Earth and Space Sciences Professor Publishes Report on History of Climate Change in the Andes

September 4, 2015

Warren Church, program director for anthropology and professor in CSU's Department of Earth and Space Sciences, along with colleagues from the Florida Institute of Technology, recently published “Climate Change and the Agricultural History of a Mid-Elevation Andean Montane Forest” in the journal The Holocene. Their detailed report documents and interprets unusually early evidence of human land alteration and maize cultivation within Peru’s inhospitable northeastern Andean cloud forests. Dr. Church and his colleagues hypothesize that population growth, increasing militarization and escalating social conflicts surrounding the Pomacochas Basin rendered crops too vulnerable, and traditional lake-side cultivation too risky to maintain.

“Climate Change and the Agricultural History of a Mid-Elevation Andean Montane Forest” is available at http://hol.sagepub.com/content/25/9/1522.

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