magdalena Ridge Observatory (1998) and Dr. Timothy H. Hankins’s research on the Crab Nebula Pulsar (2003).

– NMT –