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.