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

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Not all Penn State geographers went to the American Association of Geographers annual meeting in New Orleans. Alan Taylor shares this photo from the US Regional Association of the ​International Association for Landscape Ecology in Chicago. Pictured left to right: Alan Taylor, Lucas Harris, Jamie Peeler, and Natalie Pawlikowski, at the Cloud Gate sculpture, nicknamed, “the bean.”

GOOD NEWS

• Alumnus Joshua Stevens @jscarto was recognized as one of 50 Must-Follow Twitter Accounts for Geospatial, Data Science, and Visualization.
• Carolyn Fish accepted a tenure-track job as an Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon.
• Alumnus Peter Howe (’12g) was awarded an NSF CAREER grant from the Geography and Spatial Sciences program. The 5-year project is titled “CAREER: Location-Aware Social Science for Adaptation: Modeling Dynamic Patterns in Public Perceptions and Behavior.”
• Josh Inwood will deliver the inaugural Liberal Arts First-Year Valedictory Address.
• Aparna Parikh has accepted an offer for a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship by the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College, and will be housed in their Department of Geography.
• Cary Anderson won the AAG Cartography Speciality Group’s Illustrated Paper Award for her work on assessing emotional reactions to different map designs.
• Julie Sanchez received an award from the Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium.

RECOGNITION RECEPTION

Department to hold annual Recognition Reception on Friday, April 27

Throughout the academic year, our faculty, students, staff, alumni, and friends have contributed significantly to our department, community, and society. To extend our appreciation, we will recognize the accomplishments of our community during this annual event. This year’s Recognition Reception will feature the department’s graduating seniors, which provides a special opportunity to join them in celebrating their experience in the department and embarking on the next phase of their lives.

• Reception and Master’s Poster Display: 3:00-3:30 p.m. and 4:30-5:00 p.m., 3rd floor, Walker Building
• Awards Ceremony: 3:30-4:30, 112 Walker Building
• Watch webcast on Mediasite
• Register to attend

NEWS

Fighting fire with societal norms

There are a few statistics about women firefighters that stand out to Penn State researcher Lorraine Dowler.

Women account for about 7 percent of firefighters nationwide. Men and women firefighters have the same average age, but women are paid $10,000 less, on average, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Even in the San Francisco Fire Department, which has made great strides toward equal representation, just 15 percent of firefighters are women. In the Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY), that figure is less than 1 percent.

Undergraduate Exhibition wraps up record year

Arts and Humanities winner is working with Alex Klippel and Jiawei Huang in ChoroPhronesis
Hundreds of students and judges bustled about in the HUB-Robeson Center Wednesday evening for the 2018 Undergraduate Research Exhibition on the University Park campus of Penn State. From musical presentations in the Flex Theater posters in Alumni and Heritage halls, the University’s best were promoting the fruits of their academic and artistic pursuits.

Students see green: Mock spill illustrates potential impact of wastewater leak

Bright green water swirled around Mariah Airey’s boots as it made its way into Black Moshannon Creek.

A freshman at State College Area High School, Airey watched as green dye trickled down a tributary, mixed with the clear water in the creek and then rushed downstream.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

The future of behavioral and cognitive geography: a coda

Roger Downs
Handbook of Behavioral and Cognitive Geography, 2018

American archives and climate change: risks and adaptation

Mazurczyk, T., Piekielek, N., Tansey, E., & Goldman, B.
Climate Risk Management
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crm.2018.03.005
Climate change directly affects the future security of cultural resources. Cultural heritage and in particular, archives, are increasingly at risk of degradation due to climate change threats and triggers. This study evaluated present and future consequences of water-related climate change impacts using a mapping methodology to assess exposure of American archives to incompatible weather extremes.

HIV as social and ecological experience

Brian King and Margaret S. Winchester
Social Science and Medicine
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.04.015
The spread and varied impacts of the HIV/AIDS epidemic demonstrate the complex and reciprocal relationships between the socio-political and biophysical dimensions of human health. Yet even with increasing research and policy attention there remain critical gaps in the literature on how HIV-positive households manage health through their engagement with social and ecological systems. This is particularly urgent given improvements in the global response to the epidemic, whereby expanded access to antiretroviral therapy has extended the possibility for survival for years or decades. Because many HIV-positive families and communities in the Global South remain dependent upon a diverse set of resources to generate income and meet subsistence needs, the impacts of disease must be understood within a mix of social processes, including the maintenance of land and collection of natural resources.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Bronwen Powell (right) shared this photo from Asni Market in the High Atlas Mountains near Marrakech, Morocco in December 2017. She is interviewing a vendor and assisted by a translator.

GOOD NEWS

• April 18 at 7:00 p.m., the GIS Coalition will be holding its final meeting of the semester in 229 Walker Building. Guest speaker Mark Simpson will talk about GIS and virtual reality for data representation.
• April 28, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., SWIG will be hosting three interactive workshops teaching girls the importance of space and place by using maps/cartography, aerial photography, and VR, as part of Graduate Women in Science (GWIS) biannual Girl Scout Workshop.
• Guido Cervone received a College of Earth and Mineral Sciences postdoctoral award, which will fund a postdoctoral position for two years.
• Eden Kinkaid passed her dissertation proposal defense on April 16.
• At the 2018 AAG annual meeting, alumnus Jase Bernhardt (’16g), now in the Department of Geology, Environment and Sustainability at Hofstra University, was elected director of the AAG Climate Specialty Group.
• Hari Osofsky’s Emory Law Journal article, Energy Partisanship, (with University of Melbourne’s Jacqueline Peel) was awarded the 2018 Morrison Prize, which recognizes the most impactful sustainability-related legal academic article published in North America during the previous year.
• Next year’s SWIG officers will be Ruchi Patel, Michelle Ritchie, Elli Nasr, and Emily Domanico.

COFFEE HOUR

The Miller Lecture with Ariel Anbar: Education Through Exploration: Reimagining Learning in a Digital Age

Digital learning environments are being developed to meet the need for discovery-based and active learning at scale, enabling pedagogy that is interactive and adaptive to the learner as well as new modes of assessment. Building on the successes of tools and platforms such as the Khan Academy, Coursera, EdX, and PhET, the sophistication of interactivity, adapativity, and assessments continues to improve, driven by a combination of technological innovation and learning sciences research. This convergence creates new possibilities, but demands new approaches to the design of learning experiences.

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

NEWS

Preserving Seeds of Knowledge: Natural history flourishes at Penn State’s PAC Herbarium

Located in the Whitmore Lab on the Penn State campus, the PAC Herbarium may be one of University Park’s best-kept secrets.

Cabinets and shelves are lined with more than 107,000 carefully dried, preserved, and mounted plant specimens from around the world. The room’s temperature is kept at 69 degrees throughout the year to keep mold and insects away. Treasured specimens collected by Evan Pugh, Penn State’s first president, showcase the legacy of the herbarium and the role it has played in the university’s history as a leader in agricultural sciences.

Public Mapping Project wins 2018 Brown Democracy Medal

As conversations about how to stop partisan gerrymandering continue around the country, the work being done by this year’s Brown Democracy Medal winner could not be more timely or more relevant.

The McCourtney Institute for Democracy will award the 2018 Brown Democracy Medal to the Public Mapping Project, an initiative led by Micah Altman, director of research and head of the program on information science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Michael McDonald, associate professor of political science at the University of Florida.

One-fifth of carbon entering coastal waters of eastern North America is buried

Coastal waters play an important role in the carbon cycle by transferring carbon to the open ocean or burying it in wetland soils and ocean sediments, a new study shows.

The team, led by Raymond Najjar, professor of oceanography in Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, constructed the first known carbon budget of the eastern coast of North America from the southern tip of Nova Scotia, Canada, to the southern tip of Florida. They tracked the flows of organic and inorganic carbon into and out of coastal waters.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Advancing Dendrochronological Studies of Fire in the United States

Harley GL, Baisan CH, Brown PM, Falk DA, Flatley WT, Grissino-Mayer HD, Hessl A, Heyerdahl EK, Kaye MW, Lafon CW, Margolis EQ, Maxwell RS, Naito AT, Platt WJ, Rother MT, Saladyga T, Sherriff RL, Stachowiak LA, Stambaugh MC, Sutherland EK, Taylor AH.
Fire. 2018; 1(1):11
doi:10.3390/fire1010011
Dendroecology is the science that dates tree rings to their exact calendar year of formation to study processes that influence forest ecology (e.g., Speer 2010 [1], Amoroso et al., 2017 [2]). Reconstruction of past fire regimes is a core application of dendroecology, linking fire history to population dynamics and climate effects on tree growth and survivorship. Since the early 20th century when dendrochronologists recognized that tree rings retained fire scars (e.g., Figure 1), and hence a record of past fires, they have conducted studies worldwide to reconstruct [2] the historical range and variability of fire regimes (e.g., frequency, severity, seasonality, spatial extent), [3] the influence of fire regimes on forest structure and ecosystem dynamics, and [4] the top-down (e.g., climate) and bottom-up (e.g., fuels, topography) drivers of fire that operate at a range of temporal and spatial scales. As in other scientific fields, continued application of dendrochronological techniques to study fires has shaped new trajectories for the science. Here we highlight some important current directions in the United States (US) and call on our international colleagues to continue the conversation with perspectives from other countries.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Three schools and a total of 35 middle school girls participated in this years Supporting Young Women in Geography (SYWIG) Day, held in the Department of Geography on April 22. One activity, run by Carolyn Fish, Cary Anderson, and Emily Domanico focused on mapping the impacts of climate change. Here, girls are using contour lines on a topographic map to predict what coastal areas would be inundated in the future with 25 feet of sea level rise. Photo: Tara Mazurczyk.

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.

• A paper by Jamie Peeler and Erica Smithwick titled “Exploring invasibility with species distribution modeling: how does fire promote cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) invasion within lower montane forests?” has been accepted for publication in the journal, Diversity and Distributions.
• Brian King’s book, States of Disease: Political Environments and Human Health, received the Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award from the Political Geography Specialty Group of AAG.
• Harrison Cole passed his PhD candidacy exam.
• Aparna Parikh successfully defended her dissertation.
• Megan Bauman passed her PhD proposal defense.
• Julia Higson is giving a presentation at the 2018 Center for Global Studies, Penn State-Pittsburgh Undergraduate Research Symposium, April 6 at The Nittany Lion Inn.

COFFEE HOUR

Coffee Hour: Randall F. Mason “From geography to design”

My academic and professional path began in geography and (at mid-career) has settled in the design fields of urban planning and historic preservation. This talk draws on work from two different points in my career: research begun in the early 1990s on the urban history of NYC at the turn of the 20th century, very much inspired and informed by the mentorship of Deryck Holdsworth; and work (ongoing since 2014) on the conservation and interpretation of Rwandan genocide memorials. The links between these projects center on interpreting and practicing historic preservation and urban design as cultural and social practices. These, and my other scholarly and professional projects, continue to be informed by the basic insights about societies and built environments I learned first in cultural and historical geography.

• 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

Penn State Geographers at AAG

More than 70 Penn Staters, including students (graduate and undergraduate), faculty, and staff are participating in the AAG annual meeting in New Orleans, April 9–14.
Among the highlights:

• Several online geospatial program MGIS students will be giving their capstone presentations during the meeting.
• The Penn State Geography Alumni and Friends reception is planned for Thursday, April 12, at 7:00 p.m. at Napolean House, New Orleans.
• The Supporting Women in Geography Panel, “Reflecting on the past and future of Supporting Women in Geography (SWIG), 6th Annual Panel” will take place, April 13 at 5:20 p.m.
• Spreadsheet on Box with all Penn Staters and their sessions
• More AAG program information
• Undergraduate Student Activities & Resources at the 2018 Annual Meeting

AAG Obituary for Peirce F. Lewis

Peirce F. Lewis, an American geographer and professor emeritus at the Department of Geography at Penn State, died on February 18, 2018 in State College, PA. He was 90.

Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Peirce worked as a civilian geographer in the U.S. Army Forces Far East Command in Tokyo, Japan from 1953-1955. Afterward, he conducted post-doctoral study focusing on geomorphology of North America. Peirce joined the Geography Department at Penn State in 1958 where he taught until his retirement in 1995.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Procrustes target analysis: A multivariate tool for identification of climate fluctuations

Michael B. Richman and William E. Easterling
Journal of Geophysical Research
doi:10.1029/JD093iD09p10989
Agriculturally important climate fluctuation types are identified by using an expert systems approach to synthesize information concerning the sensitivity of various aspects of Midwestern corn production to climatic variability. This information forms target criteria which are the basis for subsequent multivariate analysis using a technique new to meteorology, Procrustes Target Analysis (PTA), to fit the target to climatological data. Mathematical derivation of PTA is presented, along with an example of its application. The results of the analysis indicate that significant climate anomalies exist in the Midwest which agree with the target coefficients. Their spatial evolution is presented. Further investigation reveals that coherent areas of these fluctuations persist for large periods of the 15‐year windows examined and that they appear to impact corn production.

Architectures of hurry: An introductory essay

Deryck W. Holdsworth, Phillip Gordon Mackintosh, Richard Dennis
Architectures of Hurry—Mobilities, Cities and Modernity
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351746601
‘Hurry’ is an intrinsic component of modernity. This introductory essay situates ideas about hurry in recent literatures on modernity, mobility, speed, rhythm and time–space compression, but argues for a distinctive focus on the infrastructures, practices and emotions associated with ‘hurry’. To this end, the essay explores literary representations of hurry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including E.M. Forster’s notion of an ‘architecture of hurry’ on the streets of modern London and Matthew Arnold’s ‘sick hurry’ of modern life, and reviews a lexicon of words often associated with hurried mobility. As an experience, if not as a word, ‘hurry’ predates modernity, yet the very contradictory and ambiguous character of hurry reflects the contradictions and ironies at the heart of urban modernity. The introduction concludes by summarizing the themes of subsequent chapters and acknowledging some inevitable omissions in the range of empirical studies, which also imply scope for future research structured around ideas of modern hurry.

Wood Pulp and the Emergence of a New Industrial Landscape in Maine, 1880 to 1930

John H. Clark (’10g) and Deryck W. Holdsworth
Maine History Volume 52

Maine History Journal

Between the 1880s and 1930s, investors developed over seventy pulp and paper mill sites to exploit the woods and inland waters of Maine. Authors John Clark and Deryck Holdsworth tracked the changing historical geographies of papermaking in Maine during this period through an analysis of data from Lockwood’s Directory, the industry’s leading monitor of investment. They also mapped mill sites, noting their changing capacity and shifts in product types as consumer needs evolved. Their work shows how the development of a railroad network helped facilitate a shift from smaller mills at coastal sites to larger mills at inland settings, which exploited water power from the state’s major rivers. This spatial shift, they argue, was also accompanied by an increasing portion of the ownership being controlled by out-of-state capital.