14
Dec 21

Geogs on StuCo | Icy research | Student farm connection

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Claire and kale

Kale anyone? Claire Byrnes is a senior majoring in anthropology and geography and executive director of the student farm club. She and two other geography students work at the farm. Credit: Claire Byrnes.

GOOD NEWS

Norman Ornelas, Harman Singh and Shuyu Chang have accepted positions as graduate representatives for 2022. They will succeed Jacklyn Weir, Bradley Hinger, and Gillian Prater-Lee.

Lilly Zeitler passed her qualifying exam. 

Chanel Lange-Maney passed her comprehensive exam. 

Chris Fowler was interviewed by WHTM/ABC27 News about the Pennsylvania redistricting process.

NEWS

Geographers see EMS Student Council as a way to connect and give back

Two geography majors are serving as College of Earth and Mineral Sciences’ Undergraduate Student Council (StuCo) officers and as EMS ambassadors. Senior Hannah Perrelli is president and sophomore Emily Shiels is secretary.

Two geographers receive NSF fellowships to study climate change in icy regions

Two incoming graduate students in the Department of Geography were awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships (GRFPs) for 2021. Both want to improve climate change modeling; one in the Arctic, the other in the Antarctic.

Geography undergraduates find connection and context working at the Student Farm

Three undergraduate students in geography are active at the Dr. Keiko Miwa Ross Student Farm at Penn State. They each came to the farm for different reasons, but all perceive a strong connection between farming and geography.

First student to graduate from spatial data science master’s program

Every summer, there are reports of sharks lurking off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Karen Dedinsky, a graduate student at Penn State, was wondering if she could use publicly available data about the sharks to predict where they might show up. She took on that project, creating statistical models and geographic visualizations for the final course of her online master’s degree program.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Reimagining geographies of public finance

August, M., Cohen, D., Danyluk, M., Kass, A., Ponder, C., & Rosenman, E.
Progress in Human Geography
https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325211054963
The study of public finance—the role of government in the economy—has faded in geography as attention to private finance has grown. Disrupting the tendency to fetishize private financial power, this article proposes an expanded conception of public finance that emphasizes its role in shaping geographies of inequality. We conceptualize the relationship between public and private finance as a dynamic interface characterized today by asymmetrical power relations, path-dependent policy solutions, the depoliticization of markets, and uneven distributional effects. A reimagined theory and praxis of public finance can contribute to building abolitionist futures, and geographers are well positioned to advance this project.

Infectious addictions: Geographies of colliding epidemics

King, B., & Rishworth, A.
Progress in Human Geography
https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325211052040
Medical geography and health geography have made significant contributions to studies of human health by addressing the spatial patterns of disease exposure, location of health care services, and place-specific processes producing health and wellbeing. Human geography and human-environment geography have also contributed with emerging attention to the body, uncertainty, and health and environment interactions. What remains understudied are the co-occurrence of multiple disease patterns, including the relationships between infectious disease and addiction. We review geographic research on infectious disease and addiction to advance a theoretical framework that emphasizes the centrality of complexity, uncertainty, difference, and care in shaping human health.


30
Nov 21

Coffee Hour is UROC | Zimmerer on food diversity | New faculty focus on water

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

turtle pond

Graduate students (Pictured left to right: Owen Harrington, Mary Roberts, Nebraska Hernandez, Alejandra Bonilla) from Louisa Holmes’ fall graduate seminar, GEOG 560 Place Race and Health Inequality, visit the turtle pond by the Hintz Family Alumni Center. Several students also submitted images of the turtle pond or turtles. Turtles are considered sacred among Native American tribes; you can read the Haudenosaunee creation story. Students collected images during the week of October 11–15, when the Department of Geography hosted a Campus Adventure to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which many states, cities, and institutions are now choosing to celebrate as an alternative to Columbus Day. Many Native Americans view the celebration of Columbus’ arrival in the America’s as disrespectful: for them it marks the start of 500 years of colonial oppression that they continue to carry the consequences of today. The event was an effort to mark our solidarity with our Indigenous colleagues, including the Indigenous People Student Association (IPSA) and the Indigenous Faculty and Staff Alliance (IFSA). Image: Louisa Holmes

GOOD NEWS

Zachary Goldberg published, “’Harvesting a participatory movement’ Initial participatory action research with the Jewish Farmer Network,” in the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development.

Tara Mazurczyk published, “Native biodiversity increases with rising plant invasions in temperate, freshwater wetlands,” in Wetlands Ecology and Management.

Christopher Fowler published, “How to make voting districts fair to voters, not parties,” in The Conversation and was interviewed on A VerySpatial Podcast – Episode 678 about boundaries, specifically related to redistricting.

If you were unable to attend GIS Day on November 16, recordings of the talks are now available.

Supporting Women in Geography (SWIG) extends a “huge thank-you” to all who contributed to the Centre Safe Holiday Sponsorship Program this year. SWIG donated $420 (far exceeding the goal of $250) to support a family in the program.

The Department of Geography staff is collecting donations for Toys For Tots. Anyone is invited to participate by donating a new, unwrapped toy or by making a monetary donation and a staff member will shop for you. Drop off gifts with Darlene Peletski in 302 Walker Building by December 15.

COFFEE HOUR

UROC Presentations

Students participating in Undergraduate Research Opportunities Connection (UROC) will give short presentations on their research projects. Speakers include Gillian Russell, Bram Woolley, Camila Pena, and Noah Rogers.

  • 4 p.m. EST, Friday, Dec. 3
  • 112 Walker Building
  • Coffee Hour to Go on Zoom

NEWS

Urbanization not always bad for food and land use diversity

Widely accepted myths that urbanization negatively impacts food and land use biodiversity are incorrect, according to a team of researchers who developed a framework for evaluating this intersection. Their results could also affect nutrition and food insecurity in urban areas.

The Department of Geography annual printed newsletter, GEOGRAPH, is now online

Highlights from the summer 2021 issue

Van Meter seeks solutions to historical water quality challenges

Kimberly Van Meter joined the department this summer as an assistant professor of geography specializing in water systems. She is a co-hire with the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI).

Take her to the river: Gaertner reads climate change warnings in water

Brandi Gaertner joined the department this summer as an assistant teaching professor of spatial data science in the online geospatial education program.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

‘Harvesting a participatory movement’ Initial participatory action research with the Jewish Farmer Network

Anika M. Rice, Zachary A. Goldberg
Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development
https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2021.111.010
The Jewish Farmer Network (JFN) is a North American grassroots organization that mobilizes Jewish agricultural wisdom to build a more just and regenerative food system for all. This paper pre­sents methodological findings and reflections from the initial stages of a participatory action research (PAR) collaboration led by the authors and JFN organizers centered on Cultivating Culture, JFN’s inaugural conference in February 2020. For this early iterative phase, we used a PAR approach to guide event ethnography to both facilitate and understand collective movement building and action. This work included pre-conference collabo­rative research design, a participatory reflection and action workshop with roughly 90 participants, eval­uative surveys, short ethnographic interviews, and ongoing post-conference analysis with researchers and movement organizers. While this data was first analyzed and organized for JFN’s use, we present findings to demonstrate the effectiveness of fore­grounding event ethnography within a PAR re­search design at an early stage of movement for­mation, especially how elements of event ethnogra­phy can address some of the limitations of using PAR with a nascent network of farmers. Our work revealed themes in the movement of Jewish farm­ing: the politics of identity in movement building, the tensions around (de)politicization, and the production of Jewish agroecological knowledge. We reflect on the utility of using PAR to frame scholar-activism and propose future inquires for Jewish agrarianism.

Urbanization and agrobiodiversity: Leveraging a key nexus for sustainable development

Karl S. Zimmerer, Chris S. Duvall, Edward C. Jaenicke, Leia M. Minaker, Thomas Reardon, Karen C. Seto
One Earth
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2021.10.012
Expanding urbanization affects food biodiversity and broader agrobiodiversity, which are essential nutrition and ecosystem resources for sustainable development but are threatened globally. The increasingly influential nexus of urbanization-agrobiodiversity interactions has not been systematically researched. Here we design an interdisciplinary perspective to identify and understand the bidirectional interactions of agrobiodiversity in four major linkages: urban and peri-urban land use, urban food supply chains, urban food access, and urban food retailing. Agrobiodiversity is evident to varying degrees amid urbanization globally, rather than the previously assumed blanket incompatibility or unspecified partial compatibility. A proposed conceptual framework is used to hypothesize how these linkages create configurations of combined conditions that support agrobiodiversity amid expanding urbanization. These key conditions contain leverage points of the urbanization-agrobiodiversity nexus for policies to address nutrition insecurity and vital environmental functions. We conclude that the urbanization-agrobiodiversity nexus is a crucial new focus of interdisciplinary research to strengthen sustainable development and food systems.

Native biodiversity increases with rising plant invasions in temperate, freshwater wetlands.

Mazurczyk, T., & Brooks, R. P.
Wetlands Ecology and Management
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11273-021-09842-4
Plant invasions change the landscape in unprecedented ways, influencing not only local wetland native biodiversity but also the regional homogenization of plant communities. Freshwater wetlands are particularly vulnerable to invasive plant impacts, but few studies provide a longitudinal assessment encompassing native biodiversity, plant invasions, and anthropogenic disturbance. We investigate the effects of invasive plant richness and abundance on wetland native biodiversity in 16 temperate, freshwater wetlands in central Pennsylvania. We calculate several commonly used plant community structure and wetland condition indices by site and sampling period across a 20-year timeframe. Results indicate that environmental stimuli had a significant impact on invasive plant abundance through time. Native plant richness and abundance was influenced more by shrub richness, non-native plant cover, and environmental stressors than by invasive plant dominance. This relationship was made evident by the high rate of dominant species turnover and prevalence of dominant native species. If an invasive plant dominated a wetland site, it was replaced by a different dominant native and/or invasive plant in 10 to 15 years, a key finding that relates to the replacement rate of dominant species in the herbaceous layer. This discovery suggests that under certain conditions, invasive plants may provide the necessary means by which a system can recover from a disturbance, which historically goes against the current dogma in the scientific community. Moreover, this supports the idea that some invasive plants serve as a type of secondary pioneer species of succession, aiding in the development of a more stable and biodiverse system over time.


16
Nov 21

Coffee Hour with Sarah Damaske | GIS Day | GEOGRAPH now online

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

cider social

An apple cider social was held by Department of Geography on Friday, Nov. 5 at 3 p.m. on the lawn outside Walker Building. Faculty, staff, and students enjoyed hot cider, donuts, and conversation in the autumn afternoon sun.

GOOD NEWS

Today is Penn State GIS Day The virtual program starts at 1:30 p.m. EST and features geographers Josh Inwood, Brandi Gaertner, Louisa Holmes, and Harrison Cole.

Undergraduate students Rylie Adams (geography minor), Joe Bagala (geography B.S.), and Allie Lister (geography B.S.) are giving talks at the NASA Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium’s 2021 WISER | MURE | FURP Research Symposium on Wednesday, Nov. 17, at 7 p.m. EST

Ben Martini’s MGIS Capstone Project, “Using Object-based image analysis to detect laughing gull nests,”  was published in GIScience & Remote Sensing. Doug Miller was his adviser.

Zachary Goldberg published, “Development through commodification: exploring apple commodity production as pesticide promotion in the High Atlas,” in Agriculture and Human Values.

Vivian D. Rodríguez-Rocha received a 2021research and writing grant from the Institute of Human Geography for, “Counter-topographies of care: care activism in the movement for women’s lives in Mexico.”


In lieu of a staff gift exchange for the holidays, the Department of Geography staff is instead collecting donations for Toys For Tots. Anyone is invited to participate by donating a new, unwrapped toy or by making a monetary donation and a staff member will shop for you. Drop off gifts with Darlene Peletski in 302 Walker Building by December 15.


COFFEE HOUR

Sarah Damaske on The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America

Drawing on interviews with one hundred men and women who have lost jobs across Pennsylvania, Sarah Damaske examines the ways unemployment shapes families, finances, health, and the job hunt. Damaske demonstrates that commonly held views of unemployment are either incomplete or just plain wrong. The unemployment system generates new inequalities that cast uncertainties on the search for work and on life chances beyond the world of work, threatening opportunity in America.

NEWS

The Department of Geography annual printed newsletter, GEOGRAPH, is now online

Highlights from the summer 2021 issue

New associate head for DEI’s mission: To foster a sense of belonging

Lorraine Dowler, professor of geography and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies was named the associate head for diversity, equity, and inclusion for the geography department spring 2021. Associate heads were named for each department in the  College of Earth and Mineral Sciences as part of an ongoing initiative to build a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive department and college environment. The program was launched in January 2021, and Dowler was among the first appointed.

Seed grants support interdisciplinary applied research in geography

Geographers Helen Greatrex, Louisa Holmes, and Emily Rosenman, whose work crosses the subfields of human, environment, and society and geographic information sciences, received seed grants for their research projects.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Using object-based image analysis to detect laughing gull nests

Benjamin F. Martini & Douglas A. Miller
GIScience & Remote Sensing
10.1080/15481603.2021.1999376
Remote sensing has long been used to study wildlife; however, manual methods of detecting wildlife in aerial imagery are often time-consuming and prone to human error, and newer computer vision techniques have not yet been extensively applied to wildlife surveys. We used the object-based image analysis (OBIA) software eCognition to detect laughing gull (Leucophaeus atricilla) nests in Jamaica Bay as part of an ongoing monitoring effort at the John F. Kennedy International Airport. Our technique uses a combination of high resolution 4-band aerial imagery captured via manned aircraft with a multispectral UltraCam Falcon M2 camera, LiDAR point cloud data, and land cover data derived from a bathymetric LiDAR point cloud to classify and extract laughing gull nests. Our ruleset uses the site (topographic position of nest objects), tone (spectral characteristic of nest objects), shape, size, and association (nearby objects commonly found with the objects of interest that help identify them) elements of image interpretation, as well as NDVI and a sublevel object examination to classify and extract nests. The ruleset achieves a producer’s accuracy of 98% as well as a user’s accuracy of 65% and a kappa of 0.696, indicating that it extracts a majority of the nests in the imagery while reducing errors of commission to only 35% of the final results. The remaining errors of commission are difficult for the software to differentiate without also impacting the number of nests successfully extracted and are best addressed by a manual verification of output results as part of a semi-automated workflow in which the OBIA is used to complete the initial search of the imagery and the results are then systematically verified by the user to remove errors. This eliminates the need to manually search entire sets of imagery for nests, resulting in a much more efficient and less error prone methodology than previous unassisted image interpretation techniques. Because of the extensibility of OBIA software and the increasing availability of imagery due to small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS), our methodology and its benefits have great potential for adaptation to other species surveyed using aerial imagery to enhance wildlife population monitoring.

Development through commodification: exploring apple commodity production as pesticide promotion in the High Atlas

Goldberg, Z.A.
Agriculture and Human Values
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-021-10280-4
Global development initiatives frequently promote agricultural commodity chain projects to improve livelihoods. In Morocco, development projects, including the Plan Maroc Vert (PMV), have promoted apple production in rural regions of the country. In order to access domestic markets, these new apple producers often use pesticides to meet market standards. Through situated ethnographic inquiry and commodity chain analysis, using a combination of surveys (n = 120) and interviews (n = 84) with apple wholesalers, government officials, along with farmers, this paper works to critique the PMV’s development approach that implicitly values commodification. By exploring interconnected processes of commodification, I link subsidized apple saplings and cold storage infrastructure to the dependence on pesticide usage, which has become a part of daily village life. This has important implications for community health and riparian ecosystems. Alternatively, I propose how we can imagine different development trajectories that decommodify livelihoods by focusing on local knowledge creation and diversification strategies.


02
Nov 21

Coffee Hour with Andrew Curley | Corn Belt study | Murphy Award winner

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Ruchi TV Fulbright

Ruchi Patel (right) was interviewed live on Salvadoran national TV in October in recognition of the Fulbright Program’s 75th anniversary. Patel spoke about her research and experiences as a Fulbright student in El Salvador so far, as well as what she hopes to gain through cultural exchange. Patel also participated in a Facebook Live panel hosted by the US Embassy as a part of the 75th anniversary week.

GOOD NEWS

An Apple Cider Social will be held by Department of Geography on Friday, Nov. 5 at 3 p.m. on the lawn outside Walker Building.

Chris Fowler is serving on Pa. redistricting advisory council which held a listening session on the redistricting process at University Park campus on Nov. 1. He also was interviewed on the WPSU show Democracy Works about gerrymandering, and wrote an opinion column, published in the Oct 20 issue of the Centre Daily Times.

Wendy L. Zeller Zigaitis was selected to be a member of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) organizing committee for a Geography Essentials workshop series for summer 2022.

Matthew Popek, who earned his bachelor of science in geography in 2009, was awarded the Pennsylvania Chapter of the American Planning Association’s 2021 Award for Leaders in the Emerging Planner category.  In his acceptance speech at the state planning conference in October in Pittsburgh, he acknowledged Roger Downs’ impact on his education and career trajectory. 

Nov. 9, noon EST, 125th Anniversary Virtual Education Series: Brian King on “Infectious Addictions: Geographies of Colliding Epidemics.” This virtual educational series is sponsored by the College’s Graduates of Earth and Mineral Sciences (GEMS) Board of Directors and will spotlight the College’s research in short interactive webinars to engage your curiosity and introduce you to our world-class faculty and alumni. Register at: https://engage.tassl.com/event/9341.

Supporting Women in Geography (SWIG) is again participating in the Centre Safe Holiday Sponsor program. Their goal is to raise $250 by Monday, Nov. 15. Donations can be dropped to the collection envelope in Casey Hamilton’s mailbox (304 Walker Building), or via Venmo to @Timothy-Prestby (comment ‘Holiday gift basket’).

Penn State University Libraries and the Department of Geography will observe GIS Day — an annual event celebrating the technology of geographic information systems (GIS) — with a virtual event from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 16. Geographers Joshua Inwood, Brandi Gaertner, Louisa Holmes, and Harrison Cole will give talks.

Elham Nasr Azadani was selected to give a lightening talk, “Supporting Equity in Participatory Natural Resource Policy and Management,”  at the American Geographical Society’s  (AGS) Geography 2050 Symposium, to be held Nov. 15–19, 2021.

COFFEE HOUR

Andrew Curley on New New Deals: the legacies of colonialism in infrastructure development

The Biden Infrastructure plan proposes $2 trillion investments in new infrastructure throughout the United States. It is building on economic theories of public spending that predate today’s lingering neoliberalism. It proposes projects specifically addressing environmental conservation, climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, the place of tribes and Indigenous nations in this new public spending initiative is uncertain. This presentation asks: “What political and economic changes and risks to Indigenous sovereignty might this new public spending initiative portend for Indigenous nations?”

NEWS

Study explores how climate change may affect rain in U.S. Corn Belt

Air humidity is more important than soil moisture in influencing whether it rains in the United States Corn Belt, an agricultural area in the Midwest, stretching from Indiana to Nebraska and responsible for more than 35% of the world’s most important grain crop, according to a new study by Penn State researchers.

Geointelligence work influenced Murphy Award winner’s focus on counterterrorism

Daniel Selik, a student in the intercollege Master of Professional Studies in Homeland Security (iMPS-HLS) degree program at Penn State and a retired U.S. Navy chief petty officer, received the 2021 Michael P. Murphy Award in Geospatial Intelligence.

Traffic and mobile phone data predict COVID case counts in rural Pennsylvania

Anthony Robinson is on the research team

How much people moved around town predicted COVID-19 cases in a rural Pennsylvania county in 2020, according to a new study by researchers at Penn State.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Mixed-Severity Wildfire as a Driver of Vegetation Change in an Arizona Madrean Sky Island System, USA

Helen M. Poulos, Michael R. Freiburger, Andrew M. Barton, Alan H. Taylor
Fire
https://doi.org/10.3390/fire4040078
Fire is a powerful natural disturbance influencing vegetation patterns across landscapes. Recent transitions from mixed-species forests to post-fire shrublands after severe wildfire is an increasingly prevalent phenomenon in pine-oak and conifer forest ecosystems in southwestern North America. However, we know little about how variation in fire severity influences other common forest types in the region. In this study, we evaluated fire-induced changes in woody plant community composition and forest structure in Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona in the United States that hosts a diverse set of vegetation types. Cluster analysis of the pre-fire vegetation data identified three dominant pre-fire vegetation types including juniper woodland, piñon forest, and pine-oak forest. All vegetation types experienced significant tree mortality across a wide range of size classes and species, from forests to shrublands. The magnitude of change within sample plots varied with fire severity, which was mediated by topography. Significant shifts in dominance away from coniferous obligate seeder trees to resprouting hardwoods and other shrubs occurred across all vegetation types in response to the fire. Regeneration from seed can be episodic, but projected increases in aridity and fire frequency may promote continued dominance by hardwoods and fire- and drought-resistant shrub communities, which is a regional forest management concern as wildfire size and severity continue to increase throughout the southwestern USA.

Move The Object or Move The User: The Role of Interaction Techniques on Embodied Learning in VR

Bagher Mahda M., Sajjadi Pejman, Wallgrün Jan Oliver, La Femina Peter C., Klippel Alexander
Frontiers in Virtual Reality
https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frvir.2021.695312
To incorporate immersive technologies as part of the educational curriculum, this article is an endeavor to investigate the role of two affordances that are crucial in designing embodied interactive virtual learning environments (VLEs) to enhance students’ learning experience and performance: 1) the sense of presence as a subjective affordance of the VR system, and 2) bodily engagement as an embodied affordance and the associated sense of agency that is created through interaction techniques with three-dimensional learning objects. To investigate the impact of different design choices for interaction, and how they would affect the associated sense of agency, learning experience and performance, we designed two VLEs in the context of penetrative thinking in a critical 3D task in geosciences education: understanding the cross-sections of earthquakes’ depth and geometry in subduction zones around the world. Both VLEs were web-based desktop VR applications containing 3D data that participants ran remotely on their own computers using a normal screen. In the drag and scroll condition, we facilitated bodily engagement with the 3D data through object manipulation, object manipulation. In the first-person condition, we provided the ability for the user to move in space. In other words, we compared moving the objects or moving the user in space as the interaction modalities. We found that students had a better learning experience in the drag and scroll condition, but we could not find a significant difference in the sense of presence between the two conditions. Regarding learning performance, we found a positive correlation between the sense of agency and knowledge gain in both conditions. In terms of students with low prior knowledge of the field, exposure to the VR experience in both conditions significantly improved their knowledge gain. In the matter of individual differences, we investigated the knowledge gain of students with a low penetrative thinking ability. We found that they benefited from the type of bodily engagement in the first-person condition and had a significantly higher knowledge gain than the other condition. Our results encourage in-depth studies of embodied learning in VR to design more effective embodied virtual learning environments.

Land use change dynamics in Euro-mediterranean mountain regions. Driving forces and consequences for the landscape

Jiménez-Olivencia, Yolanda, Ibáñez-Jiménez, Álvaro, Porcel-Rodríguez, Laura, Zimmerer, Karl
Land use policy
https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=8105932#
The marginalization of mountain regions in Mediterranean Europe since the mid-20th Century has triggered important socioeconomic and environmental changes that are putting the survival of highly regulated and environmentally adapted landscapes in jeopardy. We still have only a limited understanding of the driving forces behind these dynamics of change and their final consequences for the structure and character of the landscape. In general, the transformation of the landscape and its causes have been studied at regional and local level and various syntheses have been made for Europe or the Mediterranean as a whole, focusing above all on changes in the use of farmland. The objective of this paper is to provide a holistic view of the changes that have taken place in the landscape in the Euro-Mediterranean region, focusing in particular on the mountains because of their role as heritage reserves and as sources of environmental services. This research involves a systematic review of the evidence about the dynamics of land use change, its underlying drivers and their effects on the landscape. We analyse 53 case studies from 6 countries situated on the northern shores of the Mediterranean. These studies covered a period of around 40 years and were each performed at a local scale. The results reveal that landscape change is caused above all by the abandonment of farmland and reforestation (in over 90% of cases), and by pressure from urban development in the case of coastal and peri-urban mountain ranges. In addition, the dominant dynamics in each case vary depending on the bioclimatic area in question, to the extent that bioclimate has been shown to be an important explanatory factor behind these dynamics. The underlying boosters of change normally act together and those most commonly cited are economic, demographic and geographic. As regards the impacts on the structure and character of the landscape, the dynamics analysed are manifested first and foremost in degradation processes, in an increase in homogenization, which affects above all the most humid bioclimates, and in the fragmentation of open spaces. This analysis provides a general overview of the causes and consequences of the changes in land use in the mountain regions of Mediterranean Europe and raises questions of interest for policy-making that affects the landscape.

Where to place emergency ambulance vehicles? Using a capacitated maximum covering location model with real call data

Soheil Hashtarkhani, Ping Yin, Behzad Kiani, Alireza Mohammadi, Shahab Mohammad Ebrahimi, Mahmood Tara, Stephen A. Matthews
International Journal of Health Geographics
10.21203/rs.3.rs-994111/v1
Background: Timeliness of emergency medical services (EMS) is critical for patient survival. Identifying optimal locations for ambulance vehicles could increase the chance of timely service delivery. This study incorporates Geographical Information Systems (GIS) with a mathematical optimization technique to improve the 5-minute coverage of EMS demands.

Methods: This study was conducted in the county of Mashhad, the northeast of Iran, including 94 ambulance vehicles distributed across 74 EMS stations. Locations of demands were extracted using analysis of one-year EMS call data. Network analysis was employed to estimate the travel times. A maximal covering location problem (MCLP) model with a capacity threshold for vehicles was implemented using the CPLEX optimizer. To make the proposed model more practical in the context of EMS, we added a constraint to the model formulation to maintain an acceptable service level for all EMS calls. Two scenarios were implemented: (1) a relocation model of existing vehicles among existing stations and (2) an optimal allocation model of EMS vehicles and stations using a list of candidate locations.

Results: Using the relocation model, the proportion of calls for service within the 5-minute coverage standard increased from 69% to 75%, ensuring all urban and rural service demands to be reached within 16 and 48 minutes, respectively. Our allocation model revealed that the coverage proportion could rise to 84% of the total call for service by adding ten vehicles and eight new stations.

Conclusions: Incorporating GIS techniques with optimization modeling has the potential to improve population health outcomes in real-world decision making regarding the accessibility and equity of health


19
Oct 21

Coffee Hour with Christopher Scott | Brian King to give 125th webinar | Rosenman is Rock Ethics Fellow

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

GEOG 500 class outside

Dr. Karl Zimmerer (center) and the fall 2021 cohort of geography graduate students hold their GEOG 500 class outside University House near the Hintz Family Alumni Center. University House, designed by Evan Pugh, the University’s first president, was built in 1862-1864 using native stone, and employing student labor. It was designed in Georgian Colonial style. In 1895, it was remodeled in the Queen Anne style, and again renovated in 1940, each times with significant additions to the original plans. It served as the President’s Residence until 1969, and was designated University House in 1971, to be used for official functions. University House was incorporated into the Hintz Alumni Center in 1999.

GOOD NEWS

Nov. 9, noon EST, 125th Anniversary Virtual Education Series: Brian King on “Infectious Addictions: Geographies of Colliding Epidemics.” This virtual educational series is sponsored by the College’s Graduates of Earth and Mineral Sciences (GEMS) Board of Directors and will spotlight the College’s research in short interactive webinars to engage your curiosity and introduce you to our world-class faculty and alumni. Register at: https://engage.tassl.com/event/9341

Curious about undergraduate clubs in the Department of Geography? Learn about meetings, activities, and who to contact on this webpage.

COFFEE HOUR

Christopher Scott on Transboundary water governance: Possibilities and pitfalls at the nexus with energy and food security

The resource nexus was initially conceived to address potential trade-offs in resource demands. Though the concept emerged from the water sector, it has now come to consider multiple, synergistic (or competing) cross-sectoral interactions. Scott et al. (2018) advanced thinking on water, energy and food security interactions mediated by institutions operating at the nexus, though invariably incapable of crossing resource domains, jurisdictional boundaries, or substantively accounting for ecological dynamics. Security as a nexus dimension posits an implied achievable end goal, which in practice has proven elusive. Alternative framings consider resilience with a focus on adaptive action and adaptive capacity in social-ecological systems terms. With the resilience dimension, nexus resource availability, environmental hazards, and the overall function, services and limits of interlinked earth systems must be balanced.

NEWS

Emily Rosenman is Rock Ethics Institute Faculty Fellow for 2021–22

Her project, “Philanthropy and urban governance: the ethics of philanthropic ‘repair’ of social injustice,” investigates how philanthropic actors understand and act to alleviate racial and economic inequality through case studies of philanthropic activity in U.S. cities that are segregated by race and income and how philanthropic giving interacts with democratic decision-making and urban governance.

Via AAG Smartbrief

Behind the wire with a fence ecologist

One smoke-tinged July morning on Horse Prairie — a plateau of big sagebrush and dusty washes overlooking Horse Prairie Creek in southwestern Montana — a man sat at the helm of a skid-steer loader. Attached to its front was a spool-like contraption called a Dakota wire winder and post puller. Four volunteers threw up their thumbs — Ready! — and the man flung a switch. The winder spun up, and a stretch of woven wire fence lying on the ground jerked into motion.

Soon, a hundred-plus years of tangled Western history had become a tidy bale.


12
Oct 21

Campus Adventure ongoing this week | MGIS capstone published by AK | Lattman lecture

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Indigenous Art prizes

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

Transboundary water governance: Possibilities and pitfalls at the nexus with energy and food security

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

The GREEN Program founder Melissa Lee to give Lattman Lecture on Oct. 18

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

Dr. Erica Smithwick of Science Moms: “Explain your choices”

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.


05
Oct 21

Coffee Hour with Junjun Yin | Indigenous Peoples’ Day event | Schuckman is ASPRS exec

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

PA18congdistricts

The map shows the current boundaries for Pennsylvania’s 18 congressional districts. Starting in the 2022 midterms, per the 2020 United States census, Pennsylvania will lose one congressional seat and have 17 districts. Penn State faculty Christopher Fowler and Lee Ann Banaszak have been named by Governor Tom Wolf to the newly formed Pennsylvania Redistricting Advisory Council to provide guidance to the governor when he reviews the forthcoming Pennsylvania redistricting plan.

GOOD NEWS

EMS faculty, staff, and students walk-in photoshoots will take place outside the main entrance to the Deike Building that faces Burrowes Road. Sessions will take less than five minutes. No appointment needed. If you have questions, contact David Kubarek. Sessions are scheduled for the following dates:

  • Wednesday, Oct. 6: 2 –4 p.m.
  • Thursday, Oct. 7: 11 a.m.–1 p.m.

Caitlin Flanagan passed her comprehensive exam.

Maureen Feinman, Don Fisher, and Melissa Wright received an award under Dean Kump’s Postdoctoral Collaboration Program for, “Decolonizing the 40th Parallel: A contextual co-curriculum for Geosciences field camp.”

The Belonging, Dignity and Justice (BDJ) committee (formerly the DEI committee) is organizing a “Campus Adventure” to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day on October 11. Visit this site for more details on how to participate.

Penn State GIS Day will be held virtually on Tuesday, Nov. 16. If you are interested in giving a lightening talk, contact Tara L. Anthony by October 6.

COFFEE HOUR

Junjun Yin on Spatial Networks: The synergy of computational geography and geospatial Big Data for uncovering geo-complexity in human-urban environment interactions

Understanding detailed spatial and temporal human activity patterns concerning how citizens interact with their surrounding urban environments is of great importance to urban planning and its applications. This presentation illustrates how we can utilize computational geography approaches and geospatial social media Big Data to model and uncover unique human activity patterns in navigating through the urban spaces. By utilizing complex network theory and methods, coupling with large-scale mobility data, people’s activities in interacting with the urban environments can be represented as spatial networks. Two case studies are introduced in this presentation.

NEWS

Schuckman named American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing executive

Karen Schuckman, associate teaching professor of geography and lead faculty for the certificate program in Remote Sensing and Earth Observation, was appointed as the executive director of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS), starting Aug. 1, 2021.

Two Penn State faculty members named to Gov. Wolf’s redistricting council

Lee Ann Banaszak, head of the Department of Political Science and professor of political science and women’s, gender and sexuality studies, and Christopher Fowler, associate professor of geography and director of the Peter R. Gould Center for Geography Education and Outreach, have been named by Governor Tom Wolf to the newly formed Pennsylvania Redistricting Advisory Council.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

“We Spray So We Can Live”: Agrochemical Kinship, Mystery Kidney Disease, and Struggles for Health in Dry Zone Sri Lanka

Nari Senanayake
Annals of the American Association of Geographers
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/24694452.2021.1956295
In March 2015, Sri Lanka’s then-President Maithripala Sirisena launched the Toxic Free Nation Movement as a long-term solution to a mysterious form of kidney disease (CKDu) now endemic in the island’s dry zone. As part of this strategy, in 2016 the movement worked with farmers in north-central Sri Lanka to cultivate indigenous rice varieties without agrochemicals. Yet, within a year, 80 percent of farmers who experimented with indigenous and organic rice farming had switched back to some form of agrochemically intensive cultivation. In this article, I examine farmers’ narratives of why this happened, demonstrating how the movement’s conceptualization of agricultural harm often missed the forms of accounting most salient for residents themselves. Instead, through their testimonies, residents track how polyvalent relationships with agrarian toxicity mediate (1) vulnerabilities to simple reproduction squeezes, (2) reliance on grain fungibility, and (3) strong but bittersweet attachments to dry zone agrarian landscapes. As a consequence, I document how residents respatialize their knotted relationships to agrarian toxicity to include moments of what I call “agrichemical kinship.” I argue that this optic helps us grasp the ways in which agrochemicals simultaneously erode and enable modes of social reproduction against a backdrop of rural stagnation. Following feminist scholars of toxicity, this article not only reveals intimate, yet undertheorized, connections between the field of toxic geographies and the concept of social reproduction but also dashes hopes of any simple equation between banning agrichemical inputs and enacting health in the wake of CKDu.


28
Sep 21

Lechtanski GEMS president-elect | EMS Photoshoots | Undergrad interns at investment office

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Tri and Luke CH924

Coffee Hour speaker Rajashree (Tri) Datta, research associate in the Ice Sheets and Climate Group at Colorado University Boulder, left, with Luke Trusel, speakers committee co-chair and assistant professor of geography, at the Sept. 24 Coffee Hour. The next Coffee Hour is Friday, Oct. 8. Recorded talks can be viewed on the Coffee Hour Kaltura channel. Image: Penn State.

GOOD NEWS

EMS faculty, staff, and students walk-in photoshoots will take place outside the main entrance to the Deike Building that faces Burrowes Road. Sessions will take less than five minutes. No appointment needed. If you have questions, contact David Kubarek [dak207@psu.edu]. Sessions are scheduled for the following dates:

  • Wednesday, Sept. 29: noon–2 p.m.
  • Wednesday, Oct. 6: 2 –4 p.m.
  • Thursday, Oct. 7: 11 a.m.–1 p.m.

Monday, Oct. 4, 4 p.m. ET, EESI EarthTalks, “Viewing the 2019–20 Australian bushfire crisis through a pyrogeographic lens,” with speaker David Bowman, University of Tasmania. Zoom webinar: https://psu.zoom.us/s/767635597

The Cartography and Geographic Information Society CaGIS announces its 49th Annual Map Design Competition. The competition is open to all mapmakers in the United States and Canada for maps completed or published during the calendar year of 2021.

Erica Smithwick was a guest on the Sept. 26 episode of President Eric Barron’s monthly WPSU show, “Digging Deeper” on the topic of climate change.

Alumna Susan Lechtanski, who earned a bachelor of science in 1997, and is one of three geography representatives on the Graduates of the Earth and Mineral Sciences (GEMS) board, was voted President-Elect of the board.

COFFEE HOUR

Next lecture is Friday, Oct. 8

Spatial Networks: The synergy of computational geography and geospatial Big Data for uncovering geo-complexity in human-urban environment interactions

Junjun Yin, Assistant Research Professor, Social Science Research Institute (SSRI)

Previously recorded talks can be viewed on the Coffee Hour Kaltura channel.

NEWS

Department associate heads appointed to amplify diversity efforts in EMS

Lorraine Dowler is the DEI  associate head in the Department of Geography

Furthering its mission to support diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (EMS) has provided funding for each of its five departments to appoint faculty to serve as DEI associate heads.

Economics, geography students intern with Penn State’s investment office

Prior to her internship with Penn State’s Office of Investment Management, Morgan Keim, a Dalmatia, Pennsylvania, native and senior majoring in economics, did not know what her future held. After her remote internship experience this summer, that is no longer the case.

Alongside Keim was Jacqueline Saleeby, a State College, Pennsylvania, native and senior majoring in geography with a minor in Arabic. The pair spent 14 weeks researching the integration of environment, social and governance practices, known as ESG for short, across the investment industry while recommending potential strategies for inclusion in the office’s investment process.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Soil moisture influence on warm-season convective precipitation for the U.S. Corn Belt

Chapman, C. J., & Carleton, A. M.
Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology
https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-20-0285.1
Recent climatic studies for the dominantly rain-fed agricultural U.S. Corn Belt (CB) suggest an influence of land use/land cover (LULC) spatial differences on convective development, set within the larger-scale (synoptic) atmospheric conditions of pressure, winds, and vertical motion. However, the potential role of soil moisture (SM) in the LULC association with atmospheric humidity, horizontal wind and convective precipitation (CVP) has received more limited attention, mostly as modeling studies or empirical analyses for regions non-analogous to the CB. Accordingly, we determine the categorical associations between SM and the near-surface atmospheric humidity (q), with 850-hPa horizontal wind (V850) at four representative CB locations for the nine warm-seasons of 2011-2019. Recurring configurations of joint SM-q-V850 conducive to CVP are then identified and stratified into three phenologically distinct sub-seasons (early, middle, late).

We show that the stations show some statistical similarity in their SM-CVP relationships. Corn Belt CVP occurs preferentially with high humidity and southerly winds sometimes comprising a low-level jet (LLJ), particularly on early-season days having low SM and late-season days having high SM. Additionally, mid-season CVP days having weaker V850 (i.e., non-LLJ) tend to be associated with medium SM values and high humidity. Conversely, late-season CVP days are frequently characterized by high values of both SM and humidity. These empirical results are likely explained by the inferred sensible and latent heat fluxes varying according to SM content and LULC type. They provide a basis for future mesoscale modeling studies of Corn Belt SM and CVP interactions to test the hypothesized physical processes.


21
Sep 21

Coffee Hour with Tri Datta | Fall Coffee Hour speakers | EMS Anniversary Fellows

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Holmes and Randell

Louisa Holmes, assistant professor of geography, left, with speaker Heather Randell, assistant professor of rural sociology and demography, at the Sept. 10 Coffee Hour.   Recorded talks can be viewed on the Coffee Hour Kaltura channel. Image: Penn State

GOOD NEWS

COFFEE HOUR

Rajashree (Tri) Datta on Extreme Events on the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets

Sea level change is partly determined by the balance between precipitation and surface melt and subsequent meltwater runoff on the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets. Both ice sheet precipitation and melt occur relatively infrequently, but extreme events can have a disproportionate impact on the ice sheet system. In this talk I will highlight three different extreme phenomena and their impact, which I have studied using a combination of climate modeling and remote sensing.

NEWS

Speakers for fall Department of Geography Coffee Hour lecture series announced

The Department of Geography Coffee Hour lecture series has resumed on Friday afternoons for the fall 2021 semester on Penn State’s University Park campus.

2011 article, “SensePlace2 GeoTwitter analytics support for situational awareness,” wins Test of Time Award

The IEEE VIS Test of Time Award is an accolade given to recognize articles published at previous conferences whose contents are still vibrant and useful today and have had a major impact and influence within and beyond the visualization community.

125th Anniversary Fellows named by the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences

Geography alums among the Fellows

Founded in 1896 as the School of Mines, this year, the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences is celebrating its 125th anniversary. The college recognizes that the success and reputation of the college is defined substantially by the achievements of its graduates. To honor their accomplishments the college has selected a prominent group of 134 alumni whose contributions to the fields of science and engineering have set them apart from their peers and named them 125th Anniversary Fellows.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Interactions between landscape and local factors inform spatial action planning in post-fire forest environments

Peeler, J.L., Smithwick, E.A.H.
Landscape Ecology
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-021-01325-4

Context: Landscape and local factors govern tree regeneration across heterogeneous post-fire forest environments. But their relative influence is unclear—limiting the degree that managers can consider landscape context when delegating resources to help stand-replacing patches restock successfully.

Objectives: We investigated how landscape and local factors shape tree regeneration across heterogeneous post-fire forest environments. Our research questions were: What is the relative influence of landscape and local factors on tree species presence (RQ1) and stocking density (RQ2) at stand-replacing patches? Do thresholds occur when landscape factors are influential (RQ3)?

Methods: We sampled landscape and local variables at 71 plots near Jackson, Wyoming, United States. We used Random Forests to investigate how local and landscape variables affect post-fire tree recovery. Relative influence was determined using mean decrease in accuracy. Partial dependence plots were used to visualize whether thresholds occurred for variables with mean decrease in accuracy > 15%.

Results: Landscape factors like seed source area were associated with subalpine fir presence and stocking density. But different thresholds occurred. Specifically, subalpine fir presence required 10% seed source area, while stocking density required 40%. Northeast aspects surrounded by > 10% seed source area were most likely to support subalpine fir presence. Conversely, local factors like soil nutrients were associated with lodgepole pine presence, highlighting effects of different regeneration strategies.

Conclusions: Landscape factors bolster spatial resilience and help stand-replacing patches restock naturally. But landscape factors do not support tree regeneration equally across heterogeneous post-fire forest environments. Consequently, considering stand-replacing patches in their landscape context will be critical for future spatial action planning.

Future Sea Level Change Under Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 and Phase 6 Scenarios From the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets

Antony J Payne, Sophie Nowicki,  … Luke D. Trusel … et al.
Geophysical Research Letters
https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL091741
Projections of the sea level contribution from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets (GrIS and AIS) rely on atmospheric and oceanic drivers obtained from climate models. The Earth System Models participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6) generally project greater future warming compared with the previous Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) effort. Here we use four CMIP6 models and a selection of CMIP5 models to force multiple ice sheet models as part of the Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project for CMIP6 (ISMIP6). We find that the projected sea level contribution at 2100 from the ice sheet model ensemble under the CMIP6 scenarios falls within the CMIP5 range for the Antarctic ice sheet but is significantly increased for Greenland. Warmer atmosphere in CMIP6 models results in higher Greenland mass loss due to surface melt. For Antarctica, CMIP6 forcing is similar to CMIP5 and mass gain from increased snowfall counteracts increased loss due to ocean warming.


14
Sep 21

Fowler on redistricting council | Trusel measures Greenland ice | Schuckman named ASPRS exec. dir.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

West Greenland ice cap

Luke Trusel configures equipment to measure sub-surface temperatures in the West Greenland ice cap. Image: Sarah Das ©Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

GOOD NEWS

Monday, September 20, 4 p.m. ET, EESI Earthtalks “Examining climate-human-fire interactions and feedbacks in temperate ecosystems,” David McWethy, Montana State University. Zoom webinar: https://psu.zoom.us/s/767635597

Friday, October 1, 5 p.m. ET, deadline for undergraduate and graduate student fall academic enrichment award applications. Apply using this link: https://sites.psu.edu/geogcommunity/academic-enrichment-request-form/

Connor Chapman and Andrew Carleton’s article based on Chapman’s master’s thesis, “Soil moisture influence on warm-season convective precipitation for the U.S. Corn Belt,” was accepted for publication in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology.

Erica Smithwick was appointed to Penn State’s Carbon Emissions Reduction Task Force. https://news.psu.edu/story/668103/2021/09/03/impact/task-force-created-significantly-reduce-penn-states-carbon-emissions

Karen Schuckman was appointed as the next executive director of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS).

The fall semester Coffee Hour schedule has been announced. For speakers and dates, visit the calendar of events web page.

NEWS

Governor Wolf Creates Redistricting Advisory Council to Help Evaluate Fairness in Upcoming Congressional Redistricting Map

Christopher S. Fowler is a member of the council

Governor Tom Wolf is committed to a fair and transparent redistricting process and today signed an executive order creating the Pennsylvania Redistricting Advisory Council. The six-member council, comprised of redistricting experts, will provide guidance to the governor to assist his review of the congressional redistricting plan which will be passed by the General Assembly later this year.

Tracking Traits Podcast: Evolutionary Drivers of our Taste Preferences for Vegetables

Bronwen Powell is interviewed

Penn State undergraduate student Hannah Marchok interviews Assistant Professor of Geography, African Studies, and Anthropology Bronwen Powell about her research into factors that may drive dietary practices across different groups of people in different regions of East Africa.

A Recent Reversal Discovered in the Response of Greenland’s Ice Caps to Climate Change

Luke Trusel is a member of the research team

New collaborative research from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and five partner institutions (University of Arizona, University of Washington, Pennsylvania State University, Desert Research Institute and University of Bergen), published on September 9, 2021, in Nature Geoscience, reveals that during past periods glaciers and ice caps in coastal west Greenland experienced climate conditions much different than the interior of Greenland. Over the past 2,000 years, these ice caps endured periods of warming during which they grew larger rather than shrinking.

Past fires may hold key to reducing severity of future wildfires in western US

Previous fires may hold the key to predicting and reducing the severity of future wildfires in the western United States as fire activity continues to increase, according to researchers from Penn State and the U.S. Forest Service.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Determinants of Smallholder Maintenance of Crop Diversity in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains

Zachary A. Goldberg, Bronwen Powell, Abderrahim Ouarghidi
Human Ecology
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-021-00248-7
Smallholder farmers are important managers of global crop diversity. However, agricultural modernization is changing farming practices and raising questions about the socio-ecological factors that support crop diversity. In the context of the semi-arid High Atlas Mountains in Morocco, we explored determinants of crop diversity through a cross-sectional survey and farmer interviews in villages adopting new crops such as apples. Through a multiple linear regression analysis and farmer interviews, we found that market participation, land holdings, and water access influenced crop diversity. We highlight the importance of water access for crop diversity, especially in semi-arid regions with uneven hydrological resources.

Interpretable machine learning for analysing heterogeneous drivers of geographic events in space-time

Arif Masrur, Manzhu Yu, Prasenjit Mitra, Donna Peuquet & Alan Taylor (2021)
International Journal of Geographical Information Science
DOI: 10.1080/13658816.2021.1965608
Machine learning (ML) interpretability has become increasingly crucial for identifying accurate and relevant structural relationships between spatial events and factors that explain them. Methodologically aspatial ML algorithms with an apparent high predictive power ignore non-stationary domain relationships in spatio-temporal data (e.g. dependence, heterogeneity), leading to incorrect interpretations and poor management decisions. This study addresses this critical methodological issue of ‘interpretability’ in ML-based modeling of structural relationships using the example of heterogeneous drivers of wildfires across the United States. Specifically, we present and evaluate a spatio-temporally interpretable random forest (iST-RF) that uses spatio-temporal sampling-based training and weighted prediction. Although the ultimate scientific objective is to derive interpretation in space-time, experiments show that iST-RF can improve predictive accuracy (76%) compared to the aspatial RF approach (70%) while enhancing interpretations of the trained model’s spatio-temporal relevance for its ensemble prediction. This novel approach can help balance prediction and interpretation with fidelity in a spatial data science life cycle. However, challenges exist for predictive modeling when the dataset is very small because in such cases locally optimized sub-model’s prediction performance can be suboptimal. With that caveat, our proposed approach is an ideal choice for identifying drivers of spatio-temporal events at country- or regional-scale studies.

Land use change dynamics in Euro-mediterranean mountain regions: Driving forces and consequences for the landscape

Yolanda Jiménez-Olivencia, Álvaro Ibáñez-Jiménez, Laura Porcel-Rodríguez, Karl Zimmerer
Land Use Policy
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2021.105721
The marginalization of mountain regions in Mediterranean Europe since the mid-20th Century has triggered important socioeconomic and environmental changes that are putting the survival of highly regulated and environmentally adapted landscapes in jeopardy. We still have only a limited understanding of the driving forces behind these dynamics of change and their final consequences for the structure and character of the landscape. In general, the transformation of the landscape and its causes have been studied at regional and local level and various syntheses have been made for Europe or the Mediterranean as a whole, focusing above all on changes in the use of farmland. The objective of this paper is to provide a holistic view of the changes that have taken place in the landscape in the Euro-Mediterranean region, focusing in particular on the mountains because of their role as heritage reserves and as sources of environmental services. This research involves a systematic review of the evidence about the dynamics of land use change, its underlying drivers and their effects on the landscape. We analyse 53 case studies from 6 countries situated on the northern shores of the Mediterranean. These studies covered a period of around 40 years and were each performed at a local scale. The results reveal that landscape change is caused above all by the abandonment of farmland and reforestation (in over 90% of cases), and by pressure from urban development in the case of coastal and peri-urban mountain ranges. In addition, the dominant dynamics in each case vary depending on the bioclimatic area in question, to the extent that bioclimate has been shown to be an important explanatory factor behind these dynamics. The underlying boosters of change normally act together and those most commonly cited are economic, demographic and geographic. As regards the impacts on the structure and character of the landscape, the dynamics analysed are manifested first and foremost in degradation processes, in an increase in homogenization, which affects above all the most humid bioclimates, and in the fragmentation of open spaces. This analysis provides a general overview of the causes and consequences of the changes in land use in the mountain regions of Mediterranean Europe and raises questions of interest for policy-making that affects the landscape.

Drivers of fire severity shift as landscapes transition to an active fire regime, Klamath Mountains, USA

Taylor, A. H., L. B. Harris, and S. A. Drury
Ecosphere
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/ecs2.3734
Fire severity patterns are driven by interactions between fire, vegetation, and terrain, and they generate legacy effects that influence future fire severity. A century of fire exclusion and fuel buildup has eroded legacy effects, and contemporary fire severity patterns may diverge from historical patterns. In recent decades, area burned and area burned at high severity have increased and landscapes are transitioning back to an active fire regime where disturbance legacies will again play a strong role in determining fire severity. Understanding the drivers of fire severity is crucial for anticipating future fire severity patterns as active fire regimes are reestablished. We identified drivers of fire severity in the Klamath Mountains, a landscape with an active fire regime, using two machine learning statistical models: one model for nonreburns (n = 92) and one model for reburns (n = 61). Both models predicted low better than moderate or high-severity fire. Fire severity drivers contrasted sharply between non-reburns and reburns. Fire weather and fuels were dominant controls in non-reburns, while previous burn severity, fuel characteristics, and time since last fire were drivers for reburns. In reburns, areas initially burned at low (high) severity burned the same way again. This tendency was sufficiently strong that reburn fire severity could be predicted equally well with only severity of the previous fire in the model. Thus, reburn fire severity is more predictable than severity in non-reburns that are driven by the stochastic influences of fire weather. Reburn severity in aggregate was also higher than non-reburn severity suggesting a positive feedback effect that could contribute to an upward drift in fire severity as area burned increases. Terrain had low importance in both models. This indicates strong terrain controls in the past may not carry into the future. Low- and moderate-severity fire effects were prevalent in non-reburns under moderate fire weather and self-reinforcing behavior maintained these effects in reburns even under more extreme weather, particularly in reburns within 10 yr. Our findings suggest deliberate use of wildfire and prescribed fire under moderate conditions would increase fire resilience in landscapes transitioning to an active fire regime.


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