Namaste! Since I just joined this listserv, I just thought of introducing myself to you all.

My name is Milan Shrestha and am an anthropologist, with specializations in the human dimensions of land-use/cover change, smallholder agriculture, institutions, and resilience/vulnerability. A native of Nepal, I recently completed a PhD degree from University of Georgia and in my dissertation research "Smallholders, Mountain Agriculture and Land Change in Lamjung, Nepal," I analyzed the coupled human-environmental relationships in a mountain landscape through an interdisciplinary, multi-scalar analysis of smallholder agriculture and land-use/cover change. To be more specific, I integrated ethnographic and spatially-explicit survey data with remote sensing and GIS applications to study: (a) the household conditions and community contexts under which mountain smallholders change their agricultural land-use strategies, and (b) how their land-use strategies are linked to the district scale land-cover change patterns identified from multi-temporal (1976, 1984, 1990, 1994, 1999 and 2003) Landsat images.

My interest in SRI is primarily based on its socio-cultural components. I would like to listen to SRI practitioners and colleagues, who have hands on experiences. I will also occassionally try to share relevant information as we go along.

M

Milan Shrestha, PhD
LANRA, 105J Baldwin Hall
Dept. of Anthropology, University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602
Tel. (706) 542-3141
http://www.milanshrestha.com