Search

Programs in geographic information systems (GIS) and related areas (e.g., GPS, remote sensing) have become important additions to the curriculum at colleges and universities of all sizes and types, including tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) such as Haskell Indian Nations University. This article discusses the recent development of a GIS program at Haskell that has been built around three major components: (1) courses; (2) outreach activities; and (3) projects. Key lessons learned from the experience include the importance of developing diversified goals and activities to promote student success, pursuing external funding, expanding GIS within the university through collaborations with other departments and disciplines, and ensuring that basic geographic principles remain a vital part of the GIS curriculum. The development of the GIS program at Haskell may serve as a model for other small colleges and universities, particularly tribal and other minority-serving institutions, that seek to add GIS to the curriculum. (Contains 5 figures and 3 notes.)

Crop insurance is a relatively recent invention that attempts to level the playing field in our contest with the environment. It well represents the complexity and interaction within the human-land relationship. Ranching is another symbol of this relationship. The word stewardship captures a rancher's connection to the land. It denotes a respect for the land and its utilization in a manner that will reap benefits for the community or group now and in the future. True stewards must have a deep, distinct, and intimate relationship with that thing over which they have stewardship. Ranchers' livelihood depends on this linkage. If they neglect their land by allowing overgrazing, their livestock's sustenance is damaged; if they do not have functional, forage-producing land on which to graze their livestock, then the relationship is broken and ranching ceases. And if ranching ceases to exist, so does the ranching culture.

Keywords: Las Vegas; sense of place; tourism; urban change; personality of place EN Las Vegas sense of place tourism urban change personality of place 206 212 7 01/17/22 20220101 NES 220101 Gragg, Larry (2013). The everyday life of locals maintains a strong, longstanding, and often oppositional bond to what Goodwin refers to as the Las Vegas "master narrative", what Foster sees as the "Vegas" reputation, and what Borer calls the "Las Vegas Syndrome" or "steep neon slope." The Las Vegas craft beer scene, for example, includes local breweries that embrace gambling imagery (Bad Beat Brewing and Aces and Ales) and others that take on local toponyms and historical moments connected to Las Vegas (Tenaya Creek Brewing and Atomic Liquors). [Extracted from the article]

This auto-geographical, sense of place essay represents one approach to understanding a personal attachment to a location that has been disrupted by time and a destructive wildfire. It is written in the context of increased frequency of natural and human-caused disasters and a growing literature engaging the impact of disasters on place. It is an attempt to illustrate how a personal essay can be an important venue through which geographers can explore longstanding disciplinary themes of human interaction with place and the physical environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image of Las Vegas known throughout the world differs from the lived experience of Las Vegas residents. Yet, even within everyday, local spaces in Las Vegas, evidence abounds of the influence of the Strip and what it symbolizes. I look to the cultural landscape and suggest the idea of antecedent landscapes as one way to explore a sense of place that simultaneously influences and is influenced by Las Vegas tourist imaginaries. An antecedent landscape is one that serves as inspiration for another landscape. I describe several ways in which place is engendered and evoked under the sway of antecedent landscapes. As a direct reference to the Las Vegas Strip, everyday landscapes -- casino and otherwise -- illustrate a blurred, complicated, and tethered connection between the tourist's Las Vegas and that of the local. And, antecedent suburban landscapes that influence these same casino complexes in Las Vegas suburbs illustrate a pattern of casino emplacement within a neighborhood, further underscoring that bond between "Vegas" and everyday life. The idea of antecedent landscapes can be extended to a number of other contexts in order to better understand the human experience in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Olstad's book goes a long way to fill that gap for both seasoned and up-and-coming cultural geographers. How many times have cultural geographers read a piece of travel writing, a memoir, or a personal essay and wondered, "why was this excellent geography I not i written by a geographer?" I appreciated Olstad's strong bend toward memoir, thick and detailed description of land and place, and personal exploration of self in place. [Extracted from the article]

A shifting American cultural geography, stemming from clustering of like-minded people, has been much-discussed in recent years. The “voluntary region”, proposed by Wilbur Zelinsky in his path-breakingThe cultural geography of the United States, is a regional construct relatively unexplored by cultural geographers that may help in their contributions to such conversations. As described by Zelinsky, voluntary regions are places that attract individual, like-minded people away from long-standing “traditional regions” based on a desire for amenity and economic opportunity. I review the concept and its sparse embrace in the literature and suggest that it has much to offer our discipline. Using Las Vegas as a paradigmatic example, I explore methods that can be used to explore the formation and character of voluntary regions. I argue that the voluntary region framework is an encompassing lens through which cultural geographers can examine the complex nature of place and regional construction at the hands of dynamic forces that lead people to resettle in new places. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Increased attention to global climate change in recent years has resulted in a wide array of maps and geovisualizations that forecast various scenarios. Since many consequences of climate change are inherently geographic in nature, effective cartographic representations that depict these risks are valuable for planning and mitigation purposes. In particular, sea-level rise resulting from climate change calls attention to the numerous representation issues that warrant consideration for hazard and risk mapping in general, including categorizing and representing risk, selecting an appropriate level of realism, and displaying potential impacts of a hazard on human populations as well as on the natural and built environments. Using examples of potential inundation from sea-level rise at global, regional, and local scales, the authors propose a conceptual framework of key cartographic considerations for maps, Web-based mashups, and geovisualizations that depict risk. The cartographic framework presented here may be extended to other risks of an ambiguous or fuzzy nature and may be used to organize key future research areas for hazard or risk mapping in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Future sea level rise caused by climate change would disrupt the physical processes, economic activities, and social systems in coastal regions. Based on a hypothetical global sea level increase of one to six meters, we developed GIS methods to assess and visualize the global impacts of potential inundation using the best available global datasets. After susceptible areas were delineated, we estimated that the size of the areas is between 1.055 (one meter) to 2.193 million km² (six meters). Population in the susceptible areas was estimated to range from 108 (one meter) to 431 million (six meters) people. Among the seven land-cover types in the susceptible areas, forest and grassland account for more than 60 percent for all the increments of sea level rise. A suite of interactive visualization products was also developed to understand and communicate the ramifications of potential sea level rise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]