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

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

For the 2017 season, Alan Taylor (and his horse Rico) were fourth overall for the 25 mile distance in Competitive Trail Riding for the Northeastern Region (Maine to Virginia). The photo shows Alan and Rico (left) and Kristin and Leo in Acadia National Park, Maine.

GOOD NEWS

The Department of Geography launched a new website on March 20, 2018. The URL will be the same as before: www.geog.psu.edu, however any links to pages within the old site will no longer work. Check any links you currently have to our website, and contact geography@psu.edu if you are having trouble linking to the pages or content you seek.

• Incoming faculty member, Emily Rosenman, won the best dissertation award from the Urban Geography Speciality Group this year.
• Danielle Oprean, post-doc in ChoroPhronesis, has accepted a position at the University of Missouri in the School of Information and Learning Technologies. She will begin her tenure-track faculty position starting August 2018.
• Jonathan Nelson passed his PhD proposal defense (on March 13).
• Aparna Parikh has a chapter titled “Gendered household expectations: Neoliberal policies, graveyard shifts, and women’s responsibilities in Mumbai, India” in the recently published book, Modernity, Space, and Gender.
• Megan Baumann and Eden Kinkaid are this year’s recipients of the Nancy Brown Community Service Award.
• Clio Andris won the the 2017-2018 Emerging Scholar Award from the Regional Development and Planning Specialty Group of AAG.
• Justine Blanford was selected as a member of the inaugural cohort for the TRELIS project, Training and Retaining Leaders in STEM-Geospatial Sciences

COFFEE HOUR

Coffee Hour: Spring 2018 UROC talks

The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Connection (UROC) offers research and professional development opportunities in the Department of Geography. Students who participated in UROC during spring semester 2018 will present short talks on their research and experiences in the program.

Speakers and their presentation titles:

• Brit Ickes: A Look at Tolima, Columbia’s Waterways Effect on Sustainable Agriculture
• Clara Miller: India’s Beef Ban: Scientific Expertise, Beef Detection Kits, and Differential Citizenship
• Stephanie Keyaka: Between Tolerance and Acceptance: Sexuality and Development in the Philippines
• Lauren Hile: Analyzing Media Coverage: Refugees in a Nontraditional Resettlement Destination
• Hope Bodenschatz: Digital Timeline of Agricultural Extension in Uganda
• Joseph Grosso and Ivy Wang: The Neighborhood Connectivity Survey
• Harman Singh: Struggles of an Indian Farmer
• Brittany Waltemate: Thematic Mapping of Sri Lanka
• Love Popli: Three Challenges Facing Indian Farmers

Time and location:

• 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 Webcast

NEWS

From Science
Meet Vaclav Smil, the man who has quietly shaped how the world thinks about energy

Alumnus Vaclav Smil (’69g) is profiled
As a teenager in the 1950s, Vaclav Smil spent a lot of time chopping wood. He lived with his family in a remote town in what was then Czechoslovakia, nestled in the mountainous Bohemian Forest. On walks he could see the Hohenbogen, a high ridge in neighboring West Germany; less visible was the minefield designed to prevent Czechs from escaping across the border. Then it was back home, splitting logs every 4 hours to stoke the three stoves in his home, one downstairs and two up. Thunk. With each stroke his body, fueled by goulash and grain, helped free the sun’s energy, transiently captured in the logs. Thunk. It was repetitive and tough work. Thunk. It was clear to Smil that this was hardly an efficient way to live.

From The Guardian
Counter-mapping: cartography that lets the powerless speak

Sara is a 32-year-old mother of four from Honduras. After leaving her children in the care of relatives, she travelled across three state borders on her way to the US, where she hoped to find work and send money home to her family. She was kidnapped in Mexico and held captive for three months, and was finally released when her family paid a ransom of $190.

Her story is not uncommon. The UN estimates that there are 258 million migrants in the world. In Mexico alone, 1,600 migrants are thought to be kidnapped every month. What is unusual is that Sara’s story has been documented in a recent academic paper that includes a map of her journey that she herself drew.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Architectures of Hurry—Mobilities, Cities and Modernity

Mackintosh, P. G., Dennis, R., & Holdsworth, D. W. (Eds.). (2018). Routledge.
‘Hurry’ is an intrinsic component of modernity. It exists not only in tandem with modern constructions of mobility, speed, rhythm, and time-space compression, but also with infrastructures, technologies, practices, and emotions associated with the experience of the ‘mobilizing modern’. ‘Hurry’ is not simply speed. It may result in congestion, slowing-down or inaction in the face of over-stimulus. Speeding-up is often competitive: faster traffic on better roads made it harder for pedestrians to cross, or for horse-drawn vehicles and cyclists to share the carriageway with motorised vehicles. Focussing on the cultural and material manifestations of ‘hurry’, the book’s contributors analyse the complexities, tensions and contradictions inherent in the impulse to higher rates of circulation in modernizing cities.

The collection includes but also goes beyond accounts of new forms of mobility (bicycles, buses, underground trains) and infrastructure (street layouts and surfaces, business exchanges, and hotels) to show how modernity’s ‘architectures of hurry’ have been experienced, represented, and practised since the mid-nineteenth century. Ten case studies explore different expressions of ‘hurry’ across cities and urban regions in Asia, Europe, and North and South America, while substantial introductory and concluding chapters situate ‘hurry’ in the wider context of modernity and mobility studies and reflect on the future of ‘hurry’ in an ever-accelerating world.

This diverse collection will be relevant to researchers, scholars and practitioners in the fields of planning, cultural and historical geography, urban history and urban sociology.

Citizens as Indispensable Sensors During Disasters

Guido Cervone and Carolynne Hultquist
https://populationenvironmentresearch.org/cyberseminars/10516
The release of the seminal work People and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science in 1998 by the National Research Council marked an important milestone in the study of interactions and changes between the Earth and people [7]. The book was based on over 20 years of work with satellite data, primarily Landsat, and multiple observations that characterized human activities and their interaction with the environment. Since the publication, technological advances and population dynamics provided new challenges and opportunities.

Over the 20 years since then, our ability to observe the Earth and our environment has undergone tremendous advances by using multiple high resolution remote sensing instruments and dense networks of ground sensors to improve our collection of data. These observations are often used to initialize or validate numerical simulations, to reconstruct past events, and predict future outcomes at high temporal and spatial resolutions

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

A photo by Tara Mazurczyk of Inventory: Rain and Water, an exhibit at the 2018 Philadelphia Flower Show she and others helped artist Stacy Levy to design. If the name Stacy Levy sounds familiar, it may be because she is the artist who created the Ridge and Valley watershed map at the Arboretum, featured on the cover of our fall 2013 newsletter.

GOOD NEWS

• The Department of Geography is launching its new website today, March 20, 2018! If you are trying to use the website, you may experience a service disruption during the transition process. The URL will be the same: www.geog.psu.edu, however any links to pages within the site will no longer work after today. Starting March 21, check any links you currently have to our website, and contact geography@psu.edu if you are having trouble linking to the pages or content you seek.
• The Penn State GIS Coalition has officially been accepted as a Youthmappers chapter.
• Congratulations to Stacey Olson on passing her M.S. Proposal Defense.
• Congratulations to Jamie Peeler on passing her Ph.D. Proposal Defense.
• Megan Baumann received a Global Programs Travel Grant to present research at the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers (CLAG) in May in Costa Rica. Her paper is titled: “Living a callejera methodology: grounding Lugones’ streetwalker theorizing in a feminist decolonial praxis.” She will also be organizing a panel with Kelsey Brain on “Intersectionality and coloniality in human-environment geography: Empirical contributions to feminist theory from Latin America.”

COFFEE HOUR

Coffee Hour: Kendra McSweeney on “Drug policy and environmental change: lessons from Central America”

This presentation has two aims. First, I offer an overview of recent collaborative research that identifies the ways in which global drug policies are driving unexpected changes in land use, land cover, and agrarian futures in drug transit zones. Drawing from research in rural Central America, with emphasis on Honduras, I describe the logics, patterns, and processes driving narco-led transformations, which are profoundly shaped and intensified by specific U.S.-led counterdrug approaches. I discuss the implications of those findings for how we understand illicit economies, commodity chain geographies, and frontier transformations more generally. Second, I reflect on my research team’s collective experience doing and presenting this work, including a) the challenges of researching illicit activities in general; b) presenting our mixed-method research to international and national drug policy audiences; c) the opportunities and risks associated with working with media to mobilize our findings.

• This talk is sponsored by Supporting Women in Geography (SWIG)
• 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.
• No Coffee Hour To Go: This talk is available live and in-person only. There will be no webcast and no recording.

NEWS

Researchers create tool to better geographic projections in atmospheric modeling

Open-source code developed by a Penn State graduate could improve weather forecasting and a range of other research endeavors that rely on pairing atmospheric models with satellite imagery.
Yanni Cao, who earned her master’s degree in geography in 2016, developed the code while a member of Penn State’s Geoinformatics and Earth Observation laboratory (GEOlab) as a way to fix errors created when satellite data is combined with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. The work was done in collaboration with her adviser, Guido Cervone, head of GEOLab, associate professor of geoinformatics and associate director of the Institute for CyberScience, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

Conservation and diversity: Lives, languages and land in the balance

“Linguists reckon we lose a language every two to three weeks. Species extinction rates are about 1,000 times higher than they were before people showed up. None of that is good news,” said Larry Gorenflo, professor of landscape architecture and geography at Penn State.

Gorenflo conducts research to understand how cultural and biological diversity co-occur in the hope of helping to conserve both. Gorenflo also holds the Eleanor R. Stuckeman (ERS) Chair in Design which provides him with support to further his ongoing inquiries. His research has demonstrated that places with a high number of species also feature high numbers of indigenous languages. He added, “Both are disappearing at alarming rates.”

From Portland State University News

Portland State professor helps bring forests of the future to life

Research team members include Penn Staters Erica Smithwick, Alexander Klippel, Nancy Tuana, Rebecca Bird, Klaus Keller and Robert Nicholas

What if you could see what a forest might look like 50 or 100 years from now? Imagine being able to see how a warming climate turned a dense forest into sparser woodlands.

Soon, there will be an app for that. With just a smartphone and a cardboard headset, users will be able to immerse themselves in a forest years into the future.

Portland State University researcher Melissa Lucash is part of a team that is working to visualize how a variety of factors – including climate change, wildfires, insect invasions and harvesting practices – can alter a forest and how that information can then be used by forest managers when making decisions.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

A composite image by Tara Mazurczyk of the Coffee Hour lecture room and graduate students who gave a lightening talk last year. This Friday’s Coffee Hour will feature seven graduate students giving lightening talks about their research.

GOOD NEWS

• Meg Boyle is giving a talk on international climate policy on Wednesday March 14, at 11:15 a.m., as part of the Earth System Science Seminar brownbag lunch series, in 529 Walker Building.
• Guido Cervone and Penn State colleagues received a seed grant for “Multi-Scale Estimates of Solar Power Water Stress by Integrating Process-Based Descriptions with Deep-Learning-Based Mapping of Solar Farms” from the Institutes of Energy and the Environment.
• Karl Zimmerer and GeoSyntheSES Lab affiliate Steve Vanek have co-authored a new article with Eric Lambin of Stanford University. The article, “Smallholder Telecoupling and Potential Sustainability,” is published in the most recent issue of the journal Ecology and Society (see PUBLISHED section below for citation details and abstract)
• Congratulations to Audrey Lumley-Sapanski on passing her dissertation defense.
• SWIG is seeking new officers. Nominations are due March 21 at 5:00 p.m. to Lauren Fritzsche

COFFEE HOUR

Graduate Student Lightening Talks
This week’s Coffee Hour will features 7 short (a.k.a. lightening) talks by graduate students in the Department of Geography. The talks will offer a glimpse of their research in progress. 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 webcast

• Natalie Pawlikowski: Group Gap Dynamics and Implications for Fire Resilience in an Old-Growth Ponderosa Pine Forest
• Cary Anderson: Map Happy: Emotive Color Connotations in Cartographic Design
• Carolynne Hultquist: Comparison of Fukushima Radiation Dispersion Simulations to Government and Volunteer-Contributed Environmental Observations
• Elham Nasr: Nature Schools and their Impacts on Empowering of Young Girls
• Zach Goldberg: Coffee Hour Food: How can $25 change the world?
• Weiming Hu: Unstructured Grid Adaptation with Genetic Algorithm for Numeric Weather Prediction
• Peter Backhaus: Synthesizing Remote Wetland Functional Assessment Methods

NEWS

from the Altoona Mirror
Earth Matters: Late geography professor made a lasting impact
We all need to look up from our phones long enough to see the real world — not just to keep from running into something, but to truly look at everything that surrounds us.

We would better appreciate what a marvel the planet is and how we can change it, negatively and positively.

Penn State geography professor Peirce Lewis was as influential as anyone in helping me see those details, both natural and man-made. While his passing two weeks ago saddened me, my memories of his classes, lectures, and writings also inspired me.

Students achieve personal, professional growth through study abroad in Tanzania
Andrew Patterson, a geography major, never thought he would be able to study abroad.

“When I was a sophomore,” Patterson said, “I switched majors from environmental systems engineering to geography, and so I really didn’t think I would have the ability to study abroad and also graduate in four years.”

Geospatial intelligence students boost careers with online program
Dan Steiner knows a thing or two about assessing terrain, gathering knowledge sources and weighing human interactions — all things required in the field of geospatial intelligence — on the fly.

The West Point graduate who served for seven years in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, including leading an engineering company in combat during Operation Desert Storm, spent his life using these skills, first in the military, then for a pharmaceutical company, and currently for Orion Mapping, a geospatial intelligence business he founded three years ago.

Liberal Arts student has research paper accepted by international conferences
Penn State Schreyer Scholar Doran Tucker has been interested in medieval armor since before he started college, so much so that he has made his own chain mail.

The Penn State geography and international politics major considered making some armor to fulfill a general education course requirement but decided to research and write about it instead.

Tucker’s independent study paper on that topic has been accepted to both the 53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University this May and the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, in July.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Smallholder telecoupling and potential sustainability
Zimmerer, K. S., E. F. B. Lambin, and S. J. Vanek
Ecology and Society
https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-09935-230130
Smallholders are crucial for global sustainability given their importance to food and nutritional security, agriculture, and biodiversity conservation. Worldwide smallholders are subject to expanded telecoupling whereby their social-ecological systems are linked to large-scale socioeconomic and environmental drivers. The present research uses the synthesis of empirical evidence to demonstrate smallholder telecoupling through the linkages stemming from the global-level integration of markets (commodity, labor, finance), urbanization, governance, and technology. These telecoupling forces are often disadvantageous to smallholders while certain conditions can contribute to the potential sustainability of their social-ecological systems. Case studies were chosen to describe sustainability opportunities and limits involving smallholder production and consumption of high-agrobiodiversity Andean maize amid telecoupled migration (Bolivia), the role of international eco-certification in smallholder coffee-growing and agroforests (Colombia), smallholder organic dairy production in large-scale markets and technology transfer (upper Midwest, U.S.A.), and smallholders’ global niche commodity production of argan oil (Morocco). These case studies are used to identify the key challenges and opportunities faced by smallholders in telecoupling and to develop a conceptual framework.