Professor Ruth DeFries has been awarded a 2007 MacArthur Fellow Program Award. The MacArthur Fellows Program or MacArthur Fellowship (sometimes nicknamed the "genius grant") is an award given by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation who "show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work." According to the Foundation website, "the fellowship is not a reward for past accomplishment, but rather an investment in a person's originality, insight, and potential." The current amount of the award is $500,000, paid in quarterly installments over five years.

The 2007 Fellows Page gives the following account of her contributions:

"Ruth DeFries is an environmental geographer who uses remotely sensed satellite imagery to explore the relationship between the Earth’s vegetative cover, human modifications of the landscape, and the biochemical processes that regulate the Earth’s habitability. One of the greatest uncertainties researchers face when analyzing the world’s carbon balance is the extent of tropical deforestation. In the past, the deforestation rate has been cobbled together using national statistics on forest cover and coarse-resolution satellite imagery that cannot detect changes finer than the level of individual pixels. Recognizing the limitations of these strategies, DeFries and a team of collaborators developed a more precise approach to mapping land cover that views the landscape as a continuum of land cover characteristics rather than as discrete classes of forests. With this method, DeFries has compiled datasets that have significantly changed the scale and focus of ecosystem research, enhanced her and other researchers’ ability to make more plausible projections of future climate change, and contributed to understanding how human activities are altering habitat needed to conserve biodiversity. At the regional level, she has played a key role in exploring the impact of human-induced changes in land cover, initially focusing on central Africa and moving on to map areas in Southeast Asia and the Brazilian Amazon. Combining expertise with sophisticated satellite-imaging systems and a deep understanding of the environmental effects of agriculture and urbanization, DeFries is providing a clearer picture of the processes transforming our planet."

The MacArthur Fellows Program awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.

There are three criteria for selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.

The MacArthur Fellows Program is intended to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations. In keeping with this purpose, the Foundation awards fellowships directly to individuals rather than through institutions. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. They may use their fellowship to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers.

Although nominees are reviewed for their achievements, the fellowship is not a reward for past accomplishment, but rather an investment in a person's originality, insight, and potential. Indeed, the purpose of the MacArthur Fellows Program is to enable recipients to exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society.

The Foundation does not require or expect specific products or reports from MacArthur Fellows, and does not evaluate recipients' creativity during the term of the fellowship."

This has been an astonishing two years for Ruth during which she has also become a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has received a Fulbright Award.

For further details see: http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.2913825/apps/nl/content2.asp?content_id={FACCE0E3-8520-4752-9B5D-0F05779C3340}¬oc=1