Ithaca College

With colleagues at UC Berkeley, ENVS geographer Jake Brenner has published new research on an emerging cannabis agricultural frontier. 

 In a recent paper in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, the research team discovered that the per-unit-area impacts of cannabis farming on the northern California landscape outweighed those of the traditionally dominant timber industry.  The results suggest that without strong, targeted environmental regulation, cannabis farming threatens significant environmental damage.  The results of this and other recent work that demonstrates that cannabis farms are spatially clustered in environmentally sensitive areas, are currently being used by Humboldt County to draft environmental and land use policy.  An abstract of the new paper is available here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fee.1634/abstract, and this and other recent papers are available in PDF from Jake Brenner (jbrenner@ithaca.edu).  Parts of the research were funded by a Summer Research Grant awarded through the Center for Faculty Excellence.