No Coffee Hour | GIS Day, GAW Week | Taylor video on fire

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

GIS Day

The annual GIS day event is co-sponsored by the Department of Geography and the University Libraries. Read more about ongoing activities this week

GOOD NEWS

  • Eun-Kyeong Kim won second place in the 2016 KOCSEA Moon-Jung Chung Scholarship Competition and received a cash prize of $600.
  • UROC projects for spring 2017 will be accepted until November 18. Submit your projects here: http://www.geog.psu.edu/uroc-project
  • Marnie Deibler received the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences November staff “Rock in Role” award.

NEWS

No Coffee Hour on November 18 or 25 due to Thanksgiving holiday
Coffee Hour is a weekly lecture hosted by the Department of Geography celebrating interdisciplinary scholarship and collegiality. Topics range from innovations in GIScience, to food security, to land use and justice issues, among others. All members of the Geography, Penn State, and Centre County community are invited to attend.
Next time: December 2 with Kathleen Carley

Expanded GIS Day program highlights resources and experiential knowledge
An expanded GIS Day program for 2016 highlighting geospatial information includes two days of events Monday and Tuesday, Nov. 14-15, in Penn State’s Pattee and Paterno Library at University Park. Keynote presentations, a career panel, information fair, “lightning talks” and a networking reception highlight this year’s program. Students, faculty, staff, and members of the community are encouraged to participate and learn more about the extensive resources available in GIS and related fields. The free program is co-sponsored by the University Libraries and the Department of Geography. The complete events schedule of GIS Day activities at Penn State is available at sites.psu.edu/gisday.

Penn State launches first Transgender Visibility Week, Nov. 14-20
Penn State will join universities and communities across the nation Nov. 14 as the University initiates its inaugural Transgender Visibility Week. The week’s events complement the University’s All In initiative.

Video: California forest fires might be influenced by human activity
Over half of the nation’s forest firefighting budget goes into fires in California. While trying to design a model that would aid in fire forecasting, Alan Taylor, professor of Geography came upon evidence that would suggest that human activity plays an even larger role.

Interested in learning more? Our spring 2014 Geography newsletter is all about pyrogeography.

RECENTLY (OR SOON TO BE) PUBLISHED

Beyond white privilege: Geographies of white supremacy and settler colonialism
By Anne Bonds and Joshua Inwood
In Progress in Human Geography, December 2016; vol. 40, 6: pp. 715-733., first published on November 4, 2015
doi: 10.1177/0309132515613166
This paper builds from scholarship on whiteness and white privilege to argue for an expanded focus that includes settler colonialism and white supremacy. We argue that engaging with white supremacy and settler colonialism reveals the enduring social, economic, and political impacts of white supremacy as a materially grounded set of practices. We situate white supremacy not as an artifact of history or as an extreme position, but rather as the foundation for the continuous unfolding of practices of race and racism within settler states. We illustrate this framework through a recent example of a land dispute in the American West.

Mountain Ecology, Remoteness, and the Rise of Agrobiodiversity: Tracing the Geographic Spaces of Human–Environment Knowledge
By Karl S. Zimmerer, Hildegardo Córdova-Aguilar, Rafael Mata Olmo, Yolanda Jiménez Olivencia & Steven J. Vanek
In Annals of the American Association of Geographers
doi: 10.1080/24694452.2016.1235482
We use an original geographic framework and insights from science, technology, and society studies and the geohumanities to investigate the development of global environmental knowledge in tropical mountains. Our analysis demonstrates the significant relationship between current agrobiodiversity and the elevation of mountain agroecosystems across multiple countries. We use the results of this general statistical model to support our focus on mountain agrobiodiversity. Regimes of the agrobiodiversity knowledge of scientists, government officials, travelers, and indigenous peoples, among others, interacting in mountain landscapes have varied significantly in denoting geographic remoteness.

Ice core and climate reanalysis analogs to predict Antarctic and Southern Hemisphere climate changes.
By Mayewski, P.A., A.M. Carleton, S. Birkel, D. Dixon, A. Kurbatov, E. Korotkikh, J. McConnell, M. Curran, J. Cole-Dai, S. Jiang, C. Plummer, T. Vance, K. Maasch, S. Sneed, and M. Handley.
In Quaternary Science Reviews, accepted (in press)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2016.11.017
A primary goal of the SCAR (Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research) initiated AntClim21 (Antarctic Climate in the 21st Century) Scientific Research Programme is to develop analogs for understanding past, present and future climates for the Antarctic and Southern Hemisphere. In this contribution to AntClim21 we provide a framework for achieving this goal that includes: a description of basic climate parameters; comparison of existing climate reanalyses; and ice core sodium records as proxies for the frequencies of marine air mass intrusion spanning the past ~2000 years. The resulting analog examples include: natural variability, a continuation of the current trend in Antarctic and Southern Ocean climate characterized by some regions of warming and some cooling at the surface of the Southern Ocean, Antarctic ozone healing, a generally warming climate and separate increases in the meridional and zonal winds. We emphasize changes in atmospheric circulation because the atmosphere rapidly transports heat, moisture, momentum, and pollutants, throughout the middle to high latitudes. In addition, atmospheric circulation interacts with temporal variations (synoptic to monthly scales, inter-annual, decadal, etc.) of sea ice extent and concentration.

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