Graduate Student Research
Current Students
- Dempsey, Kara – Landscapes, Power and Identity in Europe
- Gonzales, Leila – Late Glacial No-analog Climates and Vegetation
- Grinnell, Max – Cities, knowledge, and regional development
- Hung, Po-Yi – Improvised Place-Making for Globalization: Spatiality and Landscape in Northwest Yunnan, China
- Jones, Reece – Political borders, social boundaries, and identity categories: The borderlands of India and Bangladesh
- Liesch, Matt – Perceptual geography and the Gogebic iron range
- Loope, Henry – Upper Mississippi River middle-late Wisconsin terrace chronology
- Adam Mandelmlan – Hawai'i's Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail
- Muellerleile, Chris – Dislocating Boeing: Corporate geography and the relocation of the Boeing Company’s headquarters
- Abby Neely – Health and Nature in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Zululand
- Reyerson, Paul – The utilization of phytolith analysis to document late Quaternary to Holocene vegetation dynamics in grasslands
- Van Den Hoek, Jamon – Investigating the Relationship between Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Forest Regeneration and Cultural Distribution in Northwest Yunnan, China
- Weng, Yen-chu – From patterns to processes-an exploration of urban political ecology
Alumni
- Alberts, James – Comparing Perception Maps Indicates Common Traits
- Bauch, Nick – Politics of counter-culture food production
- Biehler, Dawn – In the Crevices of the City: Public Health, Urban Neighborhoods, and the Creatures We Call Pests
- Galt, Ryan – The Political Ecology of Regulatory Risk in Costa Rica: Export Farmers' Responses to U.S. Pesticide Residue Regulations
- Goldman, Mara – Maasai conservation and science
- Peppler, Marie – Effects of Magnitude and Duration of Large Floods on Channel Morphology
- Qi, Feng – Knowledge discovery from 'area-class' natural resource maps
- Robertson, Gordon – Human historical impacts on the Highland landscape
- Rose, Robert – Changing Farms, Changing Forests: A Multi-scaled Model of Land Cover Change in Northwestern Wisconsin
- Sheesley, Ben – Map of American Birkebeiner cross country ski marathon
- Sheesley, Ben – TypeBrewer: Design and Evaluation of an Online Cartographic Design Help Tool for Selecting Map Typography
- Spigel, Kevin – Holocene lake sediment dynamics
- Stone, Jeff – Map of American Birkebeiner cross country ski marathon
Current Students
Kara Dempsey – Landscapes, Power and Identity in Europe
Regional tensions within Spain, like those within other European countries, have led to growing interest regarding the formation, manipulation, and politics of regional sentiment. As a result of the 1978 Constitution, regions and "historic nationalities" such as Galicia and Catalonia were granted a greater degree of autonomy. In a country that comprises a variety of ever-developing identities, geographically-based conceptions of regional identity exist within Spain, although not necessarily mutually exclusive with national sentiments. I am therefore interested in contemporary regional identity (in Galicia, Spain) in the broader context of a current political mobilization as an autonomous region within Spain (since 1981) as well as attempts to promote a distinct and unified identity within the region.
As current research on national and regional identity suggests,
built environments and spaces that are created for political,
religious, or even civic purposes often hold great power
and meaning. Landscapes from the earliest 
The proposed design for the
Cidade da Cultura construction. The seven buildings that
constitute the construction were intentionally designed
to mimic the surrounding mountainous landscape in order to
better incorporate it within the local environment (photo
by Kara Dempsey at the Cidade da Cultura exhibit in Galicia).
times have been
manipulated and used to display authority, impart a ruling
power's sentiments, or act as a form of legitimization
for their control over a society. This
is especially true for monumental constructions such as the
Cidade da Cultura complex, which in many ways are intended
to function as a text through which the values or beliefs
of a political elite are communicated to society at large.
In 1999, Manuel Fraga, the president of the newly autonomous Spanish region of Galicia, ordered the construction of the Cidade da Cultura, a monumental building dedicated to the preservation, celebration and production of Galician culture and identity.
Despite the promise of numerous benefits that the building would generate for the region, the general reaction to this project within Galicia was extremely divided as many saw the construction as the president's personal vision for the region. The conflicted nature of the response suggests the presence of complex, perceived meanings embedded within this grandiose endeavor to define and project Galician regional pride and identity. In this sense, this monumental construction can be seen as a means to empowerment, which in turn can be highly contested.
To its detractor the building represents Fraga's imposition
of his own definition of Galician identity on the community,
while others see it as a monumental form of hyper-identity
that neglects anything "Spanish". Without soliciting
public opinions before the building's 
The current construction
of the Cidade da Cultura's Archive building (photo by Kara
Dempsey). construction, many
feel that Fraga essentially formulated his own concrete vision
for a showcase which will be the region's most expensive
public work. Supporters of Fraga's project, however, stress
the economic benefits that will ensue from the building's
completion.
The mixed public reaction reflects deeply rooted political and cultural unrest within the region. The conflict regarding the building's construction has recently been intensified by the election of a new PSOE/BNG government in 2005. Shortly after taking office, the new government stopped the building's construction and worked to "redefine" and architecturally modify the building. Finally the Cidade da Cultura officially re-commenced construction in August of 2005. But the process was again drawn to a halt five months later due to continuing debates regarding the building. The persisting controversies that surround the monument, its purpose and meaning for Galicia clearly demonstrate the lack of a definitive vision for the Cidade da Cultura.
But the implications of this ensuing conflict are not limited to the building alone. Since landscapes can be interpreted as stages on which the efforts to manipulate or influence a community are openly performed, the Cidade da Cultura offers a unique opportunity to explore and gain a better understanding of other tensions and divisions regarding identity, power and meaning that exist within Galicia. The Cidade da Cultura conflict not only reflects the various levels of economic and political unrest that exist within the region, it also serves as a reflection of the ongoing confusion about Galicia's cultural identity. The current reassessment and redefining of the building not only deepen the building's significance to Galician society, but also sheds light on the new administration's visions of Galician identity and the processes that constitute the current evolution of modern European "multi-layered" regions. The Cidade da Cultura offers a unique opportunity to investigate and understand the current struggles and practices that are part of our everyday understanding of self and surroundings. The meanings of places and structures undergo constant renegotiation. The negotiations over the meaning and purpose of the Cidade da Cultura is a marker of Galician society's contemporary transformations and constant reconcilement of its sense of identity with the past, and a testament to the strength, richness and diversity that constitutes regions and regional identity.
Leila Gonzales – Late Glacial No-Analog Climates and Vegetation
This
research comprises my dissertation topic in which I am using
palynology, expanded response surface modeling and a regional
vegetation model to reconstruct the vegetation and climate
history at a site in north-eastern Illinois during the late
glacial period. This time period is very interesting because
climates during the late-glacial period (16ka - 9ka) had no
modern analog. Likewise the vegetation communities did not
have any modern analog either.
IMAGE AT RIGHT: Elm (Ulmus) pollen grain (top image) and a folded grass grain (Poaceae) from the Crystal Lake, Illinois sediment core.
The first part of this project involves reconstructing the vegetation history of Crystal Lake, Illinois through pollen analysis. Once I finished this part of the project, I was able to compare my results with those of two nearby sites that show similar patterns. During the late glacial period, spruce was dominant on the the landscape at this site. Black ash also appears in the record along with fir and larch which would suggest wetter conditions during this perod. The peak of pine and birch during the Pleistocene-Holocene transistion suggests greater fire frequency during this period of time as forests were changing from coniferous late glacial forest to the deciduous forests of the Holocene.
The
next step in this project is to model late-glacial climates
by developing a new variant on response surfaces, called
expanded response surfaces. Expanded response surfaces attempt
to estimate pollen-climate relationships for climates outside
the modern climate domain.
I derived the response surfaces from a new dataset of >4500 North American surface pollen samples and modeled the pollen relative abundances relative to bioclimatic indicies for specific late-glacial taxa common to three late-glacial pollen records from northeastern Illinois. I assumed that relative pollen abundance responds follow a unimodal, symmetrical distribution to climate variables. All of the taxa in the dataset show this symmetrical, unimodal pattern; however some taxa have distributions that are truncated at high abundances by the edge of the modern climate envelope. I assumed that species with truncated distributions have fundamental niches that extend beyond the current realized climate space.
After this step is completed, I will run the climate generated by the expanded response surfaces through a regional vegetation model to see if the model simulates the type of vegetation cover represented in the pollen records.
For more information about my research, please see my website.
Above: Leila Gonzales scrapes
sediment cores
at the Limnological Research Center,
2006
Max Grinnell – Cities, Knowledge, and Regional Development
There is an increasing
interest among scholars and practitioners in the importance
of the role that cities play in supporting revitalization
efforts in their respective regions, and much of my work revolves
the contemporary (and historic) trends in the efforts of cities
to attract and retain talented persons who are employed in
what is sometimes referred to as the "knowledge economy".
I
am particularly interested in the role of certain institutions,
such as universities and colleges, in this process. As much
of these efforts involve a complex set of actors (often operating
on a variety of spatial scales), it has been my good fortune
to travel in the course of my research to such places as the
city of Sheffield in Britain, Chicago, and Worcester, Massachusetts.
Most recently, I was involved in a research project in Britain
that entailed an examination of the role of higher education
institutions in the regeneration plans for Sheffield and the
South Yorkshire region. Much of this work involved extended
interviews with various local and national officials, administrators,
policy experts, academics, and politicians.
In the past several years I have contributed scholarly book reviews to the Journal of African-American History, Urban Geogaphy, Material Culture, and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers. I also have a taught a variety of courses dealing with urbanism at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Chicago. My syllabus for "Introduction to the City" Geography 305 may be viewed online.
As I try to maintain abreast of major policy issues which affect urban areas throughout North America and Western Europe, I always look forward to hearing from persons with similar interests, so please feel free to drop me an email.
Po-Yi Hung – Improvised Place-Making for Globalization: Spatiality and Landscape in Northwest Yunnan, China
On December 17, 2001, after the fight over which place should be the “authentic” Shangri-la in northwest Yunnan, Zhongdian County of Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture was officially renamed as Shangri-la County. As a local official told me, to date Shangri-la as a popular “world brand” (shijie pinpai) has finally been “truly found” in China. Ironically, the term “Shangri-la” is actually not a reference to a real place, but comes from the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton as an imagined peaceful and utopian Tibetan society lost somewhere in the Himalayas. Neighboring Zhongdian County of Diqing Prefecture is Yulong Naxi Autonomous County of Lijiang City. Both Diqing and Lijiang, when competing for the name of Shangri-la, have searched for and produced various kinds of genealogical “proofs” of landscapes. For claiming the legitimacy of 
being the real Shangri-la, they looked for pledged evidences from snow mountains, grasslands to minority people’s costumes and lifestyles to fit for the western imagination and romanticization in Hilton’s Lost Horizon.
Although Lijiang lost the competition for the name of Shangri-la at the end, it has become a node of international environmental conservation and cultural tourism since the end of 1990s. The growth of the environmental concerns and tourism development has been fueled by two events: the devastating earthquake of 4 February 1996 in Lijiang, and the declaration of a UNESCO World Culture Heritage Site of the old town of Dayan in Lijiang in 1997. Today Lijiang has received over 4.9 millions visitors from January to November in the year of 2007 (Lijiang Tourism Administration, 2008), and the international NGOs, like The Nature Conservancy (TNC), have ongoing projects focusing on biodiversity conservation and national park planning both in Lijiang and Diqing. As a local Naxi tour guide who migrated to Dayan from a remote village believed, the disastrous earthquake “shook to awake” (zhenxing) the world’s interests and cares about Lijiang and the “Great Shangri-la Area,” including both Diqing and Lijiang, has been benefited from the earthquake.
This seemingly messy juxtaposition of multiple elements as mentioned above fills in my fieldnotes of preliminary research in summer 2007. However, the messiness does not necessarily mean a randomness of whatever made. On the contrary, this project contends that these messy elements in Northwest Yunnan from the text of a novel, the sacred snow mountains, to the strong earthquake, international NGOs, the migrated laborers of minority groups, etc. manifests the contingency of natural forces, cultural practices, social relations, and political economic processes which are articulated with the materiality of locality, characterizing place-making in the era of globalization. In accordance, I further propose two approaches, spatiality and landscape, to look into this messiness of juxtaposition. Given that, I assume that spatiality is the critical medium for disclosing the relational processes underpinning the superficial juxtaposition of different elements, and landscape is the essential avenue for understanding the historical sedimentation of contingent place-making. The nexus of place-making, spatiality and landscape makes me propose three research questions for the dissertation project: 1) In the context of globalization, how is place-making mediated through relational spatiality and materialized in historicized landscapes? 2) What are the implications of redefinitions of a place as (re)articulations for state and international projects about development and conservation? 3) How has the contingent place-making translated into and been reshaped by people’s everyday practices?
Reece Jones – Political borders, social boundaries,
and identity categories:
The borderlands of India and Bangladesh
Boundaries play a crucial role in
defining group identity categories such as nation, ethnicity,
and race because they distinguish between the We of the group
and the Other of those on the outside. 
Although these social
boundaries can often appear to be fixed and eternal, particularly
when they are inscribed on maps in the form of political
borders, they have to be re-fixed and reiterated on a daily
basis in order to reify their meaning.
At right: Reece conducting interviews in Bangladesh (September 2006).
In recent years, some scholars have suggested that the processes of globalization are undermining economic, social, and cultural boundaries in what is becoming a borderless world. Although particular boundaries may indeed be transcended, these same advances in transportation and communication have resulted in the need to strengthen and patrol other borders and boundaries. This need to partition off dangerous 'others' is particularly evident in the recent border fencing that has been carried out in the United States, Israel, and India under the banner of the war on terror.
My
dissertation research in India and Bangladesh investigates
the discourses of terrorism and security that allow governments
to build these fences. I also look at everyday narratives
and practices that do the work of bounding and ordering group
identity categories in the Bengali speaking communities along
the border between India and Bangladesh.
At left: Riton Quiah standing on a border stone that marks the border between Bangladesh (on left) and India (on right).
India is building a fence along the entire border with Bangladesh, which is scheduled to be completed in 2007. Previously the border had been lightly guarded and only marked with these border stones.
For more information on my research please see my website at: http://mywebspace.wisc.edu/reecejones/web
Matthew Liesch – Places of Opportunity, Places of Despair: Perceptual Geography and the Gogebic Iron Range, 1884-1966
In the 1880s, the Gogebic Range of Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Wisconsin experienced a development boom. During the 1880s, thousands invested blindly, and many lost everything in fraudulent stocks or land claims. How could this happen?
In large part, newspapers and mining weeklies gave images to potential investors in places such as Milwaukee, Lake Geneva, or Cleveland, Ohio. Newspaper stories give impressions of place, but reading these descriptions leads one to conjure thoughts of a place, whether true or not. Newspapers routinely attested to the physical and economic geography of the Gogebic in falsely glowing terms, describing the Gogebic's majestic hills of iron, with bustling cities teeming with millionaires-in essence, casting the Gogebic as a place of hope and fortune ripe for immediate investment. As an example, here is a Chicago Tribune article typical of mid-1880s news coverage in the Gogebic's investment hinterlands. In addition to rapid investment, Gogebic fever also led to the opening of a stock exchange at Milwaukee, and its high-grade Bessemer ore helped to build the early skyscrapers of the Northeast.
Photo
at left: The Plummer Mine Headframe is the lone headframe
on the Gogebic. Mining's effects on the cultural landscape
have been fading away, although its social memory lingers
on. Photo by Matt Liesch
Demand for Bessemer ores shifted with new technologies, and cheaper modes of production out-competed the Gogebic. Open-pit taconite mines on other Lake Superior Ranges, as well as imports, caused the Gogebic's deep deposits to cease commercial viability. Considering linkages across space, the Gogebic's fortune was most strongly tied to the port city of Ashland, Wisconsin and secondarily to other Great Lakes ports in Ohio and Indiana. Hinterlands of investment will be mapped based upon remaining advertising and ownership records.
An underlying theme of the Gogebic during the mining era (1880s-1960s) was its reputation, whether as a geographic region of fortune and wealth--in essence, a place of hope, or as a place of sin. Attention is being paid to the hierarchies of scale. For example, during Prohibition the city of Hurley's reputation may have superseded that of the entire Gogebic Range.
The Gogebic has received little attention from academics, but is made even more interesting due to the political geography and tension of the state border (civic boosters in Michigan tried to concentrate the taverns and brothels on the Wisconsin side, plus Michigan's liquor laws have been more restrictive). Some of the world's deepest iron ore mines, the largest ski jump in the Western Hemisphere and numerous waterfalls just south of the world's largest freshwater lake, Superior, accentuate the sense of place. The local communities are imbued with mining memories, even as mining's effects on the cultural landscape become obscured.
The research epilogue will delve into how Gogebic Range communities faced crisis and attempted to repackage the meaning of place for purposes of economic development, emphasizing characteristics of physical geography such as lake-effect snows and topography. Even as ski resorts and tourism attempted to alleviate unemployment, the region retained its mining identity. This work hopefully will contribute towards a greater understanding of identity and memory in former mining towns, serve as an example of the power of (mis-)communicating geographical information and accentuate our understanding of economic historical geography of the Great Lakes.
Henry Loope – Upper Mississippi River middle-late Wisconsin terrace chronology
The goal of this research is to refine the chronology of middle-late Wisconsin fluvial aggradation, incision, and loess accumulation in the Upper Mississippi River Valley (UMV) using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) and radiocarbon dating.
The
UMV received meltwater and sediment from the Laurentide Ice
Sheet (LIS) sourced from several lobes (e.g.,
Des Moines Lobe, Superior Lobe, Green Bay Lobe, Lake Michigan
Lobe) and several proglacial lakes (e.g., glacial
lakes Agassiz, Lind, Grantsburg, Duluth, Wisconsin) from
~55,000 14C yrs BP to ~9,500 14C yrs BP.
At right : Hillshade digital elevation model of the LaCrosse, WI area. This area contains one of the widest sections of the Savanna Terrace within the Upper Mississippi Valley.
This work will focus on
a late Pleistocene fill terrace and one of the main landforms
in the UMV, the Savanna Terrace (Bettis and Hallberg, 1985;
Flock, 1983; Hajic et al., 1991; Mason and Knox, 1997).
Previous research has constrained the timing of incision
below the Savanna terrace (after ~14,000 14C yrs BP) and
provided several ages within older sediment of the terrace
(as old as ~19,000 14C yrs BP) (Bettis and Hallberg, 1985;
Hajic et al., 1991; Mason and Knox, 1997). 
However,
the detailed chronology of aggradation and incision below
the Savanna Terrace (i.e., the Bagley Terrace(s)) is not
well understood.
At right: View southwest across the Savanna Terrace and lower terrace near the confluence of the Bad Axe River and the Mississippi River, south of Genoa, WI.
Additionally, the chronology of loess accumulation
adjacent to multiple terrace levels has not been studied
in detail. By obtaining a chronology for loess accumulation
using OSL, a link could be established between terrace aggradation/incision
and loess deposition. This work will attempt to establish
a chronology for sediments older than ~19,000 14C yrs BP
and refine the chronology after ~19,000 14C yrs BP. This
work will try to connect the fluvial and eolian chronology
of the Upper Mississippi Valley with middle-late Wisconsin
glacial events in the Mississippi 
watershed.
At right: Slackwater sediments of the Savanna Terrace, Mill Coulee, north of Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin
Henry Loope is a PhD candidate interested in Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology. His advisors are Joe Mason and Jim Knox.
Adam Mandelman – Hawai'i's Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail
I am currently researching Hawai'i's Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail.
As one of the more recent additions to the National Trails System, the Ala
Kahakai attempts to recapture the routes of ancient coastal foot-trails around
Hawai'i's Big Island. Many of these trails still exist on the ground today,
but access to them can be contentious because of the intense resort and residential
development that has taken place on Hawai'i's coastlines. The establishment
of the Ala Kahakai thus raises several questions about public access and land
tenure while also engaging discourses about place and heritage. My thesis asks
how stakeholders view and use the trail in ways that articulate competing ideas
about Hawaiian culture, history, and nature.
I am also more broadly interested in collaborative projects that bring geographers, artists, and other thinkers together to creatively emplace critical geographical thought and render it accessible for the public. Examples include the LA Urban Rangers and the Center for Land Use Interpretation.
Chris Muellerleile – Dislocating
Boeing: Corporate geography and the relocation of
Boeing
Company’s headquarters to Chicago, Illinois
Have large corporations become “placeless” in
our increasingly globalized world? Have relocations,
outsourcing, international mergers and improved communications
technology made places less important to the “footloose
corporation?” These are some of the questions that
have driven my research of the Boeing Company’s headquarters
relocation from Seattle, Washington to Chicago, Illinois in
2001.
At right: Boeing’s world headquarters at 100 N. Riverside in downtown Chicago (Source: Muellerleile research files)
Boeing was founded in Seattle in 1916 and since World War II has been the region’s single largest employer. To this day, the company designs and assembles most of its commercial airliners in the Puget Sound region. Why, then, would the company decide to relocate its headquarters to Chicago, a place where it has no history and no other facilities? Attempting to answer these questions has led me into a deeper exploration of the historical development of the aerospace industry, the contested corporate culture of Boeing, as well as the imagined and real political-economic environments of Seattle and Chicago.
My sense is that Boeing’s management determined that close geographical
ties between the company’s headquarters staff and its Seattle-based commercial
aircraft division were impeding the broader goals of corporate restructuring. Boeing’s
move to Chicago was part of its progressive reinvention as a global aerospace
conglomerate. While the Seattle region had afforded Boeing many advantages
over the years, the corporate culture and the socio-economic environment of the
region eventually restricted the strategic vision and agency of the headquarters
team. They decided that the solution was to relocate to Chicago, a location
with more convenient access to their operating units, key financial networks,
and global 
In the development stage, the high-tech 787 will
be a “super-efficient” mid-sized airliner.
(Source: www.boeing.com)customers, but notably distant from the Seattle-based interests that
had shaped the company through the 20th Century. Boeing’s restructuring,
you might say, entailed its progressive “dislocation.”
In addition to the above, I have also conducted research with my advisors Jamie Peck and Kris Olds on how the City of Chicago and the State of Illinois courted Boeing. Winning the Boeing investment was strategically important in the representation of Chicago as a business-friendly environment and a place of global connectedness. As such, this process reflects the new “realities” of the post-industrial economy, just as it underlines some of the contemporary imperatives for “entrepreneurial” behavior on the part of policymakers and civic leaders. It is notable that the city and state put together a $60 million incentive package for Boeing, in order to lure not a large manufacturing facility, but a corporate headquarters with plans to employ 400 mostly corporate executives.
Abby Neely – Health and Nature in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Zululand
South Africa in general, and KwaZulu-Natal specifically, is a place where staggering HIV prevalence rates reflect the uneven racial, economic, and environmental legacy of Apartheid, and where the government continues to waffle on how best to treat the epidemic. Indeed, HIV/AIDS is affecting nearly every segment of South Africa society, including large and small-scale environmental managers. Through natural resource management, which includes the everyday tasks of herding and gardening, behavioral modifications due to ill health are helping to inscribe the HIV/AIDS pandemic on the South African landscape. As the environment changes, so too does the health of the people. This HIV/AIDS-environment nexus puts the livelihoods of South Africa’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens at great risk. This risk is then situated in a larger spatial and temporal context where local, state, and global actors are responding to today’s challenges as a product of Pholela’s environmental and epidemiological histories. Understanding HIV/AIDS and other health predicaments as environmental health conditions requires scholars and policy makers to broaden their conception of environmental health. This project pushes the boundaries of environmental health by attempting to understand the relationships between health and nature, as complex concepts that have multiple meanings, with biophysical and ideological components.
Working in this South African context, this project poses three key questions: How are health and nature related? How have health and nature evolved from the mid-twentieth century to the present? What is the role of labor (via natural resource management) in connecting health and nature? A wide variety of methods will be employed to complete this project including qualitative and quantitative analyses from both oral and written sources. Methods will include the collection of life and oral histories, a historical re-survey, focus groups, landcover change analysis, and archival research. These methods will gather a large amount of data including qualitative information on local environmental and health changes, scientific reports, policy documents, historical aerial photographs, and longitudinal agricultural and epidemiological data. These sources will then be triangulated to provide a complete and nuanced understanding of health and nature in Pholela from 1940 to the present.
Paul Reyerson – The utilization of phytolith analysis
to document late
Quaternary to Holocene vegetation dynamics
in grasslands
Climate change is always a hot topic (no pun intended). In many ways, humanity really has no idea of what to expect as global warming strengthens. Will there be more droughts? More flooding? How will agriculture be affected?
While climate models can offer an often very good glimpse into the future, those models need to be calibrated in some way. In other words, we need to be able to tell the computer what will happen when a particular climatic forcing occurs.
One way to do this is to document past climates.
For example, central North America was much warmer and drier
around 7000 years ago. Was there a drought? How did the vegetation
react? Utilizing evidence found in various sediments, it
is possible to "reconstruct" these past environments (paleoenvironments).
Evidence of paleoenvironmental conditions are often referred to as proxies, and can include macrofossils, pollen, diatoms, and phytoliths, among others. In semi-arid grassland regions such as the Great Plains , pollen and macrofossils are not preserved very well. (Traditionally, pollen is best preserved in lacustrine and fluvial sediments, which tend to be somewhat rare in grassland regions). However, grasslands are abundant producers of phytoliths.
Above, Reyerson collecting soil samples in the native vegetation of the Marcellus Nature Preserve. Photo: Paul Reyerson.
Phytoliths are microscopic bits of silica formed in, and in-between, cells. Because these proxies are made of silica, phytoliths tend to persist in the soil once the plant dies and decays, especially in dry regions such as grasslands. Phytoliths are mostly produced by grasses, but are also found in certain shrubs and trees as well. Recent research has speculated that phytoliths are common in grasses as a defense against herbivory (by wearing down teeth), but this argument was recently questioned, due to the fact that phytoliths are much softer than dental enamel.
Phytoliths come in many shapes and sizes. In fact, any given
shape (termed morphotype) may be utilized by several species.
Making matters worse, a given species may produce several
different morphotypes. Fortunately, it is possible to detour
around these problems, since species tend to produce morphotypes
in specific ratios. For example, a species of grass may produce
10% of morphotype x, 30% of morphotype y, and 60% of morphotype
z. By looking at the ratios of morphotypes in the soil (with
the use of descriptive statistics), it is possible to get
a reasonable determination of the dominant plant species
in a given area.
Currently, I'm working in two separate grassland regions. The interior Pacific Northwest (Columbia Basin) is a semi-arid grassland due to the rainshadow effect of the Cascade Mountains . This grassland is composed mostly of C3 grasses (no C4 present), sagebrush, and other herbs and forbs. One of my research questions was to determine if phytoliths can accurately predict contemporary Above, rolling hills of loess near the town of Clyde, Washington. Photo: Paul Reyerson. Columbia Basin vegetation. To do this, I needed accurate collections of morphotype data for each study plot (termed an assemblage). This was achieved by spending many, many hours peering into a microscope - up to 600 morphotypes counted for each of the 37 study plots. I also needed a good estimate of the modern vegetation. NDVI data was extrapolated from aerial imagery of the study plots. NDVI measures the amount of photosynthetic biomass present, and is thus a good measure of overall vegetation density. It is also a more objective and accurate method than in situ visual inspection. The results were good: phytolith assemblages can accurately predict vegetation density and species composition.
Left, rolling hills of loess near the town of Clyde, Washington. Photo: Paul Reyerson. This is an important factor to document, since vegetation density is primarily affected by climate. I've just completed this study, and I hope to publish the manuscript in the Journal of Biogeography.
Currently I'm writing a manuscript on the use of fossil phytolith assemblages to reconstruct vegetation in the Columbia Basin since the late Glacial. This study relies upon the modern analog method, and assumes that fossil phytolith assemblages which are similar to modern assemblages should have similar vegetation. The results so far indicate xeric, sparse vegetation during the late Glacial, which gradually increases in density until the present. Around 7,000 years before present, sagebrush steppe was replaced by an Agropyron spicatum dominated grassland, indicating more mesic conditions. This study has demonstrated the robustness of phytolith analysis in paleoenvironmental reconstructions.
The second study area which I am focusing on is the central
Great Plains, in southwestern Nebraska. In this sagebrush
and grass prairie, I plan to once again utilize phytolith
analysis. However, the intention this time around will not
be to reconstruct the vegetation composition, but rather
to quantify phytolith emplacement rates in the soil. Recently,
a study has suggested that soils which develop under mesic
conditions should have a high rate of phytolith dissolution
and weathering. In other words, relict phytoliths are rapidly
recycled. In the Great Plains, 
just downwind of the Nebraska
Sand Hills, thick sheets of loess aggrade through time due
to eolian sediment deposition. This loess offers an excellent
opportunity to study phytoliths through time.
With the aid of optically stimulated luminescence dates, it is possible to determine the rate of phytolith entrainment for any given unit of time. Within the loess profile, times of low loess aggradation represent periods of relative stability, mesic conditions, and soil development. On the other hand, times of rapid loess deposition represent periods of drought, in which much dust is being deposited. My research question is compare mesic times (paleosols) to drought conditions (loess accumulation). Will the paleosols have less phytoliths due to dissolution, or will the loess sections have less because there are simply fewer plants to produce phytoliths?
This research is scheduled for the summer of 2007, and it is important for a number of reasons. First, understanding how vegetation responds to climate change is paramount, given the global warming issue. Second, recent studies have documented the role of phytoliths in the greater carbon cycle: it turns out that phytoliths, even though they are made of silica, trap (occlude) quite a bit of carbon. This occlusion effectively sequesters the carbon in a stable long-term sink. So the next time you want to do something about global warming, plant some grass! Above: Reyerson at Steptoe Butte, overlooking the Palouse in eastern Washington. Photo: Paul Reyerson
Paul Reyerson is a PhD student in the Department of Geography, and is advised by Prof. Joe Mason. His research interests are in paleoenvironments and paleoclimatology.
Jamon Van Den Hoek – Investigating the Relationship between Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Forest Regeneration and Cultural Distribution in Northwest Yunnan, China
In reaction to devastating floods on the Yangtze River in 1998, the Chinese Central Government enacted the Natural Forest Protection Project (NFPP), which introduced a ban on commercial logging across 17 Chinese provinces. The objective of the logging ban was to decrease soil erosion rates via forest regrowth and improved soil retention. One of the priority areas for forest regrowth was Yunnan Province because of the extreme soil erosion in the Three Parallel Rivers area. 
Since the ban’s introduction, there have been significant gains in Yunnan forest cover through active afforestation campaigns and natural regeneration, however these gains are not uniform across the province, with some regions still experiencing a net loss of forest cover.
My research is focused on better understanding the reasons for the disparity of forest regrowth rates in northwest Yunnan Province. My hypothesis is that variation in forest regrowth rates is not only related to variations in topography, but also cultural variability. Different minority ethnic groups across Yunnan use their land in unique ways, which yield different spatio-temporal patterns of land cover change. For example, many northwest Yunnan groups, such as the Naxi, Bai, and Zang (Tibetans), have traditionally depended on forests for construction lumber and firewood, as well as for income. It is unknown, however, if the manner in which ethnic groups’ interactions with Yunnan forests have changed in light of, or in reaction to, logging restrictions, or if the cultural differences inherent in these interactions are manifest in varying forest regrowth rates.
The results of my proposed research will provide a better understanding of the factors behind the spatial variability of forest regrowth by exposing the role that cultural differences have on forest regeneration. This research will illustrate how effective the NFPP has been in promoting forest regrowth, and, further, the extent that cultural traditions have been resilient to conditions set forth by environmental policy in northwest Yunnan.
To address my research questions, I will classify satellite images of the four Yunnan counties that comprise my study area into forested and non-forested areas. After classifying a collection of images taken before and after the logging ban’s introduction, I will develop forest cover change maps which will be analyzed to provide the rate, extent, and spatio-temporal pattern of forest cover regrowth. To better understand if different ethnic groups’ livelihoods and relationships with forest resources have shifted under the logging ban, I will consider census data and conduct village- and household-level interviews in ethnic minority villages. Finally, I will develop a geographic information system (GIS) analysis to help examine the relationship between varying forest regrowth rates and cultural variability.
Yen-Chu Weng – From patterns to processes-an exploration of urban political ecology
As a geographer with interest in ecology, I have always been intrigued by the heterogeneous patterns on the landscape. With geospatial background and knowledge in ecology, I find myself perfectly situated in the niche of landscape ecology. However, given that most landscape ecological research in the US has a strong root in ecology and hence the focus is mainly on natural reserves or forest management, I felt that there is a need to bring in more geographic perspectives in the field.
Therefore, my Master's research was to apply landscape ecological
methods to the study of urbanization. More specifically I
used landscape metrics to quantify landscape pattern along
a rural-urban-rural transact in the 
The transect of my study and two example
outputs from the metric analysis.City of Madison and its
vicinities to capture the changes in response to urbanization.
For the same transect, historical land-use data were compiled
every decade from 1970 to 2000 to capture the changes in
landscape pattern temporally.
Overall, the results from landscape metric analysis revealed an increase in landscape heterogeneity, fragmentation, and complexity paralleling the degree of urbanization. This trend of change was consistent both spatially and temporally. This study demonstrated the application of landscape metrics to the analysis of urban landscape pattern, which set up the foundation for future studies of the ecological significance of these changes of landscape pattern resulted from urbanization. (See figure below.)
As the field of landscape ecology has moved from pattern detection to process exploration, I find that it is not only ecological processes that shape the landscape patterns found on the ground, but also, especially in an urban context, the socioeconomic processes. Therefore, in my PhD research, I would like to explore urban ecology from political ecological perspectives.
My special interest in urban ecology lies in urban green space. I would like to use urban green space as a point of entry to interrogate the patterning of urban space. With an emerging interest in restoring nature in cities, it is necessary to consider not only the ecological aspects of such practices but also the socioeconomic implications of this trend. Who gets to decide where urban green space is allocated and how and for whom the space is managed are essentially social and political questions. Therefore, the theoretical aspects I will bring into my research include a critical investigation of green urbanism, environmental justice, and the science studies of restoration ecology.
However, while emphasizing the social aspect of urban ecology, I still plan to balance my research from ecological perspectives. I would like to explore how urbanization has changed the vegetation composition in cities and perhaps some possibilities of restoring urban nature.
In short, for my PhD research, I would like to engage myself in the studying of people-environment relationships in cities and address this question from both ecological and social perspectives. My study would contribute to the understanding of the ecological and social dynamics of urban green space, which can be further applied to the design of sustainable and environmentally just cities.
Please see my website for more information on my Master's research on political ecology at UW-Madison.
Alumni
James Alberts – Comparing Perception Maps Indicates Common Traits
Throughout
the history of cartography examples of maps which depict
the world in relative, yet spatially inaccurate terms exist.
These maps which are blatantly inaccurate in respect to actual
physical geography yet may be considered accurate because
they portray the world as it was perceived by the ancient
cartographer. (See inset at right, map section showing spatial
distortion of streets.)
What fascinates me about this is that maps which appear "wrong" are still very much correct because they depict the perception of the world rather than the actual world itself. I began thinking about the way in which individuals perceive the world. Surely everyone perceives their surroundings a bit differently; what I wanted to do was map these differences. It is interesting that mental maps work (that is, they are highly functional), even if they are not spatially accurate. I hoped that by studying and comparing the spatial distortions of people's mental maps from my hometown, I'd gain insight into how they perceive and function within that real space.
I gathered "mental maps" of my hometown from four individuals that live in the same neighborhood (see process frames above). The volunteers were to draw a map of town. The map could be drawn in any manner as long as it included the five predetermined landmarks which were evenly distributed throughout town. The complete maps were then scanned into Photoshop, converted to vector format, and exported to Illustrator. A base map was obtained from ESRI's StreetsUSA dataset. The raw base map was exported to Illustrator, cleaned up and simplified. The base map and hand-drawn mental maps were overlaid and aligned as well as they possibly could be. The next step involved a sort of "rubber sheeting" technique, where the base map was distorted to match the hand-drawn map. This was accomplished by maintaining the integrity of intersections on the base map. These intersections were then forced to coincide with the intersections of the hand-drawn version. The end result is a complete map of town that displays that individual's spatial distortion - or a fleshed-out mental map. The results are indeed interesting to look at. They provide an insight into both common perceptive traits and an individual's relationship with his or her surroundings.
-- James Alberts earned a GIS Certificate in the Department of geography at UW-Madison in 2005.
Nick Bauch – The politics of counter-culture food production and consumption in the United States
The
overarching goal of this research is to understand how counter-culture
food production and consumption have been used and politicized
through time in the United States. I am particularly interested
in the history of conceptions
of nature in the USA and how those conceptions have altered
agricultural landscapes. 
I want to understand how alternative
agricultural practices, and their associated transformations
of space and place, have been used
to represent and promote an ever-changing relationship between
humans and their environment.
This idea springs from my Master's research, where I began by looking at the enactment of a law in the European Union that allows producers to trademark their food product as authentic if their site of production lies within the boundaries of a specified territory. According to lawmakers and advertising rhetoriticians, the sites of production in the cases of the protected EU food products are much more than locations in Newtonian space. They are instead denoted as places of tradition and spirit, where familial ties and ancient social networks breathe life into the food products. In addition, these places of production are framed as having the sole physical environment on earth capable of making the authentic versions of the food products.
Rather than ask if this was true or not, or why this law was made possible, my Master's thesis probed at the meeting point of two of these food products (Parmigiano-Reggiano and Prosciutto di Parma, both from Parma, Italy) with American consumer culture. A simple way to put the main question of the thesis is "what about these products, real or imagined, is attractive to consumers?" My conclusions were based on the very broad geographical concept of experiencing "over there," or other places. More specifically my conclusions can be broken down into three parts: 1) the mental space of Parma, Italy and the image of Italy as a whole, 2) the visceral, ingestive connection with another place that only food allows, and 3) the moral consideration that goes into supporting this type of agricultural production.
I am now interested in expanding this
research, and in giving it a nudge toward the historical.
I see geographically labeled foods, such as Parmigiano-Reggiano
and Prosciutto di Parma, as members of a larger set of
foods that all share a common aesthetic thread. This set
can perhaps be most simply defined in the context of the
politics of agriculture - they all counter large-scale,
Fordist production methods of food. What I have in mind
are things like organic foods, community supported agriculture,
farmer's markets, heritage seeds, geographically labeled
foods, and grocery cooperatives. 
Community supported agriculture
farm
space in southern Wisconsin.Often
interrelated, these forms of food acquisition and consumption
are also political statements.
What I want to do for my dissertation is show how these counter-mass agricultural movements have waxed and waned in America over the past 50-100 years. While I see these combined food movements as a political event, I feel that no political movement can be successful without ideological and aesthetic backing. It is the development of this backing that concerns me. The movements seem to promote the intersection of nature, cultural history, and place as something with a high moral value, a value that is certainly not ubiquitous in time or space. I am interested in discovering why in this time and space it is growing in importance.
Dawn Biehler – In the Crevices of the City: Public Health, Urban Neighborhoods, and the Creatures We Call Pests
Ecologists and environmental policymakers have in recent years become increasingly interested in urban ecosystems, where the interface of social and natural systems poses unique challenges for reform efforts. One fertile domain for exploring these interactions is the complex and changing relationship between animals identified as "pests" and the human beings whose lives are entangled with them.
Click image above for larger view
In the early 1900s city health departments across the US warned the public that houseflies could carry a variety of infectious diseases. This illustration comes from a flier distributed by the Chicago Health Department in 1916. Though it is more likely that disease agents were transmitted by contaminated drinking water or dirty human hands, belief in the vector role of flies led officials to urge households to take responsibility for screening their homes against these insects.
Pest animals have been implicated in many kinds of health risks, among them infectious diseases ranging from typhus to West Nile virus, exposure to pesticides used to control vermin, and indoor allergens such as arthropods, their body parts and excrement. This project will examine how poverty, the physical environment, and pest control strategies have shaped the historical geography of human-pest interactions in US cities from 1900 to the present. The main objectives are to assess the effects of past interventions in pest problems and to show how communities navigated political challenges related to pest problems. I analyze archival materials, past scientific research, and interviews to reconstruct pest control programs and understand how they failed or succeeded with reference to urban ecosystems and epidemiology. I also trace ideas about pest control in the context of shifting attitudes toward the environment and urban animals. The study will reveal how political controversies affected neighborhoods with high pest populations; preliminary findings show that communities have resisted the spatial stigma of infestation, and have faced difficulties implementing preventive approaches to pest control. Initial results also suggest that both low-income, inner-city communities and suburban fringe areas have experienced the ecology of unintended consequences, for example the growth of pest populations at urban renewal sites mid-century and around subdivisions today, and exposure to toxic pesticides in the course of efforts to protect against pest-borne illness.
Click image for larger view.
In the mid-1960s
rats were physical and symbolic emblems of the neglect
of central-city
communities, and they became much more than a symbol for the thousands of people
each
year who were
actually bitten by rats. In 1968 Congress and the Johnson Administration allocated
funding
to implement
intensive rat control programs in several cities across the US. Milwaukee was
the first city to
receive a grant.
This map shows the portions of Milwaukee designated for the pilot program.
The analysis of historical relationships among human communities, the urban physical environment, and populations of urban wildlife will help to explain current urban environmental and health problems. By tracing failures, injustices, and successes in past responses to vermin by public, private, scientific, and activist institutions, the researchers will be able to inform present-day efforts to protect urban communities from pest-related disease. The project also bears implications for current efforts to cultivate healthy ecological systems in cities: urban animals and emerging disease vectors pose both ethical and practical challenges for urban ecology programs, and this project will examine the past as a guide to addressing these problems.
[Of note: Biehler's dissertation grant application for this project is posted by the National Science Foundation as a model for other grant applicants. see it here ]
Ryan Galt – The Political Ecology of Regulatory Risk in Costa Rica: Export Farmers' Responses to U.S. Pesticide Residue Regulations
This
paper adds to the literature on risk in agriculture by examining
farmers' responses to an unappreciated form: regulatory risk.
Unlike much of the literature on pesticide use in developing
countries in which misuse and abuse are apparently the norm,
many farmers exercise considerable caution in their pesticide
use on the main export crops, mini-squash and chayote, in
Northern Cartago and the Ujarrás Valley, Costa Rica.
Export farmers in the area are generally careful about pesticide
residues in a number of ways, including the selection of
insecticides of less residual chemical classes, general respect
for recommended pesticide doses, and adherence to pre-harvest
intervals (PHIs) for insecticides. Regulatory risk from pesticide
residue requirements for export markets and the specific
way in which it is socially mediated by exporters and the
state have led to a partial rationalization of pesticide
use among most farmers who produce for export markets. However,
the history of residue violations in the area and a local
misinterpretation 
of pesticides' color bands leads farmers
to exercise more caution with PHIs of insecticides than with
fungicide PHIs. The resulting lack of caution with fungicide
PHIs raises the possibility of dramatically increased pesticide
residue violations if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) changes its pesticide residue testing strategies. Thus,
while the export mini-squash and chayote sectors in Costa
Rica are both currently political ecologies of success, this
success remains extremely precarious.
Photos (click for larger image):
TOP, A potato harvest high on the flanks of
Volcán Irazú.
BOTTOM,
A worker sprays pesticides on sweet corn for export.
Keywords: pesticides, export agriculture, Costa Rica
Mara Goldman – Maasai and Conservation Science: Ecology, communication, and the politics of knowledge in northern Tanzania
In northern Tanzania movements of wildlife outside of the parks onto village lands has led to growing interest by international conservation agencies to initiate community-based conservation (CBC) projects to protect wildlife across increasingly humanized landscapes.
Knowledge of wildlife movements, local ecological processes,
and suggestions for conservation-related land use planning,
came directly from European and American researchers and
International NGOs (Non-Profit Organizations) working in
the area.
Plans therefore reflect Northern ideas of nature,
human-nature relations, scientific priorities (i.e. biodiversity),
and socio-cultural processes of knowledge dissemination
and resource management.
I am interested in local (Maasai) knowledge regarding wildlife, ecological processes and land use planning, as well as processes of knowledge dissemination and resource management. My research focuses on this interface between a globalized conservation science-culture applied locally and a localized science-culture, facing issues of global concern. My dissertation research was strongly influenced by appeals from within feminist/social studies of science to interrogate relations of power and hybridity at the nature-society and scientific-indigenous knowledge interfaces. Specifically, I combine social and natural science techniques to ask how local Maasai residents in northern Tanzania could contribute to scientific dialogues regarding wildlife conservation in the humanized landscape.
(Photo, at right: a local Maasai traditional leader (olaiguenani) and member of the steering committee of a new community-based conservation area, the Manyara Ranch. Elephants had disrupted the meeting by coming close to the meeting spot to access water in the nearby tank. Everyone was so interested in the elephants that all interest in the meeting was lost. Elephants use the Ranch on a seasonal basis. It was the dry season and the they were in search of water! Photo by Mara Goldman)
My research involves a critical engagement with both local Maasai knowledge (ecological, geographic) and Western conservation science (conservation biology, wildlife ecology, and GIScience) to understand current land use patterns of people and animals, competing knowledge productions and knowledge communication processes, and alternative conservation solutions.
Specifically, I combine ecological, ethnographic and geographic
data to 1) delineate the spatial and temporal distribution
of wildlife and livestock in village lands; 2) critically
explore Maasai and scientific knowledge regarding wildlife,
rangeland ecology, and geography; and 3) propose methods
to best facilitate dialogues of negotiation between Maasai
and scientific knowledges, both practically (through improved
participation in community-based conservation) and theoretically
(in theorizing and writing about different 
knowledge systems).
This last emphasis forms the foundation of my thesis, and
relies heavily on the insights of science studies, combined
with other scientific methods/tools (including participatory
GIS mapping) and with components of indigenous Maasai communication
processes.
The goal here is to (re)present all knowledge claims (Maasai and scientific) as partial and socially situated, while never losing focus of the macro- and micro- power relations central to any knowledge exchange and heightened in environmental resource management contexts. I conducted field research from January 2002-2004 in the local languages of Swahili and Maasai.
(Photo, at right: Mara Goldman in Tanzania with sick livestock)
After finishing her PhD, Goldman will be leaving for an NSF International Postdoc in Kenya/Tanzania for a year working on a project called "Communication and the Politics of Participation in Pastoral Societies: An ethno-geographical analysis in East Africa." Starting in Sept. 2007, Goldman will teach in the Department of Geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Marie Peppler – Effects of Magnitude and Duration of Large Floods on Channel Morphology: A Case Study of North Fish Creek, Bayfield County, Wisconsin, 2000-2005
Impacts
of a flood on a stream are closely related to the magnitude
and duration of the flood. Many applied applications in fluvial
geomorphology are focused on the importance of the effective
flow, i.e. bankfull flow, as the driving force in channel
form and biotic function. Reliance on bankfull stage may
be insufficient in areas where the bankfull flow is not the
only factor affecting channel morphology. The present study
shows that the rare floods of catastrophic magnitude also
influence channel form, move large volumes of sediment, and
leave strong imprints on channel morphology. This thesis
presents results from monitoring changes in channel morphology
and bluff erosion
following installation of flow-deflecting vanes at three
eroding bluff sites along North Fish Creek, Wisconsin, over
the period 2000-05. Channel and bluff changes are described
in the context of four floods that occurred from 2001-2005.
Channel responses were measured following floods that involved
1-7 flood peaks and illustrated a range of high magnitude,
low frequency flows caused by differing rainfall and/or snowmelt
conditions. Changes in channel morphology (based on changes
in cross-section profiles) were quantified in terms of volume
of sediment eroded or deposited along survey transects representing
point bar, streambed, bars, and bluff margin locations.
Results
show that a flood of moderate magnitude and long duration (30
days duration, 100 year flood recurrence interval and 39 days
duration, 25-50 year flood recurrence interval) shows a pattern
in progressive downstream deposition with distance from cross
sections that experienced net erosion. More extreme, high magnitude
floods (2 and 7 days duration, greater than 1,000 year rainfall
recurrence interval) were found to produce different cross
section to cross section morphologic changes depending on durations
of flow and numbers of flood peaks. An extremely flashy flood
mobilizes large amounts of sediment, but a longer duration
flood or a second flood peak is required to produce total net
erosion of all cross sections over an extended reach. If it
can be assumed that present data are representative of long-term
flood frequency behavior for North Fish Creek, for example,
over a
1,000 year period, then in spite of the large 
magnitudes of erosion and
sedimentation documented for recent extreme floods, summation of net
sediment exchange implies that the smaller magnitude floods, transport more
sediment in the long-term than do low frequency, high magnitude
floods. This conclusion supports Wolman and Miller's (1960)
conclusion that low magnitude, high frequency floods are more
important than low frequency, high magnitude floods for the
long term erosion and sedimentation from a small watershed.
Nevertheless, present results also show the importance of extreme
floods for exceeding stability thresholds of a channel system,
such as incision of a previously long-term armored channel
bed. These types of adjustments were observed to produce important
lateral and vertical changes in the channel morphology.
Of note:
Continuing her student work and publishing, Peppler
will be working as a geographer at the USGS
Wisconsin Water Science Center.
Feng Qi – Knowledge discovery from 'area-class' natural resource maps and knowledge-based natural resource modeling and mapping
Feng Qi, doctoral student in Geography, reports that she spent most of summer 2005 in China as part of the Chinese Professionals in GIS (CPGIS) Young Scholar Summit Program.
Qi delivered talks in two Universities covering Artificial Intelligence Techniques and GIS, with a specific focus on her dissertation research: Spatial Data Mining for Natural Resource Modeling. Qi also attended an international conference on Fuzzy Logic in Beijing.
Current research by Qi focuses on knowledge discovery from 'area-class' natural resource maps and knowledge-based natural resource modeling and mapping. While previous work and publications have demonstrated the success of using spatial data mining methods in extracting valuable knowledge from such maps, the current focus is on representing and extracting knowledge for categorizing geographic entities with indeterminate boundaries. In doing so, the research examines geographic knowledge discovery from the perspective of human cognition. Specifically, it aims to develop a scheme for organizing knowledge used in categorizing and mapping such geographic entities and investigate data mining algorithms for extracting such knowledge from choropleth maps.
The involvement of high tech tools such as GIS and Remote Sensing in the last two decades has already brought unabated growth of geographical data in hundreds and thousands of gigabytes, not to mention the amassed maps and survey records over centuries. It calls for endeavors to applying data mining approach to geographic data, which is known as spatial data mining or geographic knowledge discovery.
With the distinct power of discovering previously unclear knowledge in spatial data, spatial data mining not only improves our spatial data analysis abilities, knowledge discovery from previously underutilized data sources (e.g. image data, map data, etc.) also provides an alternative to knowledge construction for knowledge-based systems where traditional knowledge acquisition is difficult. Qi's research interests lie in knowledge discovery from spatial databases for the purpose of knowledge-based environmental modeling.
Read Qi's complete research agenda >>
In 2004, Qi published "Knowledge discovery from 'area-class' resource maps: data preprocessing for noise reduction" in Transactions in Geographical Information Science, 8(3), 297-308.
Gordon Robertson – Human historical impacts on the highland landscape: the case from Knoydart
Microtopographic Evidence of Human-Landscape Interactions in Knoydart Peninsula, Scotland, UK
ABSTRACT: Human occupation and land use in rugged areas is often dictated by topography, bedrock and glacial geology, and microclimate. Evidence of prehistoric patterns of agriculture in north-western Europe has been largely obliterated by more recent constructs, but wild regions of western Scotland hold remarkably preserved evidence of past human activities. The Knoydart peninsula of western Scotland is a sparsely populated, remote area of heath-covered hills comprised primarily of Moinian pelitic and micaceous schists and psammites/semi-pelites. Slope topography is steep and rocky, with few low-lying areas suitable for long-term sustainable settlement. The climate is tempered by moderate ocean currents, which bring frequent rain and mist, and limit direct sunlight. Natural fertility of the soil is low and agriculture could only be accomplished through alteration of the natural landscape and addition of nutrients.
Using
historic land surveys, several agrarian use areas were visually
identified along the coastal reaches of Knoydart. The microtopographic
patterns on this landscape are striking. Land areas modified
by subsistence communities consisted of sets of 2-3m wide,
20-27m long and 0.5m high raised beds in three general areas
on the landscape: 1) low relief coastal toeslope, 2) moderate
relief footslope, and 3) high relief backslope. Most extensive
sets (up to 5 x 104 m2) occurred in the low to moderate relief
areas, where amendments such as cattle manure, seaweed, and
shell sand could most easily be transported to the fields.
Beds were oriented parallel to slope on the toe and foot-slopes,
but tended to be smaller (20-500m2) in high relief areas.
Backslope sets also appeared to be less developed, suggesting
limited use. The largest field areas occurred preferentially
in areas of micaceous schist bedrock and in the limited areas
of glacial deposits, where thicker soils would naturally form.
Buried organically enriched horizons representing the original
soil surfaces within the beds were found at 30-40cm depth.
Extensive soil samples across these anthropogenically-altered
landscapes will be assessed for soil biogeochemical indicators
in effort to clarify the history of this once active and well-preserved
human landscape.
Robert Rose – Changing Farms, Changing Forests: A Multi-scaled Model of Land Cover Change in Northwestern Wisconsin
As human use of the biosphere expands and
intensifies, we are reconfiguring terrestrial ecosystems,
changing the global climate, and altering the distribution
and numbers of species drastically (Meyer and Turner II 1992;
Peterson 2000). Agricultural landscapes are particularly
dynamic as shifts in farm economies cause rapid changes in
land use (Burel and Baudry 1995) . To understand the environmental
outcome of anthropogenic change, we need to empirically link
social processes with ecosystem conditions. Geographers are
particularly well 
suited for such research given their long-term
theoretical interest in people-environment interactions and
their newfound powerful analytical techniques, especially
in GIS and remote sensing.
Changes in land use regimes from logging to farming to recreation and urban housing in northwestern Wisconsin have had significant impacts on the regional forest cover. Current studies have shown that as a whole, forest cover in northwestern Wisconsin has grown steadily since 1970. But the regional expansion of forests masks significant forest loss and or fragmentation in certain areas and habitat types of Northern Wisconsin . Three prominent shifts in land use are causing forest loss, in direct opposition to regionally observed trends: tourism and recreation development in shorelines, the consolidation of small farm operations and the growth in year-round housing. The goal of this research is to analyze these trends at the local level to see how they impact long term forest recovery.
The proposed research uses remotely sensed data in a multi-scaled, trajectory analysis to model the pattern of land cover change due to fundamental shifts in agricultural economies, the recreation industry and urban growth. This project will analyze land use and forest cover change from 1975-2001, a period of farm consolidation, falling commodity prices and a boom of the recreation industry. Specifically, I intend to answer the following question: how has the consolidation of agricultural landholdings and growth of urban and recreation/vacation homes affected forest cover and forest fragmentation in northwestern Wisconsin ?
Given its dynamic land use history and the availability of long-term social and physical data, Northwestern Wisconsin presents a unique opportunity to conduct research on the changing pattern of land use and land cover at both the local (farm) and regional (multiple county) scales. Northwestern Wisconsin is a physically and socially heterogeneous landscape. Thus, the impact of socioeconomic change will affect specific areas differently, depending on the initial conditions of a given piece of land. Therefore, this research will use a spatially explicit and multi-scaled approach to model land cover changes in relation to land use transitions.
The approach will first use field interview data to identify the important factors influencing land use changes at the property level. The field interviews will focus on identifying the relevant social and economic factors, such as increasing land taxes, age of land owner or zoning regulations as well as spatial factors such as distance from nearest water body, distance from urban center or size of farm that may lead to land use changes. Next, multiple date, satellite image analysis will provide information regarding land cover change at the local and regional level respectively over a twenty-five year period (1975-2001) at approximately five year intervals. Satellite data will provide the trajectory of land use change at the pixel level where the trajectory describes the initial land cover at time one and subsequent land cover at time two. These data will then be combined with socioeconomic and spatial data in a geographic information system (GIS) using regression analysis in order to model the factors influencing land cover change.
The second part of the study looks at changes in forest fragmentation using landscape ecology methods. These methods include the use of landscape metrics, such as contagion and connectivity to determine whether the forest has become more or less fragmented over time. Landscape metrics will be calculated for each satellite image and then changes in the metric over time will be quantified.
This research will contribute a better understanding of
the effects of local land use transitions on forest change.
It will provide information on both the amount and the patterns
of forest change at both the local and regional level and
will provide valuable land change information to land use
planners, local governments and state conservationists. It
is important to understand both the scale and pattern of
forest change for a number of reasons. First, the recovery
of stable, continuous forests will enhance the recovery efforts
of wildlife species such as wolves and it is important to
know where these forests are or will be in the future. 
Second,
as the urban areas expand into forested regions, new concerns
arise such as increased risk of fire damage, decreasing water
quality and increased risk for negative human/wildlife interactions
and by modeling changes and predicting future landscapes,
planners can begin to guide development objectives and restrictions.
Moreover, by modeling the relationship between land use and
social, economic and geographic factors, the results will
add to the growing body of research on linking socioeconomic
and spatial factors to land cover change studies in a multi-scaled
manner.
Robert Rose graduated with a doctoral degree from the Department of Geography at UW-Madison in the Fall of 2007 with the help of his advisor Lisa Naughton. While at UW-Madison he was a TA for Geography 377, "Intro to Geographic Information Systems" and lectured Geography 360 "Quantitative Methods." Robert also worked for 2 years in the Harvard Map Collection as a GIS instructor.
Ben Sheesley – TypeBrewer: Design and Evaluation of an Online Cartographic Design Help Tool for Selecting Map Typography
An abundance of geographic data and readily available mapmaking software have contributed to the democratization of cartography and map design. Non-specialist mapmakers can now be found among the general population of spatial information users.
My research argues that
the role of cartographers must now include facilitating the mapmaking
practices of non-specialists. Map typography, particularly
selecting visual properties of text (e.g., typeface, size,
tracking, weight, posture, case, etc.) is an element
of map design that is
particularly challenging and where resources are difficult
to obtain and/or do not contain specific, practical
design help that many mapmakers require.
The purpose of my research is to design and evaluate TypeBrewer, an online map design help tool that facilitates the typographic design choices of non-specialist mapmakers. TypeBrewer should encourage broadened thinking and learning about map typography as well as offer specific practical guidance for creating type that is legible, functional, and visually appealing. Design and development of TypeBrewer involves research in three main areas: cartography, typography, and human-computer interaction. The success of TypeBrewer will be measured qualitatively during and after its production using focus groups, survey instruments, and map document analyses.
Kevin Spigel – Holocene Lake Sediment Dynamics at Emrick Lake, Wisconsin
My
current research is focused on determining how and why erosion
and sedimentation dynamics of a Wisconsin lake basin have
responded to Holocene environmental change. I am seeking
to interpret hydrological relationships between climate,
vegetation, wildfire, and human activity. In collaboration
with Samantha Kaplan, we recovered a ~9m 
lake
sediment core from Emrick Lake in Marquette County, Wisconsin
in early February 2004 (approximately 2.7 km. northwest of
Oxford; T.15N, R. 8 E., Sec. 7, N.W. ).
(Photo at right: Spigel loading a core segment on the GEOTEK at the Limnological Research Center (LRC) at the University of Minnesota.)
Emrick Lake was chosen because of its proximity to the prairie-forest ecotone, a location sensitive Holocene climate and vegetation change. More importantly, Emrick Lake's morphometry is such that varves (laminated sediments that represent the annual deposition of eroded or autochthonous material) exist, thus providing an additional source of age control beyond radiocarbon analysis. We used a modified piston corer for our long core and we also used a frozen finger corer to recover the sediment-water interface. A basal date on the core yielded a radiocarbon age of 9930 +/-70 yr. BP, a second date from a charcoal sample came back at 11,600 +/- 320 yr. BP. Laboratory analysis underway includes loss-on-ignition, pollen, charcoal, and environmental magnetism.
Ben Sheesley and Jeff Stone – American Birkebeiner Cross Country Ski Marathon
Winner of the 2005 ACSM-CaGIS National Geographic Society Award for Electronic Maps, Student Division
The
primary design objective of the American Birkebeiner map was
to visualize a race whose results had previously been published
in tabular form only.
Creation of an attractive base map showing the course and surrounding area was also a major design objective. Unique features of the map facilitate comparisons between racers using interactive selection and benchmarking tools, as well as by permitting a normal or synchronized race start. These features are explained for map users in the map's "Instructions" and "Help" menus.
The map is intended for an audience motivated to explore, analyze, and invest time with the race information, such as race participants, race spectators, and race organizers.