Karl Zimmerer

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Karl Zimmerer
Karl Zimmerer.png
Born
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Antioch College (BSc), University of California, Berkeley (MA, PhD)
Known forAgrobiodiversity research, political ecology, land use and food systems
Awards Guggenheim Fellow (2002)
Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2012)
Alexander & Ilse Melamid Medal (2013)
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2024)
Scientific career
Fields Geography, Environmental science, Political ecology
Institutions University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Pennsylvania State University

Karl Zimmerer is an American geographer whose research focuses on the environment-society dynamics of agrobiodiversity, the biodiversity of food systems, and land use. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Environment-Society Geography at Pennsylvania State University.

Contents

Early life and education

Zimmerer was born in 1958 in New York City and grew up in New Jersey, where he graduated from Ocean Township High School. His maternal grandparents emigrated from Lemkovyna in western Ukraine in the early 1900s.

He received a bachelor's degree in biology and physics from Antioch College in 1980. [1] As an undergraduate, he held research internships at the National Center for Appropriate Technology in Montana, the Uplands Research Laboratory in the Great Smokey Mountains, and the Land Institute in Kansas. He later earned master's and doctoral degrees in geography from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985 and 1988. His doctoral research examined food biodiversity and environment-society relationships in agricultural systems in the Peruvian Andes. [2]

Academic career

Zimmerer began his academic career in 1988 as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1990, he joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was promoted to professor in 1996. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison he received the Romnes and Kellett faculty awards. [3] [4] In 2007, he became a professor at Pennsylvania State University, where he was named Distinguished Professor in 2025. [5] He has held cross-appointments in Ecology, Rural Sociology, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies programs. [6]

Zimmerer has been a research fellow at the Wisconsin Humanities Institute and the universities of Yale, [7] Harvard, [8] and Montpellier, France. [9] His research fellowships have also included the Residency at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy. [10]

Zimmerer founded and co-led the Environment and Development Advanced Research Circle and chaired the Departments of Geography at Wisconsin (2002–2007) and Penn State (2007–2014). He was editor of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers from 2004 to 2013. [11] He is the founding and current Editor of the Urban Agriculture section in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems [12] and directs the GeoSyntheSES Laboratory. [13]

Research

Zimmerer’s research explores the interactions between biodiversity, food systems, and land use, with a particular focus on the Andean region, including the cultivation and use of over 4,000 varieties of potatoes. [14] His work examines how social-ecological systems are shaped by local knowledge and practices related to consumption, plant and animal care, soil and water management, seed systems, sociocultural-ecological and territorial commoning, [15] and cultural and historical frameworks such as Buen vivir ("Living Well"). [16] He investigates the ways in which these practices are influenced by broader factors of national and global development policies, urbanization, land-use intensification, migration, conservation efforts, and public health considerations. [17] His research highlights both the resilience and the vulnerabilities within these socio-and political-ecological systems. [18]

Zimmerer’s research has used extended multi-community case studies of changing food, land, water, and seed systems in global agrobiodiversity centers that began in the early 1980s with a project with Andean smallholder farmers whose knowledge and practices guide the co-evolution of the “Popping Bean,” or nuña, and other unique Andean legumes in Cajamarca, Peru. Zimmerer then lived in the Andes-Amazon ecotone of Cusco to conduct research with Indigenous Quechua farming communities who tend and eat highly agrobiodiverse Andean potatoes, Andean maize, and other food plants such as ulluco and quinoa. Their agroecological, spatial, cultural, and historical dynamics demonstrated both versatility and vulnerability. He predicted the threats and impending loss of the fast-maturing Indigenous potatoes locally known as chaucha (Solanum phureja). [19] In the 1990s and 2000s, Zimmerer studied soil, water, social, and conservation-area influences on agrobiodiversity in periurban and rural landscapes of Cochabamba, Bolivia. [20] This research expanded to include an ancient Indigenous irrigation system undergoing rapid development [21] and the intensification of land use, migration, and accelerated impacts of global environmental and social changes. Since 2010 Zimmerer has researched the changing landscape and nutrition dimensions of agrobiodiversity systems influenced by specific urbanization, food system, and climate impacts in Spain and the western Mediterranean, Latin America, and selective case studies in the U.S., Africa, and Asia. [22]

Honors and awards

Selected publications

Selected books

Selected articles

References

  1. "Giving by Class Year". Antioch College. 18 December 2020.
  2. "Geography 'Coffee Hour' lecture series to begin with Sept. 6 talk by Karl Zimmerer". Psu.edu.
  3. "MADGEOGNEWS Number 48 Spring 1996" (PDF). University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Geography. 2022.
  4. "Kellett Mid-Career Awards presented to seven professors". University of Wisconsin–Madison. 2001.
  5. "Penn State names 10 new distinguished professors for 2025 | Penn State University". PSU.edu. Retrieved 18 June 2025.
  6. "Karl Zimmerer". Penn State Department of Geography.
  7. "Recent Visiting Scholars". Yale.edu.
  8. "Scholarships and Recipients |". Harvard.edu.
  9. "Karl Zimmerer - Montpellier Advanced Knowledge Institute on Transitions". Université de Montpellier.
  10. "Bellagio Center". Rockefeller Foundation.
  11. "Zimmerer appointed Nature and Society editor for Annals" (PDF). AAG.
  12. "Specialty chief editor". Frontiersin.org.
  13. "Karl Zimmerer GeoSyntheSES Lab | Geographic Synthesis for Social and Ecological Sustainability". Psu.edu.
  14. "Geographer researches food biodiversity sustainability on sabbatical in France | Penn State University". Psu.edu.
  15. Zimmerer, Karl S. (1 March 2002). "Common Field Agriculture as a Cultural Landscape of Latin America: Development and History in the Geographical Customs of Resource Use". Journal of Cultural Geography. 19 (2): 37–63. doi:10.1080/08873630209478288. ISSN   0887-3631.
  16. Zimmerer, Karl S.; Bell, Martha G. (1 July 2015). "Time for change: The legacy of a Euro-Andean model of landscape versus the need for landscape connectivity". Landscape and Urban Planning. 139: 104–116. doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2015.02.002. ISSN   0169-2046.
  17. "Urbanization does not always decrease food diversity". Earth.com.
  18. Zimmerer, Karl S.; Vanek, Steven J.; Baumann, Megan Dwyer; van Etten, Jacob (20 April 2023). "Global modeling of the socioeconomic, political, and environmental relations of farmer seed systems (FSS): Spatial analysis and insights for sustainable development". Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene. 11 (1): 00069. doi:10.1525/elementa.2022.00069.
  19. Seminario, J.F. (2025). "Cultivar loss and conservation of genetic resources of the phureja potato (Solanum phureja L., Phureja Group) in Peru". Genetic Resources. 6 (12): 1–13. doi:10.46265/genresj.JCDC4631.
  20. Rogers, A. (2013). "Intensification and agrobiodiversity conservation in a global hotspot (Bolivia)". Penn State Geography Newsletter. p. 12.
  21. Ward, M. (3 December 1995). "UW geographer finds ancient irrigation: Technology may have originated in Andes much earlier than thought". Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. p. 28.
  22. Tutella, F. (31 May 2022). "Biodiverse 'keystone food spaces' can help meet UN's 'Zero Hunger' goal". Penn State News.
  23. "Carl O. Sauer Distinguished Scholarship Award". CLAG.
  24. "Fall 1998 Newsletter of the Department of Geography University of Wisconsin-Madison" (PDF). University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Geography.
  25. "Guggenheim Fellowships". GF.org.
  26. "AAAS Members Elected as Fellows". AAAS. Retrieved 18 June 2025.
  27. "Alexander and Ilse Melamid Medal". American Geographica.
  28. "CAPE Honors". AAG Cultural and Political Ecology Group.
  29. 1 2 "Karl Zimmerer". Fulbright Scholar Program.
  30. "Karl S. Zimmerer". American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
  31. "38th CLAG Named Honors 2024". CLAG.
  32. Brookfield, Harold (1998). "Review of Changing Fortunes". Annals of the Association of American Geographers.
  33. Bebbington, Anthony (2004). "Review of Political Ecology". Geographical Review. 94 (2): 250–253. JSTOR   30033977.
  34. Rocheleau, Dianne (1 July 2008). "Review of Globalization and New Geographies of Conservation". Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 98 (3): 742–745. doi:10.1080/00045600802118723. ISSN   0004-5608.
  35. Caramanica, Ari (2020). "A review of Agrobiodiversity: Integrating Knowledge for a Sustainable Future Conservation through conversation". ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America XIX: 2.