IMAGE OF THE WEEK
The Department of Geography has a YouTube channel with playlists for the Activism and Academic Series, Graduate Admissions Process, Geography Alumni Profiles, and select Coffee Hour lectures. For easy access to all these resources, the channel link is in the News & Events mega menu of the department homepage.
GOOD NEWS
DoG enews milestone
This is the 250th issue of the department’s weekly news blog. The first post was published on July 2, 2014. Prior to that date, DoG enews was distributed by email only and not saved anywhere. It was the suggestion of Guido Cervone to maintain an archive of the department’s news that led to the creation of the “dogblog” using the Sites at Penn State web publishing platform. DoG enews is emailed weekly to more than 1,000 subscribers including internal Penn State advocates; the department community of faculty, staff, and graduate students; undergraduate students; and alumni and friends. Thanks for reading!
A video on “Virtual Reality field tour of the ‘Variable Density Thinning’ study on the Stanislaus-Tuolumne Experimental Forest, California,” research conducted by Alan Taylor, Alexander Klippel, and Jan Wallgrün is featured on the USDA Forest Services Research and Development highlights webpage. This 33-minute tour provides a visual view of novel thinning and prescribed fire treatments for restoring a more diverse forest that is also resilient to stressors such as wildfire and drought.
Erica Smithwick discussed the impact wildfires have on the ecosystem, climate change and human habitat. At “Conversations with Colleagues,” monthly seminar hosted by at Penn State’s The Village. The 57-minute video of her talk can be viewed on YouTube.
Jamie Peeler successfully defended her Ph.D. She also has received postdoc funding and will be a NatureNet Science Fellow with The Nature Conservancy in Missoula, Mont.
Helen Greatrex received a Research Innovations with Scientists and Engineers (RISE) seed grant from the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) for the project “Standardizing satellite weather analysis.”
NEWS
Virtual Undergraduate Exhibition showcases undergraduate ingenuity
Harman Singh presented a poster from her research “Examining the Complex Nature of Flash Flooding through a Mixed Method Approach: A Case from Kerala, India.”
Faculty and staff encouraged to prepare Box accounts for migration to Office 365
The College of Earth and Mineral Sciences migration starts on May 4, 2021
As Penn State IT continues to migrate Box files to comparable Office 365 services, University IT leaders are asking faculty and staff members who have not yet done so to clean up their Box files to help facilitate successful, timely migrations.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
The Organ Supply Chain: Geography and the Inequalities of Transplant Logistics
Harrison Cole
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12458
This paper describes how supply chain management practices are applied to the process of organ transplantation in the United States. While these practices are meant to increase the volume of organs available for transplantation, I argue that they may in fact exacerbate existing inequities of access to treatment. This is an especially pressing issue given that the number of people currently on the organ transplant waiting list far exceeds the number of organs available for transplantation, a situation referred to as “the organ shortage crisis.” A contributing factor to this disparity is the spatiotemporal distribution of transplant centers, donors, and recipients, considering that the transplant process is so time‐sensitive and time‐intensive. In response, the healthcare industry is developing systems that smooth and accelerate the procurement and delivery of organs, creating a logistical network that is standardized, data‐driven and able to be deployed at a moment’s notice. However, these new systems draw design inspiration from those originally developed for profit‐based corporate supply chains, and thus risk employing the spatial logics of corporate supply chain management practices. Drawing from interviews with transplant and other medical professionals, I argue that applying these practices to the organ transplant network may end up privileging already‐advantaged patients, when instead, a truly equitable network must attend to the uneven landscape of transplantation in the US. Furthermore, I argue that these technologies should not necessarily be resisted outright, but rather adopted in the interest of universal access as opposed to the maintenance of profitability.
Prescribed fire alters structure and composition of a mid-Atlantic oak forest up to eight years after burning
Dems, C.L., Taylor, A.H., Smithwick, E.A.H. et al
Fire Ecology
https://doi.org/10.1186/s42408-021-00093-5
Background: Prescribed fire in Eastern deciduous forests has been understudied relative to other regions in the United States. In Pennsylvania, USA, prescribed fire use has increased more than five-fold since 2009, yet forest response has not been extensively studied. Due to variations in forest composition and the feedback between vegetation and fire, Pennsylvania deciduous forests may burn and respond differently than forests across the eastern US. We measured changes in forest structure and composition up to eight years after prescribed fire in a hardwood forest of the Ridge and Valley region of the Appalachian Mountains in central Pennsylvania.
Results: Within five years post fire, tree seedling density increased more than 72% while sapling density decreased by 90%, midstory density decreased by 46%, and overstory response varied. Following one burn in the mixed-oak unit, overstory tree density decreased by 12%. In the aspen–oak unit, where pre-fire harvesting and two burns occurred, overstory tree density increased by 25%. Not all tree species responded similarly and post-fire shifts in species relative abundance occurred in sapling and seedling size classes. Abundance of red maple and cherry species decreased, whereas abundance of sassafras, quaking aspen, black oak, and hickory species increased.
Conclusions: Forest composition plays a key role in the vegetation–fire relationship and localized studies are necessary to measure forest response to prescribed fire. Compositional shifts in tree species were most pronounced in the aspen–oak unit where pre-fire overstory thinning and two prescribed fires were applied and significant structural changes occurred in all stands after just one burn. Increases in fire-tolerant tree species combined with reductions in fire-intolerant species highlight the role of prescribed fire in meeting management objectives such as altering forest structure and composition to improve game habitat in mid-Atlantic hardwood forests.
