News

The Community Assets and Relative Rurality (CARR) index now has its own website at ruralityindex.com! On the website we provide open access to the original block group scale CARR data as well as CARR data for several additional spatial scales including: school districts, ZIP codes, and counties.

Jean represented SCALes and the Department of Geography and Geospatial Sciences at the 3rd annual Rocks & Rockets community science outreach event held in Colby, Kansas. More than 500 visitors and 300 K-12 students attended the event!

Jean’s paper Linking Diversity–Productivity Conditions of Farming Systems with the Well-Being of Agricultural Communities was recently published in Sustainability. The paper examines variation in a community well being index across counties in the U.

I am excited to share the news that I will be starting a new position as Associate Professor of Sustainability in the School of Natural Resources at the University of Missouri this August.

Congratulations to Michael, who successfully passed his preliminary exams and advanced to candidacy April 2024!

As part of his SARE grant, Jean has created a story map to serve as a platform to explore the interconnection between farming practices and community well-being, highlighting key management decisions intentionally made by farmers to achieve sustainable outcomes.

Jean’s first-author paper Examining the State of Community Well-Being at the Intersection of Rurality and Agricultural Engagement in the Contiguous United States was recently published in the International Journal of Community Well-Being!

A systematic review conducted in collaboration with colleagues in the Department of Computer Science and Department of Biological & Agricultural Engineering at KState, and the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as part of the NSF EPSCoR BioWRAP project was recently published!

Jean’s review of the book “Risk on the table: food production, health, and the environment” was recently published in Agriculture and Human Values!

Michael and Kate’s reanalysis study was recently published in PLOS One! The study, “Effects of landscape simplicity on crop yield: A reanalysis of a global database” reanalyzes an existing dataset of field-scale crop experiments with information on landscape diversity, ecosystem services, and yields.