The Environmental Demography Network (EDeN) is a research group dedicated to understanding the complex interactions between humans and their environments.
The human system includes social, economic, political, and behavioral components; the environment is built, biological, geophysical, and chemical; and the interactions include dynamics, processes, and feedbacks. Our EDeN Research Group develop and apply innovative spatial, qualitative, and big data methods to traditional and non-traditional data.
Our mission is to develop solutions—social, economic, institutional, infrastructural, ecological—to help all actors reduce their carbon emissions AND help a diverse range of populations become more resilient to environmental changes.
Pursuing Opportunities for Long-term Arctic Resilience for Infrastructure and Society
This transdisciplinary project serves as a platform to integrate three convergent research pillars—human-environment hotspots, food security, and migration—with education, local community engagement and outreach, international comparison and collaboration, and external evaluation, in order to create resilient Arctic communities in the face of a changing environment.
Building a cyberinfrastructure to integrate and analyze big contextual and social media data and to generalize for social science research
Based on 60+ terabytes tweets, this project evaluates the (mis)representativeness of Twitter data and develops weights to generalize the data, which will create opportunities for social scientists to take advantage of the rich social media data.
Community-driven innovation for infrastructure development in rural Alaska communities
This project aims to understand the importance of bridges for the well-being of remote communities in Alaska and to develop a protocol for other remote communities to work together to identify and apply funds for constructing, monitoring, and maintaining bridges.
COVID-19 preparedness in remote Alaskan fishing communities facing rapid, massive, seasonal in-migration
In late spring 2020, around 13,000 people were estimated to descend on the Bristol Bay region of Alaska to participate in the world’s most valuable wild salmon fishery. The region’s only hospital has 16 beds and two ventilators to serve a regional population of about 7,000. This project investigates the complexities of a public health crisis in an area economically dependent on a seasonal commercial fishery.