Students Visit Chicago to Investigate Urban Issues

This summer, students had the opportunity to work in small groups on a variety of urban issues related to the main themes of the 3-week Geography 305 summer course, "Introduction to the City".

“It’s difficult to adapt a 15-week course into a 3-week course," said Department of Geography lecturer and doctoral student Max Grinnell, "but students seemed to take well to the group project.” The course format included lecturers, film screenings, and an overnight trip to Chicago where the students visited the Chicago Board of Trade, Millennium Park, and Hyde Park on the city’s South Side. Each student joined a group that investigated one of four themes: public space, homelessness, culture and development, and manifestations of globalization.

“Bringing the students down to Chicago to take a first-hand look at some of these urban processes ‘in action’ was a great experience," said Grinnell, "and one that let all of us think about cities in a different light.” At the end of the course, students presented their group projects to their classmates and offered policy solutions for their areas of inquiry.

(See Spring syllabus.)

At right:

Geography 305
students presented group work for a public space redesign proposal for Lisa Link Peace Park in Madison.

[Click on image to view full size.]

Wolf Recovery Project Gets New Website

Lisa Naughton's research on wolves in Wisconsin and human-wildlife conflicts has a new web site. The "Living with Wolves" project (http://www.geography.wisc.edu/livingwithwolves) features a public opinion survey on wolves in Wisconsin and publications related to or published for the project. Naughton frequnetly is called on to lecture and present the latest research on wolves to a wide variety of government and private groups who are managing human-wildlife conflicts.

Dr. Naughton recently received a 2005 Fulbright-Hays Research Fellowship to study environmental governance in Ecuador's protected areas and a 2005 Fulbright-IIE, 8 month research and teaching grant for Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.

Jian Liu Wins in GIS/Remote Sensing Specialty Group Competition

Jim Burt writes:  "Jian Liu's illustrated paper at the April Denver AAG conference won second place in the AAG Cartography/GIS/RS Specialty Group's Student Illustrated Paper competition. Liu's award is important recognition for excellent work, and reflects very well on our department. So congratulations and thanks to Jian!"

A copy of the poster at: https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/jianliu/web/AAG_poster.bmp . Prof. A-xing Zhu is Liu's advisor.

Liu's abstract states:

"Descriptive knowledge cannot be used as the direct input in current knowledge-based mapping systems. This paper gives a solution based on fuzzy logic. Descriptive words are represented with fuzzy membership functions that are defined by eliciting prior knowledge from the domain expert. The representation functions are embedded into a GIS- based inference engine to produce maps with descriptive words as the direct input. A case study of soil mapping gave a high accuracy. The proposed approach is promising in terms of mapping accuracy and it overcomes the bottleneck of feeding descriptive knowledge into inference systems."