Dr. Sietze Norder
Assistant Professor
My research focuses on human-nature connections in time and space. I study these relationships across various scales and levels: from local to global, and from the past into the future. My research areas include (oceanic) islands, cities, agroecological landscapes, continents, and sometimes the entire globe.
Questions that drive my research are: what is the relative contribution of human and environmental factors in shaping biodiversity patterns, and why do biodiversity and cultural diversity coincide spatially?
These questions cannot be addressed from the perspective of a single discipline. Therefore, I collaborate with people from across the social sciences, natural sciences and humanities. In terms of methods, I generally use open source geospatial approaches (e.g. GIS, geocomputation, mapping).
With my research I hope to contribute to a shift from the one-sided focus of ‘human impacts on biodiversity’ towards a more nuanced relational approach called 'biocultural geography'.
Projects
Project
Disentangling the roles of social and biophysical factors in the evolution of linguistic diversity in South America
01.01.2025
to 01.01.2029
General project description
This NWO Open Competition L project is a collaboration between UU GEO (Derek Karssenberg - FG, Sietze Norder – Copernicus, and Judith Verstegen – SGPL), University of Groningen (Nick Emlen), and Leiden Centre for Linguistics (group of Rik van Gijn). A language family arises as a result of the diversification over time of the speech variants of groups that once spoke one and the same language but followed differential historical trajectories. These socio-historical processes took place all over the world, but they have led to radically different patterns of linguistic diversity from one area to another. This project aims to understand the interplay between the biophysical environment and the social processes of diversification to explain the patterns of linguistic diversity we see today. It will employ two distinct approaches: 1) areal-typological approach, combined with regionally informed qualitative contextualization, performed by a PhD student in Leiden, and 2) a spatial agent-based modelling approach, simulating how languages (agents) change, merge, and split over time, performed by a PhD student in Utrecht. The PhD students will work on the same case studies in South America.
Role
Researcher
Funding
NWO grant NWO - SSH Open Competition L
Project members UU
External project members
- prof. dr. Rik van Gijn (Leiden University)
- dr. Nicholas Emlen (University of Groningen)