IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Art work by Anishinabee woodland artist Jim Oskineegish of Eabametoong First Nation will be given as a prizes to the top participants in the Indigenous Peoples’ Day Campus Adventure ongoing this week, Oct. 11–15. Learn more about Penn State’s Acknowledgement of Land.
GOOD NEWS
Travis Young successfully defended his dissertation entitled “Publicly subsidized disasters: disaster recovery and dispossession in Houston-Galveston.”
Harman Singh won second place for her poster, “Examining the Nature of Complex Urban Flooding through a Mixed-Method Approach: A Case from Kerala, India” at the ICDS symposium.
Retired U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer Daniel Selik was awarded the 2021 Michael P. Murphy Award in Geospatial Intelligence.
Patricia Ekberg, MGIS program alumna, published her capstone project, “Developing map marginalia design recommendations for the Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys” as a report of investigation through the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys.
COFFEE HOUR
Next Coffee Hour is Friday, Oct. 22
With Christopher Scott, the Maurice K. Goddard Chair of Forestry and Environmental Conservation in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management, College of Agricultural Sciences.
Previously recorded talks can be viewed on the Coffee Hour Kaltura channel.
NEWS
Melissa Lee will give the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences’ 2021 Lattman Visiting Scholar of Science and Society Lecture. Her talk, “Training the Next Generation Workforce for a Sustainable Future,” will be held at 5 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 18, in 26 Hosler Building on the University Park campus. The event is free and open to the public.
From Thrive Global
As part of my series about companies who are helping to battle climate change, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Erica Smithwick.
Dr. Erica Smithwick is a member of the Science Moms campaign, the largest educational campaign on climate change since 2007. As a landscape and ecosystem ecologist at Penn State, Dr. Smithwick studies the impacts of climate change on people and environments.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
Developing map marginalia design recommendations for the Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys
Ekberg, P.G., and Kessler, Fritz
Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys Report of Investigation
https://doi.org/10.14509/30661
Maps play a crucial role in supporting DGGS’ mission by helping geologists and scientists understand, interpret, and visualize Alaska’s diverse geologic resources. Unfortunately, the overall look and feel of DGGS produced small-format maps are often inconsistent, particularly how map marginalia are included or excluded, placed, and designed. Such inconsistencies have the potential to create confusion for the user, leading to difficulties in orienting the map, measuring distances, identifying map symbols, or learning about the topic and important production information about the map. In addition, the overall appearance of some of the marginalia elements used on past DGGS maps do not conform to what is considered good cartographic design. The variation in map marginalia elements also contributes to the lack of cartographic consistency and continuity in the look and feel of the division’s maps. The purpose of this Report of Investigation is to establish recommended designs for map marginalia and present guidelines for their inclusion, design, and placement. An extensive literature review was performed to compile and document accepted cartographic conventions for marginalia inclusion, design, and placement. A qualitative survey was developed and administered to gather user reactions to, and opinions about, DGGS marginalia elements.
Results of the literature review and qualitative survey supported the establishment of recommended designs for map marginalia and guidelines for their inclusion and placement with the purpose of greatly increasing the consistency of DGGS small format maps and helping map makers critically think about the purpose, role, and considerations of each element on a map. These guidelines will offer DGGS map makers the flexibility to more easily and consistently create a variety of small-format maps that are recognizable as well-designed, professional, organizational products that have a consistent appearance, while supporting the DGGS’ mission and meeting the needs of the map’s intended users.
Uncertain Waters: Participatory groundwater modelling in Chicago’s suburbs
Devin H. Mannix, Trevor L. Birkenholtz, Daniel B. Abrams, Cecilia Cullen
Geoforum
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.09.006
Groundwater exists in underground aquifers and is largely hidden and intangible to water users. As such, groundwater models are one of the main vehicles through which groundwater is made legible. They are critical for water supply planning purposes. However, models are imperfect representations of limited data and contain much uncertainty, posing challenges for the water supply planning process. In this paper, we draw on a case from the Greater Chicago area to examine efforts by the authors and the Illinois State Water Survey to engage with local water managers to develop future water supply scenarios. Much of this area has been dependent upon the Cambrian-Ordovician Aquifer System for over 150 years. Over this period, water levels have declined by over 300 m and aquifers are expected to be unviable by 2030. Here we advance the growing field of participatory groundwater modelling (PGM) to identify forms of uncertainty and their influence on understandings of water supply and risk perceptions of depletion. Conceptually, we draw on the idea of models as world builders, where uncertainties are elucidated through knowledge production in the act of model building, while model development is simultaneously influenced by expectations, beliefs, and ambiguity surrounding those using the models. Through planning meetings and focus group discussions between groundwater modelers and water supply stakeholders, we identify four forms of interconnected uncertainty that hinder planning efforts: 1) hydrogeologic uncertainty, 2) modelling uncertainty; 3) water demand uncertainty; and 4) urban planning uncertainty. We describe our PGM efforts to reduce uncertainty and find stakeholder perceptions are as important as model uncertainties in water management decisions. Participatory modelling is effective in reducing and clarifying these four forms of uncertainty, particularly applied to short-term management decisions in a rapidly changing system. We conclude that future participatory modelling efforts need to focus on reducing communication barriers between scientists and local users.
Piloting a spatial mixed method for understanding neighborhood tobacco use disparities
Louisa M. Holmes, Julia McQuoid, Aekta Shah, Tessa Cruz, Antwi Akom, Pamela M. Ling
Social Science & Medicine
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114460
The tobacco retail environment is where most advertising dollars are spent. However, most research on the retail environment has not methodologically situated tobacco retailers as part of a larger community, and few studies have incorporated community member perspectives of their own tobacco use in relation to their local environments. The purpose of this study is to describe and evaluate a multilevel, multimodal, mixed methods approach for understanding tobacco use in context. We combine quantitative data collected from tobacco retailer audits and geographically-explicit interviews with neighborhood residents to tell a more complete story of tobacco use behavior among adults in San Francisco’s Marina district, and the Oakland Coliseum neighborhood in Alameda County, California. We find that while area-level and retail data provide a broad snapshot of two distinct communities with respect to sociodemographic characteristics and tobacco availability, interviews with community residents who use tobacco add important perspectives regarding how tobacco retailers are viewed and how residents interact with their neighborhood landscapes on a daily basis. The method we describe and critique has the potential to be scaled to incorporate a broader set of geographies, or tailored to address a multitude of health-related questions. Our approach further demonstrates the utility of including geolocated participant narratives as a means of understanding where researcher interpretations of urban environments diverge from those of community residents.
