Geography PhD candidate Cathy Day has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant for her dissertation research.

Day’s interests center around how climate change influences agricultural systems and how humans perceive and deal with climatic shifts within a complex social-economic context. For her master’s degree, she researched the vulnerabilities of farmer livelihoods to climate change in Niger’s Sahel zone.

Her current work examines how the nexus of institutions, social context, and environmental change shapes farmer decisions in the southwestern United States. By examining the network of factors that contribute to farmers’ choices, she plans to determine which elements of those networks may be most important for producing farm landscapes that sustain both farmer livelihoods and ecological health.