Stephen J. Walsh is a Professor of Geography and Research Fellow at the Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA; President (2003-2005), Vice-President (2000-2002), and Secretary (1992-1994) of the Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers (SEDAAG); Chair of the Geographic Information Systems (1998-2000) and the Remote Sensing (1994-1996) Specialty Groups of the Association of American Geographers (AAG); Recipient of the Outstanding Contributions Award and Medal from the Remote Sensing Specialty Group of the AAG (1997), awarded Research Honors from the Southeastern Division of the AAG (1999), and awarded National Research Honors for Distinguished Scholarship from the AAG (2001); editorial board member of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Plant Ecology, and Geocarto International and formerly on the editorial boards of the Journal of Geography, The Professional Geographer, and the Southeastern Geographer; Co-edited special remote sensing and GIS issues in the Journal of Vegetation Science, Geomorphology, and Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, and currently co-editing a special issue of GeoForum on coupled human-natural systems and biocomplexity, as well as a special issue of Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing on the mapping and modeling of land use/land cover in forested frontiers; Co-editor of a series of books for Kluwer Academic Publishers -- GIS and Remote Sensing Applications in Biogeography and Ecology (2001, Millington, Walsh, Osborne); Linking People, Place, and Policy: A GIScience Approach (2002, Walsh and Crews-Meyer); and People and the Environment: Approaches for Linking Household and Community Surveys to Remote Sensing and GIS (2003, Fox, Rindfuss, Walsh, Mishra); and in 2003 for Elsevier, Mountain Geomorphology – Integrated Earth Systems (Butler, Walsh, Malanson); Research is currently being conducted in Thailand, the Amazon Basin and the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador, and the Mountains of the American West.