Kansas State University

Geography faculty and students present research at national conference

Submitted by Chuck Martin

Faculty members and graduate students from the geography department participated in the annual American Association of Geographers meeting, April 10-14, in New Orleans, Louisiana. The meetings are the largest annual gathering of professional geographers in North America. 

The following faculty members and students made presentations at the meetings: 

Ali S. Alghamdi, graduate student, and John Harrington, Jr., professor, presented "Atmospheric Circulation Conditions and Sea Surface Temperatures Teleconnections for Warm Season Heat Waves in Saudi Arabia: A Preliminary Assessment." 

Karl F. Bauer, graduate student, presented "Evaluating Free Land Programs as a Method of Reversing the Trend of Population Decline in Rural Kansas." 

Marcellus M. Caldas, associate professor, and colleagues G. Granco and P. De Marco, Jr., presented "Can Climate Change Undermine Brazil's Long-Term Goals of Renewable Energy from Sugarcane?" 

Caldas and colleagues M. Sanderson, J. Bergtold, J. Stamm, and S. Ramsey presented "Climate Change Beliefs: What is the Role of Values?" 

Meng Ding, graduate student; Jida Wang, assistant professor; Blake Walter, graduate student; and colleagues C. Song, Y. Sheng, T. Urano, C. Bailey, and P. Satori presented "Assessing Global Surface Freshwater Storage using High-Resolution Water Body Datasets." 

Luo Dong, graduate student, presented "Can Support Vector Machine be Used to Predict and Estimate Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) Mapping using Landsat Images?" 

Amariah Fischer, graduate student, presented "Developing and Evaluating a Geographic Information Dashboard." 

John Harrington, Jr., professor, presented "Climate Thought." 

Audrey Joslin, assistant professor, presented "Labor as Linchpin: The Role of Pre-Existing Labor Institutions in Andean Water Fund PES." 

Thomas Larsen, graduate student, presented "Social Justice, Guerrilla Geography, and Place-Hacking the C3 Framework." 

Richard A. Marston, emeritus professor, and colleagues B. Marston, D. Lageson, M. Hubbard, B. Pokharel, and S. Pandit presented "Resilience of Solukhumbu Communities to the 2015 Nepal Earthquakes." 

Bimal Paul, professor, and colleagues T. Crawford, K. Rahman, and S. Curtis presented "Resilience Thinking and Panarchy in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna Delta." 

Paul; Avantika Ramekar, graduate student; and colleague M. Sharif presented "Analysis of 2015 Nepal Earthquake Mortality using Spatial Bayesian Model." 

Ramekar presented "Living with Oil and Gas in Kansas and Oklahoma." 

Blake Walter, graduate student, presented "An Enhanced High-Resolution Global Inventory of Dams and Artificial Water Impoundments." 

The following faculty members and graduate students in the geography department served as panelists, chairs, or organizers for panels or sessions at the conference: 

Caldas, panelist for "Integrating Culture into Land System Science" and Caldas and colleagues G. Granco and M. Daniels, organizer for "Climate Vulnerability and Adaptation: Integrative Modeling for Coupled Natural-Human Systems: Functional Models of Human Decision-Making and Environmental Response Feedback Loops." 

J. Harrington, Jr., organizer and chair for "Thinking about Climatology," and panelist for "Broadening the Impacts for Transformative Research in Geography." 

Lisa M.B. Harrington, professor, chair for "Rural Economies, Resources, and Accessibility" and "New Voices in Rural Geography," and panelist for "Rural Identity in the Academy."

Larsen, panelist for "Powerful Geography." 

R. Marston, chair for "Changing Landscapes and Livelihoods in Mountain Regions 2." 

Paul and colleague M. Rahman, organizer for "South Asia and Human-Environment Interactions." 

Ramekar, organizer for "Rural Economies, Resources, and Accessibility" and "New Voices in Rural Geography."