Jane Landrum presenting at NCUR 2025

Author: Jane Landrum | Major: Earth Science, Anthropology, French | Semester: Spring 2025

My name is Jane Landrum and this past year I completed research with Dr. Brad Peter of the Geosciences department, as well as successfully defended my thesis titled “Environmental and Societal Impacts of Agricultural Land Abandonment in Indonesia: A Bibliometric Review.” I received Magna Cum Lauda distinction with a score of 8.75 on my thesis defense, and will be taking a gap year before pursuing a career in environmental conservation. I majored in Earth Science, Anthropology, and French, and minored in Geology at the University of Arkansas, and I would like to find ways to incorporate these fields of study in my future endeavors.

I found my mentor in the spring semester of my junior year by meeting with various professors of the geosciences department. I had an interest in sustainable agriculture and the environmental impacts of agricultural development, and Dr. Peter recommended that I join his lab and work on a project focused on the Food Estate Program in Indonesia. We worked together to develop and clarify the research questions that I would aim to answer over the next year and a half, and I attended weekly lab meetings which aided me greatly with scientific writing, professional development, and general skills needed to complete research. My project utilized a free-form literature review as well as bibliometric analyses, and I had never completed bibliometric analyses prior to this research. I learned a great deal in completing my literature review, and I found several aspects of my research project very interesting, including governmental policies implemented in Indonesia to address problems arising from agricultural land abandonment.

One of the programs which drew me into this research was the Food Estate Program, instituted in 2020 in Indonesia to help mitigate food insecurity by incentivizing agricultural extensification. During my research, I actually found that this program mimics a series of earlier programs put into place to achieve exactly the same goals, however all of these programs have failed. The failure of the Mega Rice Project of the 1990s resulted in wildfires that burned continuously for almost a year and released a globally significant amount of carbon dioxide, which demonstrates the importance of conducting more research into these programs in order to find better solutions. My bibliometric analysis showed that there is a large amount of research into these problems being done in the fields of economics, business, law, and geography, but there is minimal research being done in the environmental sciences, specifically climatology, hydrology, geology, agronomy, or agroforestry, all of which could aid in finding better solutions for Indonesia’s current problems. One last surprising find of my project was the role that the palm oil industry has played in deforestation and land abandonment in Indonesia. Palm oil is a significant amount of Indonesia’s GDP and they have been known to clear primary forests then leave them fallow for many years, increasing carbon release to the atmosphere and increasing risk of severe environmental disasters such as wildfire.

In April 2025, after defending my thesis, I attended the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in Pittsburgh and presented my research in a poster presentation. This was my first research conference and I greatly enjoyed discussing my work with other students, some geoscientists and some not, as well as learning more about other people’s research. Dr. Peter as well as members of his lab group were invaluable in helping me complete this project, and I learned a great deal academically as well as professionally durin