A doctoral program in Environmental Dynamics began in the fall 1998 at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Environmental Dynamics is the study of complex interactions between natural systems and human activity. It requires an interdisciplinary research approach and integration with the power, efficiency, and economy of advanced computer-based technologies. Stress is placed upon the discovery and interpretation of short-term and long-term cycles that underlie earth-climate-organism interactions over time. This program is unique in the south-central United States because of its interdisciplinary and regional focus, its existing technological capabilities to chart the interactions of human and natural systems over time and space, and its emphasis on socially relevant research. The program is an outgrowth of many years of successful research in human adaptations to past and present environments by faculty of the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. Primarily, the program is staffed by faculty from the departments of Anthropology and Geosciences and associated research institutes and laboratories: the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST), the Arkansas Water Resources Center (AWRC), the Tree-Ring Laboratory, the Bioarchaeology Laboratory, and the Archaeology Laboratory. Faculty from other departments and colleges sharing an interest in human and natural ecology or paleoenvironmental studies also participate in the program.

The program’s prime focus is human-environmental interactions within recent Earth history. It stresses interdisciplinary regional analysis of geophysical, biological, climatic, and sociocultural interactions and changes in the unglaciated southern United States, natural and social impacts of global climatic change, pollution, landscape evolution and degradation, earthquakes, and groundwater depletion. It disseminates relevant information about critical environmental hazards such as saltwater intrusion into fresh groundwater, catastrophic floods, drought, the New Madrid earthquake zone, rapid soil erosion, contamination of surface and groundwater, and the occurrence of mercury and other industrial heavy metal contamination.