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

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Balloon mystery: In recognition of Guido Cervone’s birthday, some person or persons decorated his office over the weekend. Each balloon encloses a couple of small puzzle pieces.

GOOD NEWS

• After nearly eight years with Esri, alumnus Mark Smithgall, (’09) started a new position as a GIS Administrator for Anadarko Petroleum Corporation.
• E.-K. Kim successfully defended her dissertation in fall 2017, and starts her postdoc at University of Zurich, Switzerland in spring 2018.
• Adrienne Kramer (nee Tucker) passed her doctoral dissertation defense on December 18; she has just accepted a new job as Senior GIS Analyst at the International Association of Fire Fighters
• Graduate student award deadline: Nominations for the department’s Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award are due to csfowler@psu.edu by February 1.

COFFEE HOUR

We’re still brewing Coffee Hour for this week.  An announcement will come soon.  In the meantime, check out the rest of the spring semester schedule: http://www.geog.psu.edu/news/coffee-hour. And remember, if you missed a talk, you can view the video on Mediasite.

NEWS

Doctoral student melds passions for science, helping others in FEMA job
Geography doctoral student Adrienne Kramer has always wanted to help people, and her first job out of college is letting her do this for potentially millions of people affected by hurricanes, flooding and other disasters. As an emergency management specialist with the Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA), Kramer is able to apply her geography skills to build maps, analytical tools and other resources to help the agency improve its response and recovery operations.

Century of data shows sea-level rise shifting tides in Delaware, Chesapeake bays
The warming climate is expected to affect coastal regions worldwide as glaciers and ice sheets melt, raising sea level globally. For the first time, an international team has found evidence of how sea-level rise already is affecting high and low tides in both the Chesapeake and Delaware bays, two large estuaries of the eastern United States.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Enhancing the temporal resolution of satellite-based flood extent generation using crowdsourced data for disaster monitoring
Panteras, G., Cervone, G.
International Journal of Remote Sensing, Volume 39(5), 2018.

Damage assessment of the urban environment during disasters using volunteered geographic information
Hultquist, C., Sava, E., Cervone, G., Waters, N.
In: L. Shintler and Z. Chen (Eds.), Big Data for Regional Science. CRC Press, ch 18. 2017.

Quantifying methane emissions from natural gas production in north-eastern Pennsylvania
Barkley, Z.R., Lauvaux, T., Davis, K.J., Deng, A., Miles, N.L., Richardson, S.J., Cao, Y., Sweeney, C., Karion, A., Smith, M. and Kort, E.A.
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 17(22), p.13941, 2017

Analysis of errors introduced by geographic coordinate systems on weather numeric prediction modeling
Cao, Y., Cervone, G., Barkley, Z., Lauvaux, T., Deng, A., Taylor, A.
Geoscientific Model Development. Volume 10, 2017, pp. 3425–3440. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-3425-2017.

A cloud-enabled automatic disaster analysis system of multi-sourced data streams: An example synthesizing social media, remote sensing and Wikipedia data
Huang, Q., Cervone, G., Zhang, G. Computers,
Environment and Urban Systems, Volume 66, 2017, pp. 23-37, ISSN 0198-9715, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2017.06.004. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0198971517303216)

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Naples at Night: Crew aboard the International Space Station took this photograph of the city lights of Naples and the Campania region of southern Italy. The Naples region is one of the brightest in the country; roughly three million people live in and around this metropolitan area. The different colors of lights in the scene reflect some of the history of development in the area. The green lights are mercury vapor bulbs, an older variety that has been replaced in newer developments by orange sodium bulbs (yellow-orange). To the northeast, the lightless gaps between the homes and businesses are agricultural fields. The bright yellow-orange complex amidst the fields is the CIS emporium, the largest commercial retail facility in Europe. The large black circular area in the photo is Mount Vesuvius, the only active volcano on Europe’s mainland. Image Credit: NASA

GOOD NEWS

• Robert Brooks announced that after 38 years of service at Penn State (25 years as founder and director of Riparia, and 15 years in geography) he will be retiring from active service at the end of August.
• Scholarships are available for geospatial students through the Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA) EnerGIS Conference. Applications are available via the EnerGIS Website.
• Alumni and current Esri staffers Jena DiFrisco (’16) and Ben Levine (’14), along with geographer/recruiter Nick Kelch, will be visiting campus Feb. 5-7 for the career fair and interviews, as well as an info session and professional development discussion held in the Department of Geography.
• Lise Nelson was selected as a Resident Fellow for the Humanities Institute at Penn State for Fall 2018 and authored “Farm labor, immigration, and race” a chapter in the textbook “Food and Place: A Critical Introduction,” just published Rowman and Littlefield.
• Russell Hedberg accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position in sustainability with the department of geography-earth sciences at Shippensburg University, where he will also be serving as the university sustainability coordinator.
• Stephen Matthews was recently appointed Liberal Arts Professor.

COFFEE HOUR

Coffee Hour with Alan Taylor: Humans modulate fire regimes, forest characteristics, and fire-climate relationships in California montane forests, USA
Climate change is predicted to increase future fire activity and trigger fire regimes shifts in western USA forests but predictions are uncertain because human activity can modulate or even override climatic effects on fire activity. This talk highlights the effects of changing socio-ecological systems on fire regime characteristics and fire-climate relationships in pine dominated forests in California. Fire regimes and forest conditions are quantified for a five century period to characterize variability in human-fire-forest-climate dynamics. A study landscape burned in 2013 providing a ‘natural experiment’ to determine if fire severity would increase as predicted by the human fire exclusion-forest thickening vegetation change model for these forests. A statistical model using daily area burned, daily fire weather, and fuels and vegetation data from the pre fire exclusion and contemporary forest were used to identify controls on fire severity. Topography, tree species composition, and cover of forbs and shrubs, best explained fire severity.

• 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.
• Watch the webcast live or later on Mediasite

NEWS

Rome wins poster contest for Alaska research; library adds to prizes
During a 2017 educational-based trip to Alaska that was focused on glacial systems, Courtney Rome began studying something that wasn’t on the syllabus.

Rome, a senior majoring in geography at Penn State, noticed that natives had a much different approach to grocery shopping than she was used to. Residents facing much higher prices for produce and other items at the grocery store than residents of the lower 48 states were opting instead to take larger roles in procuring their own food outside of the grocery store.

GEOlab researchers shaping future of energy, disaster forecasting
Never has the world been better positioned to predict and respond to natural disasters. The stream of data at our fingertips is seemingly endless.

But the size of this mounting trove of information in itself poses a problem. For example, running flood calculations for a city facing heavy rains using a century of data is highly accurate. But the calculation is useless if it takes days or weeks to compute.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Agenda-Setting at the Energy-Water Nexus: Constructing and Maintaining a Policy Monopoly in US Hydraulic Fracturing Regulation
Authors, Jennifer Baka, Kate J. Neville, Karen Bakker, Erika Weinthal
Forthcoming, Review of Policy Research
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1541-1338
Despite calls to increase federal oversight of hydraulic fracturing (HF), the US Congress has maintained a regulatory system in which environmental regulatory authority is devolved to the states. We argue that this system is characterized by a long-standing “policy monopoly”: a form of stability in policy agenda-setting in which a specific manner of framing and regulating a policy issue becomes hegemonic. Integrating theories on agenda-setting and environmental discourse analysis, we develop a nuanced conceptualization of policy monopoly that emphasizes the significance of regulatory history, public perceptions, industry-government relations and environmental “storylines”. We evaluate how a policy monopoly in US HF regulation has been constructed and maintained through a historical analysis of oil and gas regulation and a discourse analysis of 11 select congressional energy committee hearings. This research extends scholarship on agenda-setting by better illuminating the importance of political economic and geographic factors shaping regulatory agendas and outcomes.

All U.S. states are becoming more racially diverse… for now
Barrett A. Lee, Michael J.R. Martin, Stephen A. Matthews, Chad R. Farrell
N-IUSSP
http://www.niussp.org/article/becoming-more-racially-diverse-for-now/
Universal patterns or trends are rare in demographic research. Yet we have uncovered one: since 1980, all 50 U.S. states have become more ethnically and racially diverse (Lee et al. 2017). Such a finding may not seem surprising given that it mirrors the direction headed by the nation as a whole. Immigration, youthful age structures, and higher fertility have contributed to minority population growth, especially among Hispanics and Asians (Lichter 2013). Diversity has also been boosted by intermarriage (which produces multiracial offspring) and changes in racial self-identification. The operation of these mechanisms, coupled with a shrinking share of whites, is turning America into a rainbow-hued society. Without exception, states have followed suit.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The image above is of a low severity fire, the kind that can limit the severity of subsequent fires, according to research completed by Alan Taylor and Lucas Harris. As the Coffee Hour speaker on January 26, Taylor will talk about that research.

GOOD NEWS

• Joshua Inwood was interviewed by the local news about MLK Day and also wrote an article for The Conversation, “MLK’s vision of love as a moral imperative still matters.”
• Alumnus Siddharth Pandey (’14) was selected to be in xyHT Magazine’s “40 under 40 list for Remarkable Geospatial Professionals” in their January 2018 edition.
• Andrew Carleton was featured in a College of EMS Twitter faculty video, talking about his enjoyment of travel and photography.

COFFEE HOUR

Coffee Hour: Richard Schroeder “Ode to the Extreme Huntress”
This presentation explores the emergence of trophy hunting as a new and embattled frontier in the culture wars surrounding notions of women’s rights and gender equity. The analysis centers on three specific domains: 1) video campaign materials produced by the National Rifle Association to encourage firearm use in general and hunting in particular among women (“Love at First Shot”; “Armed and Fabulous”); 2) an international hunting competition that bestows the title “Extreme Huntress” on its champion each year; and 3) a group of increasingly high profile celebrity women trophy hunters, including “Winchester Deadly Passion” reality TV star Melissa Bachman, “Extreme Huntress” winner Rebecca Francis, and Jen “The Archer” Cordero, among others. In each of these settings, I analyze the seemingly contradictory ways women have come to identify and express themselves as hunters, and how these complex modes of self-identification complicate our understanding of the act of hunting writ large.

• Time: 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.)
• Watch the webcast live or later on Mediasite
• Next Week: Alan Taylor

NEWS

New course to examine science, policy and ethics surrounding climate change
“Ethics of Climate Change” (Global Health/Religious Studies/Philosophy/Meteorology 133), a new interdomain course being offered at University Park this spring, seeks to introduce students to the science, policy and ethics of climate change so they can develop an understanding of its implications on the biosphere and human civilization.

Institute for CyberScience names spring 2018 distinguished visiting researchers
The Institute for CyberScience (ICS) will bring two acclaimed researchers to Penn State in spring 2018 through the ICS Distinguished Visiting Researcher Program. The program provides funding for accomplished scholars in computational science fields to visit, deliver seminars, meet students, and discuss potential collaborations with Penn State faculty.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Online Geospatial Program students and their families gathered for a reception at the Dutton Institute before attending the fall 2017 Commencement. For most, it was their first time setting foot on campus and meeting their instructors face-to-face. Graduating students are pictured. Front row left to right: Pamela Kanu, Ginger Anderson, Jaclyn Meade Cardillo, Ben Ogle, Angelo Podagrosi. Back row left to right: Jackie Silber, Tim Naegeli, Nate Roberts, Doug Sexton.

GOOD NEWS

• Anthony Robinson was featured in a College of EMS Twitter faculty video over the winter break.
• Mallory Henig (’12) will be starting a career with Conservation International at their headquarters in Arlington, VA as a Development Coordinator. “I would also like thank Denice Wardrop and Joe Bishop for taking me to Peru and the Amazonia in 2011. Their faculty-led study abroad experience really helped me understand the importance of the natural environment around the world, and I do believe that firsthand experience assisted me and getting this new career opportunity.”
• Weiming Hu was elected to fill the grad rep position fall and spring 2018.

COFFEE HOUR

The opening Coffee Hour for the spring 2018 semester will be January 19, 2018. The speaker will be Richard Schroeder. His talk is titled, “Ode to the Extreme Huntress.”

NEWS

Creating Safe Spaces at AAG Meetings for All
Derek Alderman with Lorraine Dowler
Hollywood, The Hill, and the nation’s newsrooms have been exposed as spaces of sexual harassment, misconduct, and even assault. Yet, sexual harassment and discrimination are neither unique nor new to these highly public industries and this misconduct is unfortunately common to most workplaces. Indeed, conservative estimates suggest that 60% of all women have been victims of sexual harassment while a Harvard study found that number to be almost 90 percent for women ages 18 to 25.

From Coal Town to Trail Town
There’s a national story line about parts of West Virginia and Pennsylvania that goes like this: as the steel and coal industries fade, small towns here are literally dying out. Young people move away because there’s a lack of jobs. But for the past twenty years, some entrepreneurs have quietly been working on a different narrative — one that harnesses the region’s natural beauty to build the economy. And their slow climb is starting to bear real fruit.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Health-environment futures: Complexity, uncertainty, and bodies
Nari Senanayake, Brian King
Progress in Human Geography
First Published December 27, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517743322
The relationships between human health and the environment have captivated scholarly attention across a number of disciplinary and policy domains. This article reviews emerging health-environment research, which we categorize into three themes: complexity, uncertainty, and bodies. Although there have been robust contributions to these thematic areas from geography and the social sciences, we argue that integrating them into an analytical framework can extend geographic perspectives on scale, knowledge production, and human-environment relations, while also incorporating valuable insights from cognate fields. We conclude by reflecting on the normative contributions of this framework for research and policy.

Social Vulnerability to Climate Change in Temperate Forest Areas: New Measures of Exposure, Sensitivity, and Adaptive Capacity
Alexandra Paige Fischer & Tim G. Frazier
Annals of the American Association of Geographers Vol. 0 , Iss. 0,0
https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2017.1387046
Human communities in forested areas that are expected to experience climate-related changes have received little attention in the scholarly literature on vulnerability assessment. Many communities rely on forest ecosystems to support their social and economic livelihoods. Climate change could alter these ecosystems. We developed a framework that measures social vulnerability to slow-onset climate-related changes in forest ecosystems. We focused on temperate forests because this biome is expected to experience dramatic change in the coming years, with adverse effects for humans. We advance climate change vulnerability science by making improvements to measures of exposure and sensitivity and by incorporating a measure of adaptive capacity. We improved on other methods of assessing exposure by incorporating climate change model projections and thus a temporal perspective. We improved on other methods of assessing sensitivity by incorporating a variable representing interdependency between human populations and forests. We incorporated a measure of adaptive capacity to account for ways socioeconomic conditions might mitigate exposure and sensitivity. Our geographic focus was the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. We found that fifteen of the region’s seventy-five counties were highly vulnerable to climate-related changes due to some combination of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. Nine counties were highly vulnerable because they ranked very high in terms of exposure and sensitivity and very low in terms of adaptive capacity. The framework we developed could be useful for investigations of vulnerability to climate change in other forested contexts and in other ecological contexts where slow-onset changes might be expected under future climate conditions.