Social justice+outreach | Diaz named to NSF GRFP | Studying movement, COVID-19

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

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Keeping communities safe will take a collective effort. Help us spread the word to colleagues, family, friends and neighbors by taking a picture wearing a mask, posting to social media, and using the hashtag #MaskUpOrPackUp.

GOOD NEWS

Alumna Lettice Brown of York, Pa., who completed a bachelor of science in geography in 2006, was recently featured in an Allegheny Front story, “Nature Groups Address Environmental Justice in Pennsylvania.”

Mikael Hiestand will speak as part of the fall 2020 Climate Dynamics seminar series, on the topic, “Annual variations in latent and sensible heat fluxes under differing synoptic regimes in the U.S. Corn Belt,” on Sept. 30, from 11:15 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. via Zoom. For more information and link.

Thabiti Willis of Carleton College will speak as part of the African Studies Program fall 2020 speakers series on  “From East Africa to the Persian Gulf: Mapping Journeys of Slavery and Freedom in the Western Indian Ocean Region,” Sept. 9, at 12:30 p.m. All events will be live-streamed on Zoom. Links for the talks will be sent via email in advance of each presentation.

The AAG’s call for papers is now open. Anyone with an interest in geography may submit an abstract of up to 250 words, describing their presentation’s purpose, methods, and conclusions. Find out details on how to submit.

The undergraduate clubs in the Department of Geography: GIS Coalition, Gamma Theta Upsilon, and UnderDoGS are holding combined meetings on Zoom this semester. The next meeting is on Sept. 14 at 7:30 p.m.

NEWS

Students learn the power of collective voice while advocating for justice

Students discovered the power of community voice while working as interns over the summer through a social justice program facilitated by the Penn State Center Philadelphia, a Penn State Outreach service. Jaqueline Saleeby and Mackenzie Flanders both pivoted from their summer projects to assisting in the organization of a virtual symposium for the Penn State community that will be held in September and is focused on racial justice.

18 new NSF graduate researchers join the ranks at Penn State

Geographer Jeremy Diaz is among the new fellows

Eighteen students were named National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) recipients for the 2020-21 academic year.

Faculty funded to study how people’s movement impacts COVID-19 transmission

Nita Bharti, Lloyd Huck Early Career Professor and assistant professor of biology at Penn State, and her collaborator Anthony Robinson, associate professor of geography at Penn State, have been awarded seed funding from the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences at Penn State to study how monitoring the movement of people can potentially be used as a predictor or early indicator of COVID-19 transmission and guide health policy decisions.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Disclosing Influence: Hydraulic fracturing, interest groups, and state policy processes in the United States

Jennifer Baka, Arielle Hesse, Kate J. Neville, Erika Weinthal, Karen Bakker
Energy Research & Social Science
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101734
This paper examines copy-and-paste regulating in hydraulic fracturing (HF) fluid disclosure regulation across US states. Using text analysis, cluster analysis and document coding, we compare HF regulations of twenty-nine states and two “model bills” drafted by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF, an environmental NGO). In contrast to recent studies that have documented ALEC’s widespread influence across policy domains, we find limited evidence of ALEC influence in HF fluid disclosure regulations. Instead, elements of the EDF bill are more prevalent across state regulations. Yet, text similarity scores between states are higher than similarity scores between states and the EDF bill. In particular, Colorado and to a lesser extent Pennsylvania functioned as leader states for other states to follow. This indicates that state-to-state communication was a more influential channel of policy diffusion than interest group model bills in this instance. Future research should better examine processes of information sharing amongst state oil and gas regulators as regulatory text is but one channel of policy diffusion. The cluster analysis also reveals that contiguous states, often within the same shale basins, frequently have different regulations. This finding calls for a reconsideration of the current state-led environmental regulatory framework for HF, which has resulted in a patchwork of regulations across the US. Finally, through the use of novel text analysis tools, this paper adds methodological diversity to the study of policy diffusion within energy policy.

Robust paths to net greenhouse gas mitigation and negative emissions via advanced biofuels

John L. Field, Tom L. Richard, Erica A. H. Smithwick, Hao Cai, Mark S. Laser, David S. LeBauer, Stephen P. Long, Keith Paustian, Zhangcai Qin, John J. Sheehan, Pete Smith, Michael Q. Wang, Lee R. Lynd
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1920877117
Biofuel and bioenergy systems are integral to most climate stabilization scenarios for displacement of transport sector fossil fuel use and for producing negative emissions via carbon capture and storage (CCS). However, the net greenhouse gas mitigation benefit of such pathways is controversial due to concerns around ecosystem carbon losses from land use change and foregone sequestration benefits from alternative land uses. Here, we couple bottom-up ecosystem simulation with models of cellulosic biofuel production and CCS in order to track ecosystem and supply chain carbon flows for current and future biofuel systems, with comparison to competing land-based biological mitigation schemes. Analyzing three contrasting US case study sites, we show that on land transitioning out of crops or pasture, switchgrass cultivation for cellulosic ethanol production has per-hectare mitigation potential comparable to reforestation and severalfold greater than grassland restoration. In contrast, harvesting and converting existing secondary forest at those sites incurs large initial carbon debt requiring long payback periods. We also highlight how plausible future improvements in energy crop yields and biorefining technology together with CCS would achieve mitigation potential 4 and 15 times greater than forest and grassland restoration, respectively. Finally, we show that recent estimates of induced land use change are small relative to the opportunities for improving system performance that we quantify here. While climate and other ecosystem service benefits cannot be taken for granted from cellulosic biofuel deployment, our scenarios illustrate how conventional and carbon-negative biofuel systems could make a near-term, robust, and distinctive contribution to the climate challenge.

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