April 19, 2007
Bowling
Green, Ky. - More than 20 Western Kentucky University geography faculty, students and alumni are in attendance this week at the annual Conference of the Association of American Geographers in San Francisco.
The annual geography convention is the largest gathering of geographers in the world, with more than 6,000 attendees expected this year. The WKU Department of Geography and Geology always has a large contingent of faculty and students at the annual meeting.
Attending this year’s conference are the following:
Dr. Katie Algeo presented research titled “Present at the Creation: Negotiating Nature and Culture in the Early Years of Mammoth Cave National Park.”
Dr. John All chaired a session on environmental planning and presented “Overlap between the Clean Air Act and Safe Drinking Water Act in Karst Stormwater Management.”
Dr. Greg Goodrich presented “Climatic controls and hydrologic impacts of a recent extreme seasonal precipitation reversal in Arizona,” co-authored with a colleague from Arizona State University.
Dr. David Keeling organized and chaired a session on recent scholarship in the Geographical Review and presented “Policy Implications and Regional Geography in the Geographical Review, 2001-2006.” He also met with co-editor Dr, Alec Murphy, University of Oregon, and publisher Rowman and Littlefield to promote their new series titled “Regional Geographies.” The first book in this series, on China, was released late last year.
Debbie Kreitzer and Will Blackburn, who together have organized and led several departmental study abroad programs in recent years, presented their poster titled “Internationalizing Higher Education in Kentucky: Western Kentucky University’s efforts to Promote Study Abroad Programs.”
Dr. L. Michael Trapasso met with the co-authors and publishers of his popular Physical Geography textbook to discuss revisions for the next issue.
Dr. Jun Yan presented his research titled “Data Organization and Similarity Measures in Mining Spatio-Temporal Data,” co-authored with Dr. Stuart Foster, Kentucky Climate Center.
Undergraduate geography major Nicholas Lawalin of Tell City, Ind., presented a poster titled “Temporal Shifts in Seasonal High (Peaks) and Low (Dips) Diurnal Temperature Range.” His research was supervised by Dr. Rezaul Mahmood and Dr. Stuart Foster through the Kentucky Climate Center.
Undergraduate geography major Nicholas Rodgers of Bowling Green presented a poster titled “Flash Floods in the Appalachian Region, 1993-2005.” His research was supervised by Dr. Rezaul Mahmood.
Geoscience graduate student Ronnie Leeper of Bowling Green presented a poster of his research titled “Increase in Near-Surface Atmospheric Moisture Content due to Land-Use Changes.” Dr. Rezaul Mahmood and Dr. Ken Hubbard, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, co-authored this research project.
Geoscience graduate student Ashley Littell of Louisville, winner of the department’s 2007 Outstanding Graduate Student Award, presented “Spatio-Temporal Variations of Observed Soil Moisture in Nebraska During the warm season.” Her research was co-authored with Dr. Rezaul Mahmood, Dr. Ken Hubbard and Jinsheng You, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Geoscience graduate student Crystal Bergman of Bowling Green and undergraduate geography major Adam Hitt of Louisville also attended the conference.
Geography program alumnus Joshua Durkee, currently enrolled in the geography Ph.D. program at the University of Georgia, presented “The use of Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission to Estimate South American mesoscale convective complex rainfall.”
Geoscience graduate alumni Alan Glennon, currently enrolled in the GIS Ph.D. program at University of California Santa Barbara, and his spouse Rhonda Pfaff Glennon, representing ESRI, the world’s largest GIS software company, served on a number of GIS-related panels and workshops.
Geoscience graduate alumna Narcisa Pricope, currently enrolled in the geography Ph.D. program at the University of Florida, presented “Assessing Spatial Patterns of Sediment Transport in the Pitman Creek Basin, Kentucky,” based on her master’s thesis research at WKU.
More WKU news is available at www.wku.edu. If you’d like to receive WKU news via e-mail, send a message to WKUNews@wku.edu.
For information, contact David Keeling at (270) 745-4555.
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