July 9, 2014
Sociologist gives two international talks on National Science Foundation funded research
Laszlo Kulcsar, professor of sociology, presented results from an interdisciplinary research project on water resources, demographic trends and community development at the ninth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences in Vancouver, Canada and at the European Population Conference in Budapest, Hungary.
The two talks discussed the long-term development trajectories of farming communities in the Great Plains and the challenges of building complex modeling scenarios across various disciplines.
The findings highlighted the vulnerability of communities where the local economy is built on a single resource, particularly in the context of long-term population decline. This research is one of the projects of an interdisciplinary team of K-State faculty working on the Ogallala Aquifer and has been funded by the National Science Foundation coupled natural and human systems program.