gallington

Main profile

Allington, Ginger

Assistant Professor, George Washington University, Department of Geography

gallington@gwu.edu

I explore why and how ecosystems change in response to changes in management and climate, and what this means for the future resilience of social-ecological systems. I ask questions at the boundaries of disciplines, with a focus on issues of degradation and restoration in arid rangelands. I answer these questions using tools from ecology, geography, biogeochemistry and remote sensing. I am a user of, and advocate for the importance of long-term datasets. Landscape-scale questions and models rely heavily on a knowledge of the system on the ground, from the plants to the politics. Thus, my past and current work has involved a combination of fieldwork and synthetic meta-analysis and modeling at multiple scales. 

 

At SESYNC I am working with long-term datasets from a series of LTER sites in the southwestern US. I am developing a new framework for assessing and categorizing land cover change in arid rangelands. I will be utilizing the historical data on vegetation, soils, climate and management from these sites to validate this new methodology and to develop explanatory and predictive models. 

Associated Projects: 

Global Knowledge Gaps

Resources
Using an integrated social-ecological analysis to detect effects of household herding practices on indicators of rangeland resilience in Mongolia	Jul 12, 2018 Article published in Environmental Research Letters.
Combining participatory scenario planning and systems modeling to identify drivers of future sustainability on the Mongolian Plateau	Apr 21, 2018 Article published in Ecology and Society.
Closing global knowledge gaps: Producing generalized knowledge from case studies of social-ecological systems	Mar 14, 2018 Article published in Global Environmental Change.
Is local biodiversity declining or not? A summary of the debate over analysis of species richness time trends	Jan 07, 2018 Article published in Biological Conservation.
Urbanization and Environmental Policy Effects on the Future Availability of Grazing Resources on the Mongolian Plateau: Modeling Socio-Environmental System Dynamics	Feb 01, 2017 Article published in Environmental Science and Policy.

Links: 

Website

Twitter

Google Scholar

Research Interest: 

human-environment connections; landscape ecology; remote sensing; plant ecology; arid rangelands; pastoralism; system dynamics models; long-term data; spatio-temporal data

Audience: 

Researcher