Dexter H Locke | Urban Ecology, Urban Forestry, Geographic Information Systems

About

Research Geographer, USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station, Baltimore Field Station

For complete works, see my curriculum vitae (or CV).

Before joining the Communities and Landscapes of the Urban Northeast Research Unit as a Research Social Scientist (and later as a Research Geographer), I was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), which is part of the University of Maryland. I would describe myself as an Urban Ecologist with a doctorate from the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University. Prior to Clark, I received a Master's of Environmental Science from The Yale School of Environment (formerly Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies) at Yale University. I also graduated Summa Cum Laude from The Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at The University of Vermont with a Bachelor of Science in Natural Resource Planning, with Minors in Economics as well as Forestry.

I worked for the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation and the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station in the People and Their Environments: Social Science Supporting Natural Resource Management and Policy work unit.

Conducting applied research with urban natural resource managers is my passion. If I'm not doing urban ecology I can usually be found rock climbing and hiking throughout the Mid Atlantic region, listening to classic rock music, and playing disc golf.

For complete works, including peer reviewed publications, reports, self-published material, posters, datasets, and select presentations see my CV.

Headshot photo for promotional materials.

Connect with me via Twitter and LinkedIn, or send a message below.

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2704-9720

GitHub

Research

My research interests are organized into three interrelated themes. The main focus is urban natural resource management and stewardship, in a data-driven way.

Theme A: Urban Tree Canopy

Where are trees in urban areas?

Until relatively recently it was impossible to accurately and precisely answer this simple question. Dr. Locke contributed to novel advances in urban remote sensing include the use of LiDAR data, object-based image analysis, and data fusion, which dramatically improved our ability to map green infrastructure – including urban tree canopy – for large regions. Dr. Locke co-led new methods to integrate sub-meter resolution, remotely sensed data with Census block group data, and administrative parcel boundary data. The integration of these data revealed 1) the importance of private residential land at the parcel scale and 2) significant variation across neighborhoods within and across cities.

Theme B: Landscape Mullets

Landcover analyses in cities consistently reveal that a) most land in a metropolitan area is in private, residential ownership, b) most of the tree canopy is also in private residential ownership, and c) most of the opportunities for additional tree canopy are on private residential lands. These facts motivate residential yard care research generally. Dr. Locke developed the “Landscape Mullets” theory, which hypothesizes that social norms 1) significantly influence how households manage their yards by compelling households to conform with neighborhood aesthetics, and 2) these social norms have more of an effect on front yards than back yards. The result of social pressure in more-visible front yards relative to more-private backyards is manifest as “business in front, party in the back”.

Theme C: Environment and Public Health

How does the environment affect crime?

Crime, especially violent crime, reduces quality of life at individual, household, and neighborhood levels because of its long-term impacts on mental trauma, physical injury, and property damage. However, it remains unclear how the built environment affects crime. Changes in the built environment may reduce or promote crime, but measuring the effects is complex and challenging for several reasons: insufficient and/or irregular data at different units of analysis (data), confounding factors (study design), and spatial and temporal dependence among observations (statistical considerations). Dr. Locke employs so-called “natural experiments” with difference-in-difference analyses, the vast majority of which ignore or assume away spatio-temporal autocorrelation, which raises concerns about the validity of the findings.

Additionally, we are currently examining how changing tree canopy is associated with changes in mental and physical health, leveraging at least 46 tree canopy change studies. This data synthesis and novel analyses will be the first of its kind to measure how high-resolution changes in tree canopy cover are associated with changes in mental health (depression and anxiety) and health (physical activity, body mass index, and obesity). Analyses will move beyond correlation and move towards causal inference, by leveraging the gold standard Harvard-led NHSII epidemiological cohort (n = 116,430).

Publications

This section contains peer reviewed works only. The most current papers are shown first. Papers can be browsed by year. For a complete listing and access to all publications including reports, self-published material, posters, DATASETS, and presentations, please see my CV. To receive the latest research news by email, follow me on Google Scholar and ResearchGate.

Get in touch

I'd love to hear from you. Send a message and I will get back to you when I can! (or kindly let me know if you find any broken links or can't access any materials)