EarthView for Life

Photo credit (both the State House photo and the photo of the photo):
Geographer Ashley Costa, BSU EarthView Wrangler

Geography for Life is published jointly by the leading geography organizations in North America, as a guide to those who teach this discipline at the intersection of global studies and STEM disciplines.

After years of anticipation, a new edition was released this month by the National Council for Geographic Education, the Association of American Geographers, and of course the National Geographic Society.

The cover features a photograph of the earth itself. The introductory chapter features a photograph of a remarkable model of the earth -- our department's very own EarthView portable classroom. It is a fitting opening for a book dedicated to geographic education, since nearly 40,000 students have been inside our department's inflatable globe since we acquired it in 2008.

Although EarthView is usually used in classrooms (see videos on our blog), we have also used it is part of our advocacy on behalf of geographic literacy and geography education in Massachusetts. In the NCGE/AAG/NGS publication, EarthView is shown in its highest-profile location in this effort: the Massachusetts State House.

Partly as a result of EarthView and the work of our department and its allies, the Legislature is currently contemplating a commission that would examine geography education in the Commonwealth.

Given the critical state of geographic illiteracy in Massachusetts and in the United States as a whole, the BSU Department of Geography is a leading advocate for geography education at the state and national level. Project EarthView will continue to play an important part, along with our undergraduate, graduate, and outreach programs..

Back to the Fields

Photo: (c) Ashley Costa

July is ending as June did, with an Environmental Geography (GEOG 130) field trip to some real fields -- the organic fields of Colchester Neighborhood Farm in Plympton. The visit during the first summer session was so successful that we decided to visit with students in the second session. This time, we had less rain and more active livestock! In fact, our group was greeted immediately by Dapple, the guard donkey who actively protects the farms sheep, goats, and chickens from canine and raptor predators.

Connie Maribett (second from left above) operates the farm with her husband (and BSU adjunct geography professor) Ron. She spent some time with the group, answering questions about the farm and its partnership with New England Villages. As described in more detail in the June post, this discussion was a perfect compliment to the readings and classroom discussion. It is also helpful, given some of the unpleasant global realities examined in this course, to learn about constructive steps being taken at the local level.

See more photos of the outing -- with further commentary -- on Flickr. Most photos in this series are by geography major Ashley Costa.

Photo: (c) Ashley Costa

On the way to the farm, we briefly visited the historic Oliver Mill Park in Middleboro, an early industrial site that includes one of the earliest and best-known herring runs in southeastern Massachusetts.


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From Parking to Park

This view caught my eye yesterday, as I walked toward the commuter rail station to spend a morning in Boston (you can read about that outing on Environmental Geography). Because of construction involving the pedestrian underpass, I had taken a bit of a detour and was approaching the rail station from the vicinity of the Moakley Center, when the Geography Department's weather sock caught my eye (see detail below and an April post about the weather station itself).

The tremendous pile of sand and gravel occupies what was a useful but barren parking lot just to the east of the railroad tracks. Campus planners have removed that lot, replacing it with tiered parking at the edge of campus. The result will be a campus center that is more inviting for pedestrians, skaters, and bikers. The park that replaces the parking on both sides of the underpass will be cooler in the summer, warmer in the winter, without salt and sand blowing in the winds. Additionally, the relocated parking lot (close to the building itself) will incorporate vegetated swales and retention basins that will reduce flooding, maintain ground water, and improve the quality of surface water. This will make the parking lot itself a destination for mini field trips in our department's water-resources and environmental courses.

Detail of Science & Math Center, showing Geography
Department wind sock.

At almost the same moment I took the photo above, my colleague in Student Affairs, Dr. Tony Esposito, took the following photograph from the top of the Science & Math building. The new parking lot will be in the portion that is to the left of his photo, with access to be through the university's new main entrance next to the railroad tracks on Plymouth Street. The walkway between Kelly Gym and St. Basil's Chapel will be pedestrian only, a great improvement in safety.

Incidentally, the number of parking spaces on campus will not change, as the parking structure offsets all lost parking spaces.

Click to enlarge

Genuine Field Trip

I am teaching GEOG 130: Environmental Geography in each of the two summer sessions this year, using Carl Safina's The View from Lazy Point as the text for the first time. I have posted a number of articles about the book on my personal blog (also called Environmental Geography), and found that it led to a lot of productive conversations, particularly about the geography of climate change.

To complement the class discussions, we ended the first session of the course (as we will the second) with a visit to Colchester Neighborhood Farm in Plympton. The farm is over 200 years old and has been operated as an organic farm for the past decade by the Maribett family. It has several connections to the Geography Department, in which Ron Maribett is an adjunct professor and from which Nick Maribett recently graduated. My own family has been a farm-box CSA shareholder in the farm for a number of years.

Yesterday morning -- just before the heavy rains -- GEOG 130 students joined me in a visit to the farm, where Connie Maribett guided us through the fields, explaining some of the myriad innovations underway at this model of sustainable farming, while gathering the weekly farm share for my family. We explored fields whose soils had been compacted and rendered infertile by "conventional" farming practices, but which now exemplify tilth -- rich, friable, deep soil that nourishes plants.


Clover has been a big part of the tilth-building program at Colchester, because it fixes nitrogen directly from the air and put it into the soil, in contrast to most crop plants, which consume nitrogen from the soil. Some seed borrowed (OK, given) from Colchester has been used for the same purpose our own house in Bridgewater, which was the site of a previous field trip that focused on certified wildlife habitat and other environmental improvements at the household scale.We also saw how careful intercropping not only maintains soil fertility but can also be part of an integrated pest management (IPM) program to discourage beetles or other pests.

Many of the projects at Colchester Neighborhood Farm arise from its partnership with New England Village, a nearby residential program for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Because meaningful work is a big part of that organization's mission, a farm is a natural partner. One common consideration for clients at New England Village is the discomfort and tedium often associated with weeding, pruning, and harvesting crops that grow close to the ground.

In the photograph above, Connie is showing how some row crops are being cultivated along fencing or angled frames to make the plants more accessible. The frames are at varying angles because it is not yet clear what will work best, but it appears likely that growing up and away from the ground can reduce insect and other pests and possible increase yields. Plants that cannot grow vertically are being transferred to raised beds that will be more easily reached by all workers. These changes are a terrific example of universal design -- the farm is becoming a more comfortable and accessible place for workers and volunteers of all ability levels.

Some of the lessons of this genuine field trip were the importance of constantly building knowledge in the pursuit of better ways to produce food. We discussed a few of the ways in which knowledge continues to be built at Colchester, including the sharing of ideas by members, participation in NOFA, and collaborations with other area farms, such as the Soule Homestead in Middleboro.

From the farm, we took a rather wide swing to the north as we headed back to Bridgewater, stopping at Brockton Brightfields. This is an innovative project that uses photovoltaic panels to produce electricity on a site that would otherwise be considered a brownfield, meaning a site that cannot be developed because of prior contamination of soil and water. It is a demonstration project that would not have been financially feasible without substantial grant funding, but as the technology improves, this could become a model for repurposing many properties around the country. Unfortunately, the public-education portion of the project was closed to the public at the time of our visit.

Casa Hayes-Boh, incidentally, has been used for more than strictly academic purposes this summer. We had a higher than usual number of geography majors taking courses in the department during the first summer session, some of whom were able to get together after class during the final week.

BSU Geography Department at the State House

Read full report: Geography lost amid emphasis on other subjects: wwlp.com
Reporter Christine Lee, State House Correspondent for Channel 22 in Springfield, describes EarthView's most recent State House. Her excellent report features geography teachers and students from western Massachusetts who participate in the event each year.

Members of the Geography Department have been involved for more than a decade in state-wide efforts to expand and improve the teaching of geography in primary and secondary schools in Massachusetts. The EarthView program -- in addition to reaching 35,000 students directly in the past four years -- has helped to focus public and legislative attention on the problem.

Last Thursday, the EarthView team was in the State House for the fourth time, talking to legislators and the general public about the importance of teaching geography across the entire K-12 range and providing for the preparation of geography teachers. We encountered overwhelming support for SB 182, a bill that would create a commission to report to investigate the status of geography education in the Commonwealth. If the bill passes, such a report will be based on a series of public hearings and will be due at the end of the calendar year 2012.

Geography Department members taking part on Thursday included faculty, majors, minors, and alumni. Pictured (l-r) James Hayes-Bohanan, Lara Joyce, Brigitta Palmer-Hart, Kimberly Frisoli, Vernon Domingo, Natalie Regan-Lampert, and Diana Ramos. Not pictured: Nikki Sauber (photographer), Ed Donnelly, and Tim Pease.

EarthView really does look good in Nurses Hall, which incidentally is home of the first monument to the women who served in the Civil War. Thanks to Ashley Costa for this photo taken during the EarthView visit in 2011. See the EarthView blog for more news and photos from the day.

There's a Mapp for That!

This semester Dr. Boellstorff invited faculty colleagues to share ideas for possible class projects with students in her GIS II class. This provided an opportunity to begin the process of re-modernizing the County Map Project I had begun in paper form more than 20 years ago, and had gradually moved online in the late 1990s.

This is a geographer's "life list" of places visited, in which I indicate every county I have been in. I eventually learned that the Extra Milers Club is a network of people doing the same thing, with each participant free to make up her or his own rules about what "counts" as a visit. My rules have been simple. If I am certain I have been in a county, I mark it in yellow; if I have lived there for a month or more, I mark it in blue, and I have applied the same rules at the state level in other countries.

For a while, I was able to help a few other hobbyists with some base maps and instructions I posted on my "about" page, but eventually the software involved became problematic, so I started to move the whole project to an official GIS platform. A series of hardware and software fiascoes ensued, and the project lie dormant for years, until GIS student Matt Scholtes decided to take up the baton.

The image above is a snapshot of Matt's project, in which he began coding my travels and also did some experimentation with queries that would compare the county counts along different proposed travel routes. We will be adding some of the files he created to my existing web site, and hope eventually to create a web-based service that will give users the ability to maintain their own maps online.

As I wrote last week, the Boston area is a major center for the development of mobile computing applications, so the possibilities for a county map app could be quite real. ESRI continues to provide new ways to bring data online, and citizen-based GIS platforms such as PeopleForms are pushing this field even faster.

Campus Cartography

Photo: Ashley Costa

Perhaps it goes without saying that geographers love maps. The fascination runs so deep that we took a departmental field trip to the Leventhal Map Museum at Boston Public Library earlier this semester, where we found this trove of cartography books! The BSU Geography Department is therefore delighted to have been able to reinstate a course in cartography under the leadership of Dr. Rob Hellström. A student learns to make maps will never see a map in quite the same way again.

BSU cartographers pose with their handiwork.
L-R: Ashley Costa,  Lara Joyce, Warren Sutcliffe, Matthew Daniel, Alaina Primeeau, James Varga, and Alexander Sullivan-Young. Not pictured: Stacy Ames, Taylor Arsenault, Meredith Briand, Nick Burns, Juan De Leon, John Doherty, Jen Hannum, Charles Oliver, Timothy Pease, Heather Rios, Lyndsay Stevens, and Sarah Watt
Photo: Juan DeLeon

Although cartography and map analysis have been integral in many of our courses all along, this spring marks the first time in about a decade that the department has offered a stand-alone course in cartography. Among the many excellent outcomes has been a group project presented this week at BSU's Undergraduate Research Symposium.

Geographer Lara Joyce discusses the campus map project with Dean Rita Miller.
Photo: Ashley Costa

The project builds on research conducted by previous cohorts of BSU (then BSC) geographers in senior seminars led by Dr. Clark and Dr. Hayes-Bohanan. Dr. Clark's students made and intensive study of campus maps at peer institutions, with particular attention to the placement and design of outdoor kiosk maps. Dr. Hayes-Bohanan's students studied the existing printed campus map, with a focus on presentation and standard cartographic design.

This year, students in Dr. Hellström's class drew upon those findings but went further, implementing a campus mapping program, literally from the ground up. Using the principals of design and procedures learned throughout the semester, students worked in small groups to build a map that integrates data from standard base maps, aerial photography, and directly-measured locations using Global Positioning System receivers. This was an ideal class project because it allowed students to work at very close range on one of the central lessons of the course: an excellent map brings together design principals and the needs -- whether articulated or not -- of the end users. Creating a map for their own campus community required careful consideration of the many uses and audiences for such a map.

The result is a map that is highly accurate and readable and that can be updated at little to no costs as the campus continues to develop.

This work was one of many presentations at the annual symposium, which included at least two others from the Department of Geography. Mentored by Dr. Boellstorff, Juan DeLeon mapped four thousand brownfield sites in Southeastern Massachusetts. Mentored by Dr. Hayes-Bohanan, Katrina Delaney presented her ongoing research on Fair Trade Universities. Students of Dr. Ingvoldstad in Communication Studies documented many of the poster presentations.

Communication student Rob Morton interviews geographer Warren Sutcliffe about the work.
Photo: Ashley Costa

Final note, as if it were not already obvious: Cartography can be fun!

L-R: Tim Pease, Juan DeLeon, and AJ Sullivan-Young
Photo: Ashley Costa

Fun Map

A new way of looking at the United States. Sorry for the low resolution, but the idea

An App for That

NGS World Atlas

According to a business article in today's Globe, the Boston area is poised to ride the mobile tech wave. Specifically, Boston-area businesses have been especially prolific in the development of applications  for mobile devices such as smart phones, and this trend is expected to continue. Combined with national trends in the growth of geotechnologies generally, BSU geographers with interest and skills in GIS and related technologies are well-positioned to participate in this interesting and growing industry.

Geographers: Read the article and then answer the question (using "comments" below): What would you like your phone to be able to do?

Staying on Top of the Weather

On a beautiful afternoon, Dr. Hellström (center) proudly poses with two of the department's student employees as they complete installation of equipment in the department's newest weather station, high above the Conant Science and Math Center. Chemistry major Christa Cronk (left) has worked as a geography lab tech this year, while history major and enthusiastic weather photographer Anthony McGonagle has maintained the department's weather board.