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

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Yanan Xin won the Best Presentation Award in the 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on AI for Geographic Knowledge Discovery (GeoAI’ 19). The title of her presentation was “Mapping Miscanthus Using Multi-Temporal Convolutional Neural Network and Google Earth Engine.”

GOOD NEWS

Professor Emeritus Deryck Holdsworth will give the 2019 GRID Lecture, “Above the Turk’s Head: Providence and Post-Maritime World,” at 3 p.m., Tuesday, November 19, in the Stuckeman Family Building Jury Space.

The following students were inducted in to the Gamma Theta Upsilon Alpha Tau chapter on November 15, 2019: Kayla Bancone, Seamus Gibbons, Jacob Grande, Sara Maholland, Kyle Myers, Jenna Pullice, Sophie Tessier, Lixun Wang.

Due to Thanksgiving break there will be no DoG enews next week.

An Interdisciplinary Workshop on Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation will be held 12:30–4:30 p.m., Friday, December 6, in 134 HUB. Registration is required.

Alex Klippel will speak at the Sustainability Showcase, noon to 1:30 p.m., December 6, in 233AB HUB. He will talk about “Extended Realities-Creating Visceral Experiences for Sustainability.” For more information and to register.

NEWS

Homeless female veterans: Out of sight, out of mind

Female veterans are the fastest growing demographic among the homeless population in the United States and face a double hurdle of distance and invisibility in getting the health services they need from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, according to research conducted by Penn State graduate student and U.S. Air Force veteran Elizabeth Elsea.

Conference explores role of institutions of higher education in extreme weather

Erica Smithwick to participate

As the number of extreme weather events associated to climate change continues to grow world-wide, it is becoming increasingly important that institutions of higher education reflect on their role both before and after catastrophic events.

NCSE report on climate scholarship

Today, the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE) released a new report showing public universities are contributing significantly to America’s understanding of climate change. In Climate Science Research in the United States and U.S. Territories, NCSE analyzed the research of 80 public institutions from all 50 states and found that they had produced 10,004 studies on the impacts of climate change on their regions between 2014 and 2018.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Spatial Learning in Smart Applications: Enhancing Spatial Awareness through Visualized Off-Screen Landmarks on Mobile Devices

Rui Li
Annals of the American Association of Geographers
DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2019.1670611
Smartphones have become a significant platform in everyone’s daily lives. For example, maps and map-based services on smartphones bring great convenience for wayfinding. They affect users’ spatial awareness, however, due to their small sizes. That impacted spatial awareness can lead to degraded spatial knowledge and disorientation. This study intends to address these issues associated with spatial learning on smartphones by adapting cartographic and cognitive theories and investigating a new design for presenting spatial information on smartphones that can support users’ awareness of space. The design uses the distinctive identities of spatial locations beyond the mapped screen as landmarks and visualizes the identities and distances of landmarks in distance through visual variables. Following previous pilot studies, this study evaluates the effectiveness of using such a design on aspects related to spatial awareness. Results provide additional details on the advantage of using specific visual variables to enhance the acquisition of spatial knowledge and spatial orientation. Although smart devices are ubiquitous in everyone’s lives, it is still important to address the cognitive issues between those devices and their users. This study provides evidence that design can further contribute to the improvement of map-based applications on smartphones, which provides convenience and enhances users’ spatial learning of new places.

US Route 50: The Loneliest Road in America, Part 2

Wayne Brew
PAST: online journal of the International Society for Landscape, Place and Material Culture
https://indd.adobe.com/view/12e1ca68-2055-4fa1-ae95-1d0efa356b43
Part 2 of the loneliest road in America picks up the story in Missouri. For Part 1 of the story please refer to PAST 2018. For those starting the story here, I traveled the length of U.S. Route 50 (over 3,000 miles) from California east to Ocean City, Maryland (see Figure 1a). It is always a challenge tracing old interstates through major metropolitan areas because the exact route changes over time, usually to bypass the central business district. That is true for Kansas City and Saint Louis, Missouri. Sorting out the old routes can be done using historic USGS topographic maps, and it is the older routes that I travel.

The Blue Highway: US Route 10

Wayne Brew
PAST: online journal of the International Society for Landscape, Place and Material Culture
https://indd.adobe.com/view/12e1ca68-2055-4fa1-ae95-1d0efa356b43
rom 1926 to 1969 US Route 10 connected Detroit, Michigan, to Seattle, Washington. Starting in 1969 the western end of was subsumed by I-94 and I-90. In 1987, the eastern terminus was truncated to Bay City, Michigan, with the western end in West Fargo, North Dakota.

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It’s GIS today, Nov. 12 at University Libraries. Several Department of Geography students, faculty, and alumni are presenting talks, which may be viewed on Mediasite.

GOOD NEWS

Undergraduate geography student Zhaogeng Ding will present a poster at the annual Penn State Student Engagement Expo on Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Earth Talks Seminar Series presents “The Dynamics of Deep Decarbonization,” with speaker Leon Clarke, research director, Center for Global Sustainability, University of Maryland, at 4 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 18, 2019, in 112 Walker Building. Clarke’s presentation is titled “US Climate Mitigation and the Paris Agreement.” The seminar series is co-supported by the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI), Power and Energy Systems Transitions Lab (PESTL) and Center for Climate Risk Management (CLIMA.

Alumni Update: Michael Sutherland, a 2016 graduate in geography,  is currently working as a spatial data analyst for commercial real estate company CBRE based out of the Conshohocken, Pa. office. “I mainly work with demographics, and as of late, tracking historic demographic change. Most of my work is nationally based so I’m helping out on GIS projects across the country,” he said.

COFFEE HOUR

Coffee Hour with Marel King
Chesapeake Bay: Lessons learned from 40 years of watershed management

Marel King is the Chesapeake Bay Commission’s Pennsylvania Director.  She received her juris doctor degree from the Penn State Dickinson School of Law and her bachelor of science degree in Dairy and Animal Science Penn State.

The Chesapeake Bay is the nation’s largest estuary, with a 64,000 square mile watershed spanning parts of six states and the District of Columbia. Despite the natural, social, and political diversity across the region, efforts to restore the Chesapeake are a model of success. Nevertheless, additional progress must be made before water quality goals are achieved.

Established in 1980, the Chesapeake Bay Commission will celebrate its 40th Anniversary in 2020. The Commission is a tri-state legislative commission advising the General Assemblies of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia on matters of Bay-wide concern. As a signatory to the series of Chesapeake Bay Agreements and its four decades of work within the state legislatures and the U.S. Congress to craft “Policy for the Bay,” several lessons have emerged about how to successfully manage a large-scale watershed restoration effort.

• Friday, November 15, 2019
• 3:15 p.m., refreshments are offered in 319 Walker Building
• 3:45, an induction ceremony will be conducted for the new members of Gamma Theta Upsilon in 112 Walker Building
• 4 p.m., the lecture begins in 112 Walker Building
• Coffee Hour to Go on Zoom
• More information about Coffee Hour and previously recorded talks

NEWS

Center for Immersive Experiences to host immersive technology open house Nov. 12

Members of the Penn State community are invited to attend an immersive technology open house taking place across the University Park campus on Nov. 12. The event is being organized by the Center for Immersive Experiences (CIE) and will showcase the University’s resources around virtual reality, augmented reality, 360-degree video and more.

GTU induction set

The Department of Geography will hold an induction for the newest members of Gamma Theta Upsilon, the geography honor society, immediately preceding the Coffee Hour lecture on November 15, 2019. Gamma Theta Upsilon was founded in 1928 and became a national organization in 1931. Members of GTU have met academic requirements and share a background and interest in geography. GTU chapter activities support geography knowledge and awareness.

Choosing most cost-effective practices for sites could save in bay cleanup

Robert Brooks was involved in the research

Using site-specific watershed data to determine the most cost-effective agricultural best management practices — rather than requiring all the recommended practices be implemented across the entire watershed — could make staying below the Chesapeake Bay’s acceptable pollution load considerably less expensive.

Online geodesign program adds geographic information systems expert to faculty

Robert Stauder, a geographic information systems (GIS) professional with more than 20 years of experience in geodesign, GIS analysis and GIS in planning, is joining Penn State’s online geodesign graduate program. He is teaching Geodesign History, Theory and Principles, which is the program’s longest-standing course and also the first step toward both the graduate certificate and the master of professional studies degree, which are offered entirely online through Penn State World Campus.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Slow and Fast Violence: A Feminist Critique of Binaries

Jenna Christian and Lorraine Dowler
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies
https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1692
Rob Nixon’s recent theorization of slow violence deliberates on specific forms of violence that unfold gradually and in unspectacular ways. However, discussions about the phenomenon that fall under slow violence are not new to the academy and echo the labor of feminist scholars who have for many years written about how violence is experienced in banal, everyday, intimate, and routinized ways. We argue that these Feminist traditions of analyzing violence are vital to touch on, because these contributions are largely overlooked in Nixon’s thesis. Further, this robust scholarship demonstrates how the invisibility of slow violence is shaped not only by its everyday nature, but also by larger gendered and raced epistemologies that privilege the public, the rapid, the hot, and the spectacular. We argue that a feminist epistemological approach to denaturalizing binaries can offer a deeper understanding of how the invisible nature of slow violence is shaped by ongoing gendered and raced epistemologies. Specifically, we believe that a feminist geopolitical framework aids in recognizing the co-constitution of fast and slow violence and engages new pathways that challenge impunity.

Complex interactions among successional trajectories and climate govern spatial resilience after severe windstorms in central Wisconsin, USA

Melissa S. Lucash, Kelsey L. Ruckert, Robert E. Nicholas, Robert M. Scheller, Erica A. H. Smithwick
Landscape Ecology
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-019-00929-1
Context: Resilience is a concept central to the field of ecology, but our understanding of resilience is not sufficient to predict when and where large changes in species composition might occur following disturbances, particularly under climate change.
Objectives: Our objective was to estimate how wind disturbance shapes landscape-level patterns of engineering resilience, defined as the recovery of total biomass and species composition after a windstorm, under climate change in central Wisconsin.
Methods: We used a spatially-explicit, forest simulation model (LANDIS-II) to simulate how windstorms and climate change affect forest succession and used boosted regression tree analysis to isolate the important drivers of resilience.
Results: At mid-century, biomass fully recovered to current conditions, but neither biomass nor species composition completely recovered at the end of the century. As expected, resilience was lower in the south, but by the end of the century, resilience was low throughout the landscape. Disturbance and species’ characteristics (e.g., the amount of area disturbed and the number of species) explained half of the variation in resilience, while temperature and soil moisture comprised only 17% collectively.
Conclusions: Our results illustrate substantial spatial patterns of resilience at landscape scales, while documenting the potential for overall declines in resilience through time. Species diversity and windstorm size were far more important than temperature and soil moisture in driving long term trends in resilience. Finally, our research highlights the utility of using machine learning (e.g., boosted regression trees) to discern the underlying mechanisms of landscape-scale processes when using complex spatially-interactive and non-deterministic simulation models.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Penn State University Libraries and the Department of Geography will observe GIS Day — an annual event celebrating the technology of geographic information systems (GIS) — on Tuesday, Nov. 12, with activities designed to bring together both new and experienced users of geospatial information across disciplines.

GOOD NEWS

Luke Trusel will present a talk on “The Greenland Ice Sheet in a Warming World,” on Wednesday, Nov. 6, 11:15 a.m.to 12:30 p.m. in 529 Walker Building as part of the fall 2019 Earth System Science Center Brown Bag Series.

Guido Cervone will present a talk on “Expanded Dimensionality Image Spectroscopy via Deep Learning,” at the Meteorology Colloquium on Wednesday, Nov. 6, 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. in 112 Walker Building

Erica Smithwick will be a panelist at the Women in Science Mixer on Wednesday, Nov. 6 at 5:00 p.m. in 114 Steidle Building. Meet and support women scientists from across the university. A panel discussion will be held on being a woman scientist, imposter syndrome, and work-life balance.

Earth Talks Seminar Series presents “The Dynamics of Deep Decarbonization,” with speaker Gary Geernaert, Director, Climate and Environmental Sciences Division, U.S. Department of Energy, on Monday, Nov. 11, 2019 at 4:00 p.m. in 112 Walker Building.The seminar series is co-supported by the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI), Power and Energy Systems Transitions Lab (PESTL) and Center for Climate Risk Management (CLIMA).

Ann Myatt James ’14g recently accepted an appointment as a Data Services Librarian at George Washington University’s Gelman Library in Washington DC. In this role, she’ll be supporting students, faculty, staff, and administrators to more effectively access and engage data resources, geospatial technologies, and visualizations in their research, teaching, and practice.

Academic job postings: The George Washington University in Washing, DC is hiring an assistant professor of geography and an assistant professor of geography and foreign affairs.

COFFEE HOUR

Coffee Hour with Emily Rosenman
Marketizing the wealth gap? Geographies of risk and power in the pursuit of an anti-racist finance

Historical and ongoing structural discrimination has created racialized geographies of inequality in the United States: wealth gaps, wage gaps, employment gaps, and so on. This history, coupled with continued constraints on state social services following the 2008 financial crisis, has prompted claims that private and charitable capital must fill these gaps. Many of these capital flows piggyback off state efforts to incentivize (rather than directly fund) social investment in dis/underinvested areas, bolstered by voluntary commitments from private and philanthropic capital to shrug off a racist past in favor of revitalizing disinvested communities with investments guided by a “lens” of racial justice. While at first glance these efforts might simply seem like another pretext for private profiteering, they partially align with the demands of marginalized communities and organizations like the Movement for Black Lives: demands for reinvestment in health, education, and social services in historically disinvested communities.

• Friday, November 8, 2019
• Refreshments are offered in 319 Walker Building at 3:30 p.m.
• Lecture begins in 112 Walker Building at 4:00 p.m.
• Coffee Hour to Go on Zoom

For more information about Coffee Hour and to view previously recorded Coffee Hour talks visit https://www.geog.psu.edu/calendar/coffee-hour-lecture-series

NEWS

Geography Awareness Week — Mark your calendars!

Get ready to celebrate the importance of geography and geographic education during Geography Awareness Week (#GeoWeek) from November 10-16, 2019! The theme for this year’s GeoWeek is Igniting the Spirit of Exploration. While previous years celebrated featured parts of geography, organizers now encourage highlighting any or all aspects of geography. Follow @theAAG on Twitter leading up to and during GeoWeek for more activities and announcements.

Event explores geographic information systems Nov. 12 at University Libraries

“Exploring the World Through Geovisualization” is the theme of this year’s event

Penn State University Libraries will observe GIS Day—an annual event celebrating the technology of geographic information systems (GIS)—on Tuesday, Nov. 12, with activities designed to bring together both new and experienced users of geospatial information across disciplines.

This year’s program, “Exploring the World Through Geovisualization,” aims to foster awareness of geospatial visualization, online mapping, and geospatial data science and the ways these applications are being used on campus, in the community, and beyond. GIS use across the University is enabled through access to Esri GIS software, including ArcGIS Pro and ArcMap, along with ArcGIS Online.