About

Dr. Javier Arce-Nazario is a conservation social scientist with a focus on global sustainability, conservation and land use decision-making, community resilience, and environmental justice. His main interests center on how social science can facilitate community-based approaches to planning and management while enhancing the resilience and sustainability of communities both locally and abroad. He is passionate about engaging students in community-based work and leads a global service learning program, Global Citizenship and Sustainability, that is focused on indigenous community resilience. Dr. Arce-Nazario works in Southeast Asia in Malaysian Borneo and has recently investigated flood resilience in Bangkok, Thailand. His teaching emphasizes community-based research methods in natural resources, global service-learning, environmental justice, and community organizing for the public good.

Research topics

• Geography
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Environmental science
• Environmental resource management
• Marketing
• Agroforestry
• Art
• Business
• Cartography
• Biology
• Archaeology
• Engineering
• Environmental planning
• Literature
• Ecology
• Anthropology
• Physical geography

Selected publications

• 17. Space and place in participatory arts-based research

  Open Book Publishers · 2025-02-25 · 3 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter introduces some challenges of mixing arts-based participatory approaches with remote sensing and quantitative landscape change analysis and explores how they can be reshaped by the places where research encounters take place. Examples drawn from the author’s research on land use and island landscapes demonstrate how attention to space and place can be approached within research design and dissemination, allowing participants and researchers to contribute more effectively to uncovering and understanding remotely sensed and artistically produced data. Based on these examples, the chapter suggests strategies for approaching careful consideration of space as a method and as an invitation to explore critical perspectives on landscape science.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Land Cover Classification of Complex Agroecosystems in the Non-Protected Highlands of the Galapagos Islands

  UNC Libraries · 2024-02-23

  articleOpen access

  The humid highlands of the Galapagos are the islands’ most biologically productive regions and a key habitat for endemic animal and plant species. These areas are crucial for the region’s food security and for the control of invasive plants, but little is known about the spatial distribution of its land cover. We generated a baseline high-resolution land cover map of the agricultural zones and their surrounding protected areas. We combined the high spatial resolution of PlanetScope images with the high spectral resolution of Sentinel-2 images in an object-based classification using a RandomForest algorithm. We used images collected with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to verify and validate our classified map. Despite the astounding diversity and heterogeneity of the highland landscape, our classification yielded useful results (overall Kappa: 0.7, R2: 0.69) and revealed that across all four inhabited islands, invasive plants cover the largest fraction (28.5%) of the agricultural area, followed by pastures (22.3%), native vegetation (18.6%), food crops (18.3%), and mixed forest and pioneer plants (11.6%). Our results are consistent with historical trajectories of colonization and abandonment of the highlands. The produced dataset is designed to suit the needs of practitioners of both conservation and agriculture and aims to foster collaboration between the two areas.

  PublisherDOI

• Chorography, cartography and the geospatial humanities

  2024-04-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In this chapter, we draw on an ongoing interdisciplinary conversation about cartography, mapping and landscape description. We each inhabit different disciplinary arenas in the academy (classics and archaeology of the ancient and late-ancient Mediterranean, Renaissance and Ottoman Studies, contemporary cultural studies and critical cartography, and environmental studies and critical approaches to geospatial representation). In this conversation, we explore ways in which visions and versions of chorography and cartography inform various approaches to the spatial humanities. How do different historical contexts and disciplinary imaginations of place and space draw differentially on concepts of cartography and chorography? What are the conditions and contexts for these hermeneutics? And what kind of interdisciplinary practices might they inform?

  PublisherDOI

• Mapping Narratives of Agricultural Land-Use Practices in the Galapagos

  Social and ecological interactions in the Galapagos Islands · 2023 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Geography
  • Archaeology
  • Art
  PublisherDOI

• Resilience and community pride after a hurricane: counter-narratives from rural water systems in Puerto Rico

  Alternautas · 2022-02-10 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  hen Hurricane María stripped Puerto Rico of its characteristic verdant foliage, it revealed complex layers of hidden geographies. The media coverage in the United States presented the destruction through visual and textual references to developing and “third-world” landscapes, while the accompanying headlines reminded us that its residents are “Americans”. This provocative juxtaposition was supported by several photographic themes, such as residents surveying debris or floods engulfing vehicles and neighborhoods. This article explores narratives of post-María experiences from non-PRASA communities. It is based on mixed-method interviews with non-PRASA community residents about conditions after the hurricane, in phone interviews conducted between September 2017 and January 2018, and in in-person interviews carried out in December 2017. Patterns are evident in these narratives that highlight the different experiences of consumers depending on their water source and access technology, and also highlight the contrasts that these residents drew with neighboring, PRASA-served communities. The experiences related below reveal how non-PRASA communities contribute to the overall Puerto Rican waterscape. They also illuminate issues around the discourses of sustainability and agency, development, society and technology, and colonialism.

  PublisherDOI

• Drone-Based Participatory Mapping: Examining Local Agricultural Knowledge in the Galapagos

  Drones · 2020 · 40 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Geography

  Agriculture is cultural heritage, and studies of agricultural spaces and practices help this heritage to be valued and protected. In the Galapagos Islands, little focus has been placed on local agricultural practices and agroforestry, despite their increasing importance for food security and invasive species management. This article discusses the possibilities for unoccupied aerial vehicle (UAV) high-resolution imagery in examining agricultural and agroforestry spaces, techniques, and practices. It describes and assesses an UAV-assisted participatory methodology for on-farm qualitative research that aims to investigate the visible and invisible features of farming practices. An analysis of the types of responses elicited by different methods of interviews with Galapagos farmers demonstrates how incorporating UAV data affects what we took away from the interview, and how the perceived relationship between farmer and land is reflected. Specifically, we find that when interacting with orthomosaics created from UAV images of their farms, farmers’ responses reveal a greater focus on management strategies at larger spatial and temporal scales. UAV imagery thus supports studies of agricultural heritage not only by recording agricultural spaces but also by revealing agrarian knowledge and practices.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Land Cover and Land Use Change on Islands

  Social and ecological interactions in the Galapagos Islands · 2020 · 16 citations

  • Geography
  • Physical geography
  • Cartography
  PublisherDOI

• Land cover classification of Galapagos agroecosystems and their surrounding protected areas (2018)

  Figshare · 2019-01-01

  datasetSenior author

  This is the first high-resolution land cover classification map of the agricultural zone of the Galapagos Islands and the surrounding protected humid highlands. The classification scheme includes categories that are relevant for both agricultural and conservation sectors. The dataset is provided in Shapefile and GeoJSON formats. An additional metadata file is included as well. For information on methods, please refer to: <br><br>Laso, F. J., Benitez, F. L., Rivas-torres, G., Sampedro, C., &amp; Arce-Nazario, J. (2019). Land cover classification of complex agroecosystems in the non-protected highlands of the Galapagos Islands. <i>Remote Sensing</i>, 1–40.<br>

  DOI

• Land Cover Classification of Complex Agroecosystems in the Non-Protected Highlands of the Galapagos Islands

  Remote Sensing · 2019-12-23 · 56 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The humid highlands of the Galapagos are the islands’ most biologically productive regions and a key habitat for endemic animal and plant species. These areas are crucial for the region’s food security and for the control of invasive plants, but little is known about the spatial distribution of its land cover. We generated a baseline high-resolution land cover map of the agricultural zones and their surrounding protected areas. We combined the high spatial resolution of PlanetScope images with the high spectral resolution of Sentinel-2 images in an object-based classification using a RandomForest algorithm. We used images collected with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to verify and validate our classified map. Despite the astounding diversity and heterogeneity of the highland landscape, our classification yielded useful results (overall Kappa: 0.7, R2: 0.69) and revealed that across all four inhabited islands, invasive plants cover the largest fraction (28.5%) of the agricultural area, followed by pastures (22.3%), native vegetation (18.6%), food crops (18.3%), and mixed forest and pioneer plants (11.6%). Our results are consistent with historical trajectories of colonization and abandonment of the highlands. The produced dataset is designed to suit the needs of practitioners of both conservation and agriculture and aims to foster collaboration between the two areas.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Geovisualizing space and time in a science-art exhibit

  Abstracts of the ICA · 2019-07-15

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract. The question of how to communicate with lay audiences about dynamic spatial processes is important in many disciplines. A diversity of paradigms for representing space and time have been developed in cartography, GIS science, and geovisualization, but these paradigms are unlikely to converge to a standard representation of spatiotemporal data (Goodchild 2013). Thus, finding the best visualization techniques to support the general public’s understanding of spatiotemporal analysis requires some exploration. In the following, I discuss how this exploration produced the novel approaches to representing time and landscape dynamics in geo/visual/isla, which was a science-art exhibit about social and ecological changes in the landscape of Puerto Rico over the past century.geo/visual/isla (Museo Casa Blanca, San Juan, 2017) was developed from static, large-format prints of aerial imagery of the Caribbean island nation of Puerto Rico, which were created by a collective of undergraduate students and a geographer at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey. The data associated with times in the 1930s were derived from aerial photographs provided by the Puerto Rican Department of Transportation, and more recent data were derived from the United States Geological Survey and United States Army Corps of Engineers. The exhibit ultimately presented an 80-year history of changes in the natural and constructed landscape, during a period in which shifting global and local economies, migration, climate events and colonial policies were drivers of dramatic landscape transitions. The purpose of the exhibit was to capture the beauty and the dynamics of the landscape’s history, while helping visitors to envision and discuss past landscape change and future land use in Puerto Rico.The problem of geovisualizing time and change is an old one that has been extensively reviewed – for example, by Yuan (2016) – but when the audience is a general public, there are additional challenges. Most notably, the limited period of interaction that a lay person will have with the geospatial data in question means that the scheme for representing space and time together must be either simple or familiar to be successful. Many creators of geographic exhibits for lay audiences do utilize well-established geovisualization paradigms such as the space-time cube (Bogucka and Jahnke 2017), the time-animated series of maps (Harner, Knapp, and Davis-Witherow 2017), and the annotated timeline (Caine 2017). However, these techniques must be adapted for the intended audience: the authors in each case highlight the specific techniques they use to help viewers by reducing the information burden and interpretation ambiguity of the representations they choose. Like these other public geographic exhibits, geo/visual/isla extensively used an early cartographic representation of time, which was chosen for its simplicity and familiarity. Several of the works in the exhibit were “time-slice snapshots,” as described by Langran and Chrisman (1998). We took advantage of the rich vocabulary of the human experience of time to help viewers more easily navigate the temporal dimension of the data being displayed. For example, we encouraged viewers to associate neighboring time-slices by using the visual metaphor of the triptych, and used color schemes emphasizing the time coordinate (Figure 1). Spatial orientation between images was reinforced by choosing images with prominent, essentially consistent landscape features such as a coastline. The triptych format also reduced the temporal resolution to a manageable level, reducing the information burden noted above. Perhaps the most important distinction between science-art exhibits and GIS representations or standalone geovisualizations is possibility to use the exhibit site as an additional dimension of experience. Harner, Knapp, and Davis-Witherow (2017) used this space for physical objects, and describe how their exhibit’s interactive maps replace interpretation of these objects by curators. In geo/visual/isla, we chose the inverse relationship: the space itself provided orientation that helped viewers interpret the maps. This was achieved by two techniques: first, the viewers’ path through the exhibit allowed them to learn the “vocabulary” of the space-time representation as they progressed. Timeslice snapshots gave way to more complex presentations where data with different space and time coordinates appeared in the same frame (Figure 2). By the end of the exhibit, viewers were easily able to read the spatial landscape enough to understand the story of change in these blended presentations. Second, the environment in different parts of the exhibit hall reinforced an understanding of timescales. Images in the exhibit depicting topological landscape features in the 1950s and 1960s were portrayed in red-blue anaglyph images and viewed with paper anaglyph glasses. In this corner of the exhibit, which was populated by other visitors in “retro” glasses and complemented by artworks referencing visual tropes of other dimensions and flashbacks, our intention was to make the actual ambiance provoke discussions of this particular period of Puerto Rico’s past (Figure 3).The techniques explored in geo/visual/isla made the dimensions of space and time equally easy to navigate for users, and our observation of visitors and their responses on surveys demonstrated that we successfully produced a conducive environment for substantive discussions of landscape change. The demonstrated effectiveness of the format is consistent with our visitor survey results from prior exhibitions (Arce-Nazario 2016). Our choices were specifically designed for a physical, artistic exhibit and a non-expert audience, but the training and cueing used to make geo/visual/isla work so well could also be adapted to other geovisualization presentations and tools.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Francisco Laso

  Western Washington University

  6 shared

• Gonzalo Rivas‐Torres

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  6 shared

• Fátima L. Benítez

  4 shared

• Carolina Sampedro

  4 shared

• Yili Lim

  Columbia University

  2 shared

• Tomás A. Carlo

  Pennsylvania State University

  2 shared

• María Uríarte

  Columbia University

  2 shared

• Diego Riveros‐Iregui

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Oregon State University

• M.S.

  Penn State University

• B.S.

  Penn State University

Awards & honors

• 2018 Engaged Scholar Prize
• 2019 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Servi…
• 2021 Rising Star Faculty Award