Larry Gorenflo

Professional Bio

Larry Gorenflo is a professor of landscape architecture, geography, African studies, and anthropology. He holds the Eleanor R. Stuckeman Chair in Design in Landscape Architecture and is faculty-in-charge of the Environmental Inquiry Minor.

Gorenflo is internationally recognized for research that reveals conservation opportunities to integrate the maintenance of biological and cultural diversity. His research identifies high co-occurrence of Indigenous languages and biodiversity in regions and localities defined primarily for their importance to the conservation of nature, likely indicating that the human ecology of biodiversity-rich places contributes to preserving both landscapes and species. In the face of unprecedented loss of biological and cultural diversity, such research provides a basis for designing strategies to maintain both forms of diversity on our planet. His current efforts in this area of inquiry seek to discover the functional connections between cultural and biological diversity, primarily through examining the human ecology of selected localities in Tanzania and Ecuador, using geographic information system technology to help understand both ecology and traditional ecological knowledge. Dr. Gorenflo also conducts research on resource use and subsistence in villages near Udzungwa Mountains National Park in south-central Tanzania, and on settlement patterns and regional demographics in the Basin of Mexico.