Department of Geography (DoG) News and Events Where it's at!

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

NASA Earth Observatory Image of the Day: Inland Delta of the Niger River

Apart from the delta of the Nile River, the inland delta of the Niger River may be Africa’s most famous. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station took this photograph of the region where the Niger and other rivers flow out of the wetter, more vegetated Sahel into the Sahara Desert. The rivers inundate the lush green wetland of the delta.

GOOD NEWS

• A Human Factors Lab article has been accepted into The Cartographic Journal. The article is led by former graduate student Grant McKenzie and is titled, “The Interaction of Landmarks and Map Alignment in You-Are-Here Maps.”

NEWS

October 31 Coffee Hour: Mark A. Blumler “Agricultural History in Geographical and Evolutionary Perspective”
Much scholarly attention has been paid to agricultural origins, and to developments subsequent to 1492, but relatively little to the long, intervening time period.  In this presentation, I outline agricultural history from inception up through the “Columbian Exchange.”

• 3:30 to 5:00 p.m.
• Refreshments are offered in 319 Walker Building at 3:30 p.m.
• The lecture begins in 112 Walker Building at 4:00 p.m.
• Coffee Hour To Go

Next Week: Ingrid Nelson, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies Program, The University of Vermont.

Zelinsky’s collection at Libraries; some materials available to take
Professor Emeritus Wilbur Zelinsky’s family has donated many of his maps and books to the University Libraries. Many of his books (over 400) will be offered to interested takers. These books will be available on November 19, 2014, at the GIS networking reception, 4:00-5:00 p.m. in 208 Paterno Library. These books span many geography topics from culture, physical geography, urban studies, and more.

Penn State, ClearWater Conservancy collaboration results in Musser Gap Greenway
The Musser Gap Greenway, the result of years of collaboration by Penn State and ClearWater Conservancy, officially opened to the public on Friday, Oct. 17. The Greenway links the Centre Region bikeway system to the Musser Gap trail allowing for travel between the State College area and Rothrock State Forest.

GOOD NEWS

• Kevin Sparks is the lead author on a peer-reviewed book chapter on ​Crowdsourcing Landscape Perceptions to Validate Land Cover Classifications that will appear in a book on Land Use and Land Cover Semantics.
• EPA Regional Administrator Shawn M. Garvin announced the award of 6 Wetland Program Development Grants including $669,000 for Rob Brooks, Denice Wardrop, Sarah Chamberlain, and Hannah Ingram of Riparia to continue the Mid-Atlantic Wetland Work Group for four more years.
• Emma Gaalaas Mullaney was recently nominated and selected to serve as a Scientific Consultant to the United Nations Environmental Programme, and will travel to Berlin, Germany  to participate in the Global Intergovernmental and Multi-stakeholder Consultation on the sixth Global Environment Outlook report (GEO-6).

NEWS

October 24 Coffee Hour: Armen R. Kemanian “The Soil Carbon Balance, Nitrous Oxide Emissions, and Biofuels”
Biofuels can reduce the carbon footprint per unit of energy used, a feature that is particularly attractive for liquid transportation. Nonetheless, the broad sustainability of biofuels in that regard depends on two factors. First, that the reduction in greenhouse gas emission can be quantified and be less than that of the fossil fuel being replaced. This analysis needs to consider the entire supply and co-product chain for both the biofuels and fossil fuel. Second, that other ecosystem services are not negatively affected, for instance, due to land use change, if food or bioenergy production expands into forests or natural grasslands.

• 3:30 to 5:00 p.m.
• Refreshments are offered in 319 Walker Building at 3:30 p.m.
• The lecture begins in 112 Walker Building at 4:00 p.m.
• Coffee Hour To Go

Next Week:
Mark Blumler “Agricultural History in Geographical and Evolutionary Perspective”

The Cartographer Who’s Transforming Map Design
Cindy Brewer seemed to attract a small crowd everywhere she went at a recent cartography conference in Pittsburgh. If she sat, students and colleagues milled around, waiting for a chance to talk to her. If she walked, a gaggle of people followed. Brewer, who chairs the geography program at Penn State, is a popular figure in part because she has devoted much of her career to helping other people make better maps. By bringing research on visual perception to bear on design, Brewer says, cartographers can make maps that are more effective and more intuitive to understand. Many of the same lessons apply equally well to other types of data visualization.

Fulbright Features: Teacher makes impact in and outside New Delhi classrooms
By Rachel Passmore
Penn State students and alumni are traveling around the world to conduct research, teach English, attend masters degree programs and more as part of the Fulbright Program, a highly sought-after nine-month international educational exchange program funded by the U.S. Department of State. This is the sixth story in a series of essays written by Penn State student Fulbright winners who have returned from or have just embarked on their trips.

Climate change not responsible for altering forest tree composition
Change in disturbance regimes — rather than a change in climate — is largely responsible for altering the composition of Eastern forests, according to a researcher in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences. Forests in the Eastern United States remain in a state of “disequilibrium” stemming from the clear-cutting and large-scale burning that occurred in the late 1800s and early 1900s, contends Marc Abrams, professor of forest ecology and physiology.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

SWIG steps out for safety

Members of Supporting Women in Geography (SWIG) participate in the annual Steps to Safety 5k benefiting the Centre County Women’s Resource Center (CCWRC) held October 6, 2014. October is national Domestic Violence Awareness month. Like SWIG on Facebook.

GOOD NEWS

USGIF presented scholarships to 22 students as part of its Scholarship Program. Three Penn State geographers received awards: Undergrad, Everleigh Stokes; MGIS, Nouman Hussain; MPS/HLS-GEOINT, Seth LeMaster.

Mark Coletti competed with his bagpipe band, MacMillan-Birtles Pipe Band, on September 27 at the Celtic Classic in Bethlehem, Pa.  It was the first time he had competed with the band after a two-year hiatus courtesy of grad school.  They placed third in a very competitive field.

NEWS

October 17 Coffee Hour: Graduate Students Lightening Talks

Josh Stevens, Sasha Savelyev, Emma Gaalaas Mullaney, David Retchless, Jase Bernhardt, Doug Baldwin, Jennifer Titanski-Hooper, and Dana Cuomo will speak about their research and observations during fieldwork and teaching.

• 3:30 to 5:00 p.m.
• Refreshments are offered in 319 Walker Building at 3:30 p.m.
• The lecture begins in 112 Walker Building at 4:00 p.m.
• Coffee Hour To Go

Next Week: October 24   Armen Kemanian “The Soil Carbon Balance, Nitrous Oxide Emissions, and Biofuels”

Petra Tschakert quoted in article about Diane Ackerman book, The Human Age

Petra Tschakert, a geography professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent years in northeast India, researching the riverside villages in the Himalayan foothills where deforestation has lead to worsening monsoon floods. Tschakert found two better-off, politically-connected communities that were able to build partial embankments to protect themselves. In another community, of recent migrants of a different ethnicity and no political pull, floods are continual.s

“Any effort to reduce negative impacts of climate change that are rooted exclusively in economic or technical solutions will not be successful, or will be highly unfair, because they do not tackle these underlying inequalities, and do not build capacities among those who are most affected,” says Tschakert.

Meet Esri interns via a story map

An interactive story map was the perfect way to introduce this summer’s interns. We broke a record this year by hiring 105 interns to work at our headquarters in Redlands, California, and in several regional offices. The students’ backgrounds were just as diverse as the schools they attend.

Can you see yourself as an Esri intern? The first step is to learn about available internships, then apply online. Maybe your story will be on the map next year!

Recently (or soon to be) Published

How to Assess Visual Communication of Uncertainty? A Systematic Review of Geospatial Uncertainty Visualisation User Studies

By Christoph Kinkeldey, Alan M. MacEachren, Jochen Schiewe

In The Cartographic Journal

For decades, uncertainty visualisation has attracted attention in disciplines such as cartography and geographic visualisation, scientific visualisation and information visualisation. Most of this research deals with the development of new approaches to depict uncertainty visually; only a small part is concerned with empirical evaluation of such techniques. This systematic review aims to summarize past user studies and describe their characteristics and findings, focusing on the field of geographic visualisation and cartography and thus on displays containing geospatial uncertainty. From a discussion of the main findings, we derive lessons learned and recommendations for future evaluation in the field of uncertainty visualisation. We highlight the importance of user tasks for successful solutions and recommend moving towards task-centered typologies to support systematic evaluation in the field of uncertainty visualisation.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Party polarization of the House of Representatives over time

Party polarization of the House of Representatives through time, with a focus on which members continue to participate across party lines. The topic of our Coffee Hour this Friday with Clio Andris.

GOOD NEWS

• A Human Factors Lab paper led by Jinlong Yang was accepted by the journal, Cartography and Geographic Information Science. The paper is titled, “The cognition of change: Scaling deformations in mind and spatial theories.”
• Guido Cervone, Mark Coletti, and Rebecca Goolsby (Office for Naval Research), had a poster accepted for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics’ Computational Science and Engineering conference for 2015. The poster is on “Using Non-authoritative Crowdsourced Data to Augment Remote Sensing Data for the Fukushima Diachii Nuclear Incident.”
• Anna (Brendle) Kennedy (BS ’02) and husband Steven Kennedy welcomed Miriam (Mia) Frances Kennedy to the world on April 6, 2014. She weighed 7 lbs. 10 oz. and was 20 inches long at birth.

NEWS

October 10 Coffee Hour: Clio Andris “The Rise of Partisanship and the Emergence of Super-Cooperators in the U.S. Congress”

It is widely reported that partisanship between Democrat and Republican legislators in the United States Congress is at an historic high, resulting in a lack of productivity and innovation in Congress. We quantify the level of cooperation between Democrat and Republican Party members in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1949-2012.

• 3:30 to 5:00 p.m.
• Refreshments are offered in 319 Walker Building at 3:30 p.m.
• The lecture begins in 112 Walker Building at 4:00 p.m.
• Coffee Hour To Go
• Next Week: tba

Photo Gallery: Octocopter UAV test flight
Guido Cervone, associate professor of geography and cyberscience; Alexander Savelyev, doctoral student in geography; and Ross Caruso, undergraduate student in meteorology, tested the octocopter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for programmed flight maneuvers and safety.

Penn State commits to historic 20 percent energy reduction
Penn State has joined the U.S. Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Challenge and pledged to reduce its building portfolio’s energy use by 20 percent over the next decade. With a commitment of 28 million square feet, Penn State becomes the largest university in the program, topping Michigan State (20 million square feet) and the University of Virginia (15 million).

From the AAG Newsletter: Toward a More Healthy Discipline
I have had several bouts of depression that have left me drained and feeling vulnerable, and anxiety is something I’ve come to live with but only after years of therapy and different forms of treatment. I haven’t felt ashamed of this, but then again I don’t make a habit of talking about my illness or mental health in general. But prompted by some wonderful colleagues who are proposing a new AAG committee on mental health in the discipline, that’s exactly what I want to do in this column.

Helping GIS students select research topics
In this podcast, Directions Magazine editors Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg (M.S. ’88) talk about how hard it can be for GIS students to pick research topics. Having too many topics to choose from or lacking understanding of spatial principles can make the search more difficult, Francica says. Among their tips are for students to clarify their interests and get feedback from peers.

DOG OF THE WEEK

Last week’s mystery dog was Harley, belonging to Barbara Luther. Karen Cox was the first to respond with the correct answer. Send a photo of your dog to geography@psu.edu for our mystery dog of the week!