Jane Landrum Headshot
Author: Jane Landrum | Major: Earth Science, Anthropology, French | Semester: Fall 2024
My name is Jane Landrum, I am a senior majoring in Earth Science, Anthropology, and French, and I have just completed my first semester of research working on my thesis, “Environmental and Societal Impacts of Agricultural Land Abandonment in Indonesia”, led by Dr. Brad Peter of the geosciences department. I plan to complete my research and defend my thesis in Spring of 2025.
As I am wrapping up my first semester of undergraduate research at the University of Arkansas, I am struck with how much I have learned in the past few months. At the start of my junior year, I felt very overwhelmed by the process of conducting a research project and writing a thesis; a feeling that many peers have shared with me. I began meeting with professors, but it took a little while until I found a topic I was truly excited to delve into: urbanization and agricultural land abandonment in Indonesia. Dr. Brad Peter of the Geoscience department was recommended to me by a fellow professor, and after we met, he agreed to be my thesis advisor, alongside Dr. Cadi Fung and Dr. Kevin Hall as my committee. My committee have been so supportive in enabling me to conduct this project, and monthly meetings with Dr. Peter as well as graduate students in his lab have furthered my research progress immensely. My largest challenge thus far has been knowing where to start, as my research topic was quite broad, and a thesis is a daunting task, but I have found that creating a definitive outline and approaching each section on its own has been beneficial.
I began my research proposing to research the environmental and societal impacts of agricultural land abandonment in Indonesia, through both a free-form literature review and bibliometric analysis. As I delved into these topics through my free-form literature review, I realized that my research would largely be quantitative, focusing on the governmental policy solutions implemented to address these environmental and socioeconomic problems that Indonesia is facing. I have found that, though Indonesia is an archipelago composed of over 17,000 islands, overpopulation and increased rates of urbanization on the central island of Java have led to a series of governmental programs aimed at population redistribution and reducing food insecurity, through promoting migration to the outer islands of Kalimantan and Sumatra. These programs have a history of being unsuccessful, and deforestation and land use changes in the 1990s under the Mega Rice Project led to forest fires that released immense amounts of carbon. These programs have global environmental repercussions, and I believe this research is very important as it analyzes the motivation behind and the reason why the current solutions are being implemented.
I am currently working on completing a bibliometric analysis of agricultural land abandonment in Indonesia, utilizing OpenAlex.org and Vos Viewer software. This is my first experience with bibliometric analyses, and I have been working with graduate student Wei Lun Tay in Dr. Peter’s lab to formulate the queries which I will investigate. Wei Lun’s graduate master’s thesis focuses on land cover changes in Indonesia, and it is our plan to coauthor a paper in the Spring, to be published following my graduation. I have also applied to present at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research, which will occur in April 2025. I will continue working on my research in the Spring, with a plan to defend in March. The Honors College research grant has enabled me to focus on my research project this semester, in place of working, for which I am very grateful. I have been able to dedicate more time to completing a literature review and answering my questions more thoroughly. I look forward to my next semester of research and sharing my work.