B. L. Turner II

Biosketch

B. L. Turner II (Billie) is Regents’ Professor and Gilbert F. White Professor of Environment and Society in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and the School of Sustainability, Arizona State University. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He previously held positions at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, University of Oklahoma, and Clark University. Turner co-led the development of the Land Use/Cover Change (LUCC) program of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and the International Human Dimensions Programme, now the Global Land Programme of Future Earth. He is a Fellow of the AAAS and American Association of Geographers, a former Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. For more than a decade he has served as Associate Editor of PNAS focused on human-environmental and sustainability research.

Research Interests

Turner is a human-environmental geographer examining land systems and sustainability science from prehistory to the present. He demonstrated the range of the agricultural systems undertaken by the Classic Period Maya, capable of supporting large populations by way of landscape changes that assisted in decline environmental services and the depopulation of the elevated interior of their homelands. Turner advanced the concept of induced intensification among contemporary subsistence and semi-subsistence cultivators, demonstrating how environmental conditions altered the basic relationship between population pressure and agricultural intensity. He and his students documented the drivers of tropical deforestation worldwide, and his research teams, operating in the Yucatán-Belize-Guatemala region, advanced the capacity to project land use and cover change through the integration of econometrics, ecology, remote sensing, spatial modeling. He and his student have also demonstrated how the land system architecture (spatial shapes and patterns) of housing and yardscapes at the micro-level affect urban heat the Southwest U.S.