Since 1992, she has been living in Mexico, where she first worked at a local Research Center (CIQROO) studying shifting cultivation systems and doing an evaluation of emerging cattle ranching. Since 1996, she has been a researcher at ECOSUR (El Colegio de la Frontera Sur) in the department of Alternative Agricultural Production Systems doing research in Yucatán.  Since 1997, she has worked with an interdisciplinary team from several American and Mexican Universities including economists, remote sensing scientists, anthropologists and ecologists. Her research is grounded in the human-environment relation tradition looking specifically at the impact of local farming systems and practices, in combination with national policies, on land use and cover change. Recently, she has been looking more specifically at the impact of transnational migration from the Yucatán on land use and cover.

Through the EDGY project she is studying the vulnerability of local farming systems to severe weather events, like hurricane Dean, but also droughts. Doing household surveys in approximately 15 of the affected communities together with her graduate and undergraduate students, she is studying household responses and strategies, and how these relate and are influenced by governmental disaster relief and policies. One of the anticipated household responses is an increase of labor migration to the nearby tourist center of Cancun or Playa de Carmen or to the US, with profound implication for local agriculture. As a few of the communities affected by the hurricane are engaging in timber extraction (social forestry), she is also looking at how these communities are reorganizing their timber extraction and marketing after their forests have been highly damaged and large quantities of timber are on the ground and hard to extract.