Geography Newsletter - Fall 2023 | Geography | University of Colorado Boulder

Geography Newsletter - Fall 2023

Chair Update

Message from the Chair Fall 2023

This fall, we welcomed Jessica Finlay to the Department. Dr. Finlay, featured in this newsletter, is an Assistant Professor examining health geographies, neighborhoods, aging, and well-being. We also welcomed Sean Dunn as the Department’s new program administrator. Sean has quickly become an integral and valuable member of the Geography Department.

Sadly, our outstanding and dedicated Program Administrator, Darla Shatto, retired at the end of August. Many thanks to Darla for her fantastic work as a member of the Geography Department Staff for the past eighteen years. Darla was a joy to work with; her commitment and dedication to the Geography Department were exceptional and commendable. We miss you, Darla!

Our colloquium series this semester began with Dr. Lionel Lyles, who received his M.A. and PhD from the ��Ƶ Boulder Geography. In addition to his presentation, Dr. Lyles met with several leaders across campus to share his ideas for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice work on campus. We look forward to collaborating with Dr. Lyles on implementing and improving DEI efforts in the Department and on campus. Jennifer Greenburg, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Sheffield, presented a dynamic and engaging talk about her new book At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War, Cornell University Press. Our Colleague from the ��Ƶ-Colorado Springs Geography Department, Rebecca Theobald, discussed the state of Geography Education in the United States and the steps necessary to improve Geography education in Colorado. Elsa Culler, Earth Data Science Instructor for Earthlab and ESIIL, two centers founded by Associate Professor Jennifer Balch within the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science (CIRES), spoke about her work developing accessible Earth Science Data.

We initiated the first “Geography Day” at ��Ƶ-Boulder, which brought 30 high school students and their teachers to campus for a day of hands-on Geography activities. Students began their day in the Map Library, where our outstanding map librarians, Ilene Raynes, and Naomi Heiser, provided the students with an overview of the map collection and several engaging activities. We then walked with the students from the Map Library to Guggenheim while plotting GPS coordinates along the way, allowing the students to produce a map using GIS technology with the assistance of Teaching Associate Professor Sarah Schlosser. Assistant Professor Katherine Lininger taught a hands-on lesson about rivers, streams, and fluvial geomorphology with a stream table. I facilitated experiential activities for the students about the experiences of refugees forced from their homes due to climate-related devastation, environmental disasters, or political conflict. Due to the success of this program, we look forward to working with high school teachers and students across the front range to promote Geography teaching and learning in Colorado.

In November, we participated in the intercampus GIS Day and hosted the 2^nd Annual Geography Buff Trivia Night: Space, Place & Justice. The GIS Day included planned events in Boulder and at the ��Ƶ-Denver and Colorado Springs campuses, with a keynote address, Generating Historical Data to Map and Archive the Suppression of the Slave Trade, by Henry Lovejoy, Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Geography Buff Trivia night was co-sponsored by the Center for African and African American Studies, the Center for Asian Studies, the Latin American and Latinx Studies Center, and the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies and featured questions focused on geographies of social, political, economic, and environmental justice.

Many thanks to our department research assistant and graduate student, Gabriela Subia-Smith, who led the organization of the Geography Day and Geography Buff Trivia night. She has also worked diligently on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEI/J) efforts in the Department. Gabriela will step down as the Department RA this spring semester because she received the Gilbert White Award from the Geography Department. This award provides senior Ph.D. students with a semester of funding to focus on completing their dissertation.

We are able to provide funding to support independent research for our graduate and undergraduate students due to the generous donations of our alums and friends of the Geography Department. Many thanks to you for your continued support.

Best Wishes and Happy Holidays,

Jennifer Fluri

Faculty News and Updates

Truelove and Fluri awarded by SPARC to Investigate Gender, Caste, and Water Inequities in North Indian Cities

The fragmented water supply in Shimla, India. Photo Credit: Naomi Hazarika

Assistant Professor Yaffa Truelove and Professor Jennifer Fluri have been awarded a Government of India SPARC grant in collaboration with Dr. Anu Sabhlok and Dr. Ritajyoti Bandopadhyay at the Indian Institute of Science, Education, and Research (IISER) Mohali. This grant will fund a two-year research project titled “Assembly the City: Gender and Utility Infrastructures in Northern India.” Unavailable, unaffordable, and unreliable water infrastructure remains a problem across the globe that has become exacerbated and more visible with recent climate events. Such water crises do not simply present moments of infrastructural breakdown, disconnection, and/or water scarcity in the context of a warming climate, but also reveal simultaneous crises of water inequity and social inequality. This project will investigate the intersecting gender, caste, and class inequities associated with water infrastructure in medium-sized cities in North India, including Shimla and Chandigarh. In India, more than 100 million people live in primarily medium-sized cities that are predicted to go "waterless" (experiencing periodic episodes of piped water running out) over the next decade. Critically, gender, caste, and class identities are associated with unequal access to water infrastructure. Furthermore, significant populations of the urban poor and marginalized groups on the peripheries of cities have been denied a legal right to piped water, and must piece together insufficient and fragmented water supplies on an everyday basis. As both Shimla and Chandigarh have “smart city” missions in their urban planning aimed to improve the functioning of water and sewerage, this research will investigate the lived experiences of these new modalities of water governance and their associated technologies and infrastructure in the city, examining their uneven impacts on marginalized gender, caste, and class groups. This research builds on Dr. Yaffa Truelove’s and Dr. Sabhlok’s previous research in Shimla India on gendered infrastructural violence and embodied experiences of water inequality, and brings in the expertise of Dr. Jennifer Fluri on gender, international development, and South Asia, as well as Dr. Ritajyoti Bandopadhyay’s expertise on infrastructure, informality and caste inequities.

Using an Equitable Co-Production Framework for Integrating Meaningful Community Engagement and Science to Understand Climate Impacts

By Keith Musselman

The Arctic and rivers located in the Arctic and subarctic are warming due to climate change. To understand the impacts this warming will have on people, partnering with impacted Indigenous communities in the region is important. It is also important that these partnerships are ethical and equitable and produce science that is actionable. A new, open-access paper in the journal Community Science discusses efforts undertaken by the Arctic Rivers Project, funded by the NSF’s Navigating the New Arctic program. The interdisciplinary project team, led by Geography’s Assistant Professor Keith Musselman, aims to conduct ethical and equitable research with Indigenous communities and generate science that is useful to those communities.

Through this research, their goal is to better understand potential future impacts of climate change on rivers, fish, and Indigenous communities in central and northern Alaska and the Yukon Territory in Canada. To achieve this goal, the project team formed an Indigenous Advisory Council (IAC) and together developed guidelines for how we can work collaboratively with Indigenous communities. The process of forming an IAC and related guidelines is a new way to approach collaborative research when working across a large geographic area. The paper is led by USGS social scientist Nicole Herman-Mercer and co-authored by Indigenous leaders and the interdisciplinary project team. Together, they present their research process so that it may provide an example for other scientific efforts.

Now in its fourth year, the Arctic Rivers Project has provided support and research opportunity for over 10 undergraduate researchers, one Ph.D. student (Dylan Blaskey, Civil Engineering), and one postdoctoral fellow (Dr. Peyton Thomas, INSTAAR).

Link to the paper:

Student Updates

PhD student Priscilla Corbett presents work at the World Bank Group in Washington D.C.

Geography PhD student Priscilla (Pris) Corbett presented work at the 2023 Annual Institute of the Society of Policy Scientists, held November 9-10 at the World Bank Headquarters in Washington D.C. Pris presented evidence of the potential of women’s self-help groups (SHGs) for women’s empowerment and poverty alleviation based on previous research in West Bengal, India. Many women-only SHGs have been established as the means through which to provide people otherwise considered uncreditworthy with access to formal financial services. However, Pris’ research focuses on the potential capacity of these groups beyond what microfinance can enable.

“A lot people still consider SHGs as only being about group savings and access to credit,” Pris said, “but our research shows the potential of these groups when members take ownership of the group and define their own priorities.” Pris presented evidence of two collectives of SHGs doing just that. In the first collective, strong leadership helped to produce a group identity and sense of solidarity through which all members begun to recognize themselves as integral parts of the group. Women leveraged the sense of trust and interdependence that this created to tackle an important community priority: lack of consistent grain supply year-round. Employing a skill that the women already had, they established a village grain bank, which helped eliminate dependence on moneylenders, reduce outmigration, and mitigate food insecurity. The success of the grain bank helped establish the SHGs as legitimate community institutions, which the women then leveraged to tackle alcohol consumption: a considerably more controversial goal that required behavioral change on the part of men. Women did this by recognizing the need for support and cooperation of other SHGs in surrounding villages. The SHGs did all of this without any external support.

In the second collective, SHGs worked together to create a mango orchard and then had their access to it revoked by the landlord when the trees began to bear fruit. Pris described the mechanisms that enabled the groups to fight for their access to the land and the impacts this in turn made for the solidification of group identity, solidarity, and unity. The second case study is important, however, because it demonstrates the structural barriers women are still liable to face, even when they are united, have a strong sense of solidarity, and have institutional support behind them. These women faced considerable opposition to their attempt to generate an income stream of their own, and a lot of that had to do with the challenge to established power asymmetries based on caste, class, and gender that this project effectively posed. Pris concluded her presentation by commenting on a number of ways in which SHGs could be better supported to enable such processes of change, while simultaneously outlining the limits to interventions and the dangers of over-expecting from them.

By presenting her research at the World Bank, Pris sought to expand understanding of the potential of the SHG among individuals in positions to effect change. “Development is full of faddism,” Pris said, “and my concern is now that everyone is disillusioned with microfinance and moving on to designing other poverty alleviation mechanisms, we forget or even reject SHGs in the process. There exists some 8 million SHGs in India alone – they are by far the most common form of women-only, village-level group here and possibly in other parts of the world as well. This for me represents a network with tremendous potential as to how we can reach women and support them to take active roles in decision-making processes regarding the issues of concern to them. While lots of NGOs focus their service delivery through SHGs, a lot of that remains rather top-down. We are not really creating opportunities for women to develop their problem solving, project management, and leadership skills, such that they are in a position to adopt positions of authority in their communities.”

Pris’ research shows that when SHGs work on self-identified projects for collective benefit, it can lead to changes in norms regarding women’s roles by shifting perceptions in women’s capabilities. While structural barriers continue to pose limits to project outcomes, women’s legitimacy as community decision makers can nonetheless be directly established when group members work together on a collectively-identified problem. The status of the SHG as a legitimate decision-making entity can then be leveraged into challenging the cultural norms and social structures that limit women.

Kylen Solvik Receives NASA FINESST Award

PhD Candidate Kylen Solvik and Assistant Professor Yaffa Truelove were recently awarded a NASA FINESST Grant for Solvik's dissertation research titled "Mapping and Analyzing the Distribution and Drivers of Small Agricultural Reservoirs in Brazil''. The FINESST (Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology) award, part of NASA's Early Career Research Program, will fund interdisciplinary research on the impacts of agricultural expansion and intensification on water in Brazil. Solvik's project aims to understand how patterns of land-use/land-cover change are linked with the creation of small agricultural dams used for cattle drinking water, crop irrigation, and fish aquaculture.

The first stage of the project is to use NASA/USGS Landsat satellite data and AI computer vision methods to automatically identify human-made reservoirs and distinguish them from natural water bodies. Small reservoirs are ubiquitous in Brazilian agriculture, but these will be the first comprehensive maps of very small reservoirs (<0.5 ha), helping analyze this under-studied impact of agriculture on water in the region. The spatial distribution of reservoirs over time will be modeled over time in relation to land-use/land-cover change using existing data from MapBiomas Brasil.

The machine learning and remote sensing part of the research will be paired with qualitative interviews with farmers and ranchers in eastern Mato Grosso, Brazil about water use and management, particularly in response to climate change. Due to climate change, the rainy season that much of Brazil's agriculture depends on is becoming shorter and less predictable, driving farmers to rely more on reservoirs to store and access water. The potential impacts of these changes are not well understood. By combining both remote sensing and qualitative field interviews, this project will help researchers, policy-makers, and water users more fully understand the past, present, and future impacts of agriculture on surface water in Brazil.

Isaiah Lyons-Galante developing GeoVisualizations at the National Renewable Energy Lab

My name is Isaiah Lyons-Galante. I am a second-year masters student in Geography. Since the start of my program, I have been working as a Graduate Research Assistant at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) on data visualization research with my advisor, Morteza Karimzadeh. I am tackling a challenge in geovisualization -- how can we accurately visualize electricity grid networks at multiple scales? How can we show the health of a grid that has 20,000+ nodes? How can we help energy grid planners and operators see both geographical and topological patterns to diagnose problems?

To address these questions, we developed 4 novel visualization systems for power systems data and compared them to each other and current practices. We found that tessellations worked well at depicting the grid when they gave visual real estate to every node in the network. We also developed a new algorithm for creating a contour map that considered the topology of the network when interpolating values. We published our at the annual IEEE Vis conference in Melbourne, Australia in the Energy Vis Workshop. I am now working on embedding our visualizations into a web app that can be used by grid planners at NREL, which you can check out on my lab's GitHub as it evolves.

What I appreciate most about the work experience is the way that my mentors at NREL, and , treat me like a full member of their team. We have weekly team check-ins, I sit side-by-side with my colleagues twice per week, and I have access to the state-of-the-art visualization spaces, both 2D and 3D. I have even had a chance to travel with them to two data visualization conferences in the last year, in Idaho and in Oklahoma. It is a privilege to work with them and other NRELians on problems at the heart of the sustainable energy transition going on in the U.S. right now.

Behzad Vahedi doing a PhD Residency at X - The Moonshot Factory

Last August I started a PhD residency at . X is a research and development branch of Google (or more precisely Alphabet). is a diverse group of inventors and entrepreneurs who build and launch technologies that aim to improve the lives of millions, even billions, of people. The goal is 10x impact on the world’s most intractable problem. X approaches projects that have the aspiration and riskiness of research with the speed and ambition of a startup.

In 2010, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to form a new division of the company to work on moonshots: far-out, sci-fi sounding technologies that could one day make the world a radically better place. It was a grand experiment with ambiguous wording in vision. 10 years in, X website mentions that it has incubated hundreds of different moonshot projects, many of which have gone on to become independent businesses.

As an AI Resident, I'm engaged in an early stage project where I work on various facets of GeoAI model development and deployment, encompassing everything from model design to DevOps and MLOps practices. This role has afforded me the great opportunity of learning the implementation and deployment of AI models at the forefront of the industry, while also being exposed to the practical, conceptual, and theoretical challenges that emerge due to scalability issues.

My academic background and research in the Geography Department at ��Ƶ Boulder have been instrumental in preparing me for this role. In particular, courses such as Geospatial machine learning in the Geography Department, along with deep learning courses in the Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Departments, have been significant. Additionally, an equally impactful course, software engineering for scientists, has also greatly contributed to the skills I use on a daily basis in this position.

In light of this experience, I look forward to my return to academia to complete my PhD leveraging the insights and skills I have gained in this role. I am excited to integrate the practical knowledge I have acquired from the industry into my doctoral research.

Behzad Vahedi page

Alumni Updates

Lucy Citrine, BA 2021: From Fluvial Geomorphology Research to Mapping Underground Utilities

Lucy Citrine

While at ��Ƶ, I had the opportunity to work with the Fluvial Geomorphology Research Group. My work with the group started in the summer of 2021 in Capitol Reef National Park, where I assisted with research on the influences of hydrogeomorphic processes on floodplain dynamics and vegetation along the Fremont River corridor (channel and floodplain). The Fremont River is unique for how it was straightened by the Utah Department of Transportation for the construction of Utah State Route 24. The straightening of the river created a knickzone with a knickpoint (waterfall) in an area underlain with soft Navajo sandstone bedrock. The knickpoint has increased/amplified the rate of incision into the soft bedrock, thereby deepening the channel and altering flood inundation patterns.

We conducted topographic surveys, vegetation surveys, and calculated discharge at transects along the river corridor to evaluate how straightening the river impacted the riparian vegetation and river morphology. In the fall, I created 1D steady flow models using ArcGIS and HEC-RAS to analyze the topographic data collected from the summer. The flood inundation models were used to assess how channel morphology affects lateral hydraulic connectivity in the Fremont River corridor.

I have always had a deep interest in hydrology (specifically anthropogenic impacts) and topographic mapping. Through working with the Fluvial Geomorphology Research Group, I explored and strengthened these interests. In addition to learning new technical skills, I learned that I have a passion for surveying. Developing these skills while still an undergraduate student prepared me for the workforce and helped when looking at various career paths.

I currently work at Harris Kocher Smith in the subsurface utility engineering department where I create maps of underground utilities using AutoCAD Civil 3D, where I am able to apply the cartography and surveying skills that I acquired from my time at the geography department. 

The Fremont River the day after a flash flood.Surveying with the total station.

Molly Guiney, MA 2021: Improving Stream Function and Watershed Health

My name is Molly Guiney, and I graduated in 2021 with a master’s degree specializing in fluvial geomorphology. Advised by Dr. Katherine Lininger, I studied how landscape disturbances, such as floods and fires, can influence the deposition of wood onto floodplains in the Colorado Front Range.

My time at ��Ƶ Boulder was incredibly important in building what I call my “geomorphic toolkit,” and my experiences gave me the confidence to continue developing as a geomorphologist in Colorado. After graduation, I began my own freelance consulting business to work for and with local consultants dedicated to improving stream function and watershed health. For the past two years, I have worked on a variety of projects on streams across the state, including the Yampa River (Steamboat Springs), Coal Creek (Crested Butte), and the Colorado River (Grand Junction). Some of my most interesting projects have included mapping watersheds to identify hazardous areas that people may be unaware of, such as alluvial fans. Other projects assessed watersheds for their potential in reducing post-wildfire impacts on communities. One of my favorite tasks, however, was building imitation beaver dams (beaver dam analogs)!

Most recently, I bade Colorado farewell and moved to Seattle, WA to work as a Fluvial Geomorphologist for Jacobs. In this role, I will be assessing streams for the purpose of improving salmon passage through bridge and culvert crossings, as well as working on stream restoration projects in the Pacific Northwest. I cannot wait!

Brief Alumni Updates

As mentioned at the top of the newsletter, if you have any updates, please let us know using our alumni update form or send an email with your information to the department. We would love to hear from you about how your career has progressed since attending ��Ƶ. The updates below came to us via the form.

Frederick (Rick) Bein, BA 1969

Completed the MA in Geography at the University of Florida 1971, Thesis: Geographic Shifts in Florida Citrus
PhD in Geography at the University of Florida 1974, Dissertation: Patterns of Pioneer Settlement in Southern Mato Grosso, two case studies.
1974-77 Visiting Professor of Geography University of Khartoum
1977-78 Visiting Professor of Geography University of North Dakota
1978-1996 Chair, Department of Geography, Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis
1996-1999 Research Professor, University of Technology, Lei, Papua New Guinea
1999-2016 Professor of Geography, Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis
2005-2006 Fulbright Professor, Universidade Eduardo Mondlani Maputo, Mozamibique
2011-2012 Visiting Professor Moi University, Eldoret, Kenya
2016- present Professor Emeritus, Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis

The BA Degree at ��Ƶ opened the door to an academic career in Geography. From 1964-66, I served in United States Peace Corps in Brazil. Agricultural extension in southern Mato Grosso. I've published 50 some articles and papers.

Donald Friend, MA 1988

I have not wavered from the theme of mountain geography garnered at Boulder. I am now Distinguished Professor of Geography at Minnesota State University. I served AY 2019-2020 as a National Academies Jefferson Science Fellow in the Office of Global Climate Change at USAID.

I am honored and inspired every day to continue on as a geographer serving as a University Professor.

Andrew Canales, BA 1999

My degree in Geography set the stage for a successful 20 year career at DigitalGlobe, now Maxar Technologies.

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