Dr. Sean Sloan
Dr. Sloan is an internationally-recognized scholar of emergent human-environment dynamics reshaping land use, forests, and environmental governance across the Global South.
Research
His research centers on large-scale, long-term transitions in the use and condition of rural and semi-natural landscapes. Such research seeks to profile emergent human-environment transitions characteristic of the 21st century, and do so with reference to antecedent spatial patterns and political-economic processes of landscape change. As a broadly-trained geographer, Dr. Sloan describes spatial, biophysical, agrarian, and political transformations driving landscape reconfiguration. Areas of interest to be developed as a Canada Research Chair include:
- Shifting wildfire patterns amidst agricultural development and attendant environmental management;
- Trajectories of forest recovery and transformation amidst rural economic change;
- Transitions from semi-natural forests to planted tree cover in the era of globalization and climate-change mitigation.
Geographical regions of interest are all-inclusive but frequently feature Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Africa, the Global South, and the world.
Dr. Sloan is an active member of the Editorial Boards of the journals Land Use Policy and Land, was an active member of the former PARTNERS Research Coordination Network on socio-ecological dimensions of reforestation, and is an adjunct lecturer at the College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University, Australia. He welcomes enquiries regarding supervision from serious potential graduate students.
Contact Information
Email: Sean.Sloan@viu.ca