CLAG Carl O. Sauer Distinguished Scholar Award for 2002: Sally Horn

It is with great pleasure that the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers grants the 2002 Carl O. Sauer Distinguished Scholar Award to Sally Horn in recognition of her scholarly creativity and body of work as a biogeographer, paleoenvironmental reconstructionist, and Latin Americanist. Sally’s research can be broadly described as the study of the impact of human activity and climate change on vegetation in the Latin American tropics. Active in field exploration and sampling, she is currently investigating the long-term environmental history of rainforest, dry forest, and high montane environments in Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and southeastern United States. Together with her collaborators and graduate students, she tramps through tropical swamps, extracts sediment samples from remote lake bottoms and ascends tropical peaks in search of glacial evidence. When in the field she and her assistants rise early and often ride mules to reach their remote destinations. Sally is professor of geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She was born in San Jose, California and completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at University of California, Berkeley. At age 22 she completed her B.A. in Geography with highest honors, presenting a thesis entitled, “Late Holocene Sedimentation at Zaca Lake, Santa Barbara County, California.” Three years later she received her M. A. in Geography defending her thesis, “Late Quaternary Vegetation Change in Western Costa Rice: Pollen Evidence from Deep Sea Drilling Project Site 565.” She received her Ph.D. in Geography in 1986, demonstrating her continued interest in Costa Rican vegetative change in her dissertation, “Fire and Páramo Vegetation in the Cordillera de Talamanca, Costa Rica.” She continues today to pursue her early research themes: quaternary vegetation and climate change in the Latin American tropics; fire ecology and fire history; and human influences on vegetation. Sally has persistently sought support for her research. She has independently received no fewer than twenty-five small grants ranging up to $10,000, from University of Tennessee, University of California, and from external sources such as U.S. Information Agency, Association of American Geographers, National Geographic Society (NGS), the Southern Regional Education Board, and National Science Foundation (NSF). She secured her most substantial financial support for research by way of twenty-three collaborative projects, most notably her two largest projects funded by Mellon Foundation, “Eco-