Jill Caviglia-Harris, PhD

My research focuses on understanding the interactions among environmental change, agricultural production, and rural livelihoods in the Brazilian Amazon. I collaborate with an interdisciplinary network of economists, geographers, hydrologists, climatologists, and remote sensing scientists to examine how policies, institutions, climate variability, and household decision-making influence land-use change, agricultural productivity, water resources, and climate resilience. This work integrates long-term household surveys, field research, satellite imagery, and spatial analyses to investigate the feedbacks between human and natural systems and to generate evidence that informs environmental and development policy.

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Much of this research builds on a unique longitudinal dataset collected over nearly three decades in Rondônia, Brazil. The spatially referenced household panel, originally established in 1996 and expanded through multiple rounds of fieldwork, has supported research on deforestation, agricultural development, household welfare, climate adaptation, and environmental sustainability. The dataset is publicly available through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and continues to serve as a foundation for collaborative interdisciplinary research.