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Our students and faculty also received various grants, awards, and accolades. PhD student, Tsering Lhamo, received a Fulbright Fellowship and the Summer Foreign Language Area Studies Award to study Nepali language at the Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Katmandu, Nepal. PhD student, David Bachrach, also received the Summer Foreign Language Areas Studies Award to study Indonesian language at Indonesia’s Language Center in Bandung, Indonesia. PhD student, Naomi Hazarika, was awarded the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s Dissertation Fieldwork Grant to conduct year-long ethnographic fieldwork in informal settlements in the city of Delhi, India. PhD student, Xiaoling Chen, won the AAG China Specialty Group Annual Student Paper Award. PhD Student, Holly Roth, was the recipient of the Water Scholar Award from the Colorado State University Libraries. PhD student, Gabriella Subia-Smith, received the CU-Boulder Graduate School Summer Writing Fellowship. PhD students, Naomi Hararika, Prakriti Mukerjee, and Priscilla Corbett, all received the Zena Hunter Andrews Graduate Student Award through the Beverly Sears Graduate Student Grant Program at CU-Boulder. Many of our graduate and undergraduate students also received awards from the Department of Geography, and will be recognized at our awards luncheon on May 9, 2023, and at commencement on May 11, 2023.��

Our faculty continue to be leaders in their respective research fields, and several have received grants and fellowships, and awards for their accomplishments. Assistant Professor, Katherine Lininger, received the prestigious NSF CAREER grant for her project titled “Rivers of Carbon: assessing how humans have altered floodplain organic carbon stocks across the contiguous United States”. Professor Emily Yeh was named a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for the 2023-2024 academic year. Professor Yeh also received the CU-Boulder Sustainability Award. Professor Tim Oakes was awarded the AAG China Geography Specialty Group’s Outstanding Service Award. Professor Oakes was also awarded a Fulbright Global Scholar Award for his project “The hinterlands of Global China: infrastructures and life beyond the urban.” Emeritus Professor, Babs Buttenfield, received the USGS 2023 CaGIS Distinguished Career Award recognizing her outstanding and impressive career.

The American Association of Geographer’s Annual Meeting occurred in person for the first time since 2019 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The AAG meeting was in Denver and the Department of Geography hosted an Alumni and Friends celebration at the Sheraton Hotel. This evening was filled with much joy, celebration, and reconnection, along with lightening talks from graduate students Ben Barron, Emma Rieves, Xiaoling Chen, and Diego Melo. We also celebrated Babs Buttenfield’s retirement, which included many accolades from her former and current graduate students. Please see the article on the Alumni event in this newsletter for more information and photographs.��

Many congratulations to our faculty and students for their accomplishments. We hope you enjoy your summer, and we will be back with more updates in our fall newsletter.��

Lininger’s project will determine how much organic carbon is stored in river floodplains in soil, vegetation, and downed wood across the United States. It will assess how human activities such as levees, dams, and land use change have changed carbon storage in floodplains (Figure 1). Floodplains store large amounts of carbon, but there are no US-scale estimates of how much carbon floodplains store or how human activities have changed carbon storage. The negative impacts of climate change on the environment and on humans motivate an interest in removing carbon from the atmosphere. Floodplains could store more carbon, but we do not adequately understand the potential for increasing carbon storage through changing how floodplains are managed.����

Through work on the 5-year CAREER award, Lininger will 1) compare floodplain carbon storage in human modified and unmodified floodplains in understudied regions of the USA through extensive fieldwork, 2) use field-based estimates of floodplain carbon storage to determine whether it is accurate to use publicly available geospatial datasets to estimate floodplain carbon storage, 3) determine how much carbon is stored in floodplains across the USA and the potential storage if human modifications (for example, levees, dams, and land use change) were reduced, and 4) create course modules for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students and create outreach materials through collaborations with non-profit organizations. The project will also support training graduate students in communicating science to policy makers and management agencies through interactions with non-profit organizations. Lininger hopes to build the science of floodplain carbon storage to bring information to managers so that it can be considered in river and floodplain management activities. The work will also help determine the locations in the USA and within watersheds where maximum floodplain carbon storage occurs.��

Back in December, CIRES Director and Geography professor Waleed Abdalati testified before the Subcommittee on Space and Science in a hearing titled “Landsat at 50 & the Future of U.S. Satellite-based Earth Observation.” The subcommittee hearing, convened by Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO), highlighted critical Earth observation satellite data, the rise of commercial satellite providers, and the value this data adds to agriculture, city planning, water management, wildfire prevention and detection, and disaster response.��

“The 50-year record of  highlights the value of space-based observations in understanding how our Earth is changing, and how those observations benefit the lives of people,” said Abdalati, “The view from space offered by Landsat and the many other Earth-observing satellites, provides a context, scale, and perspective of change critical to predicting weather, managing hazards, meeting the challenges of climate change, and so much more. They are an indispensable tool in effectively navigating and managing our changing environment.”��

Abdalati, who was the former chief scientist at NASA from 2011-2012, joined current NASA chief scientist Kate Calvin as well as leadership from NOAA, Maxar Technologies, and USGS at the hearing.����

Abdalati and U.S. Senator from Colorado, John Hickenlooper

Emily Yeh Wins Campus Sustainability Awards and “Green Faculty” Title

The University of Colorado recognizes outstanding efforts toward continuing the leadership and legacy of sustainability at ����������. Since 1997 the Annual Campus Sustainability Awards have recognized individuals, departments, and offices that have made a significant contribution to reducing the ecological footprint and increasing the resilience of campus infrastructure and improving social cohesion and equity in campus communities. Outstanding efforts make CU's successful and challenging approaches to attaining sustainability possible. The awardees exemplify CU's continuing efforts to become a sustainable institution and set an example for environmental stewardship and responsibility.  Some of the awardees have made groundbreaking efforts that will change the overall way CU operates, and others make an impact on the community and campus environment with their everyday actions.  The Awards happen every April in conjunction with the Campus Sustainability Summit.��

Emily Yeh is selected as one of the 14 Phi Beta Kappa Society Visiting Scholars��

Since 1956, the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s  has offered undergraduates the opportunity to spend time with some of America’s most distinguished scholars. The purpose of the program is to contribute to the intellectual life of the institution by making possible an exchange of ideas between the Visiting Scholars and the resident faculty and students.��
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Each year, members of the Committee on the Visiting Scholar Program select top scholars in the liberal arts and sciences to visit universities and colleges where Phi Beta Kappa chapters are located. Visiting Scholars spend two days on each campus meeting informally with undergraduates, participating in classroom lectures and seminars, and giving one major lecture open to the academic community and general public.��
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The 2023-2024 Visiting Scholars will make over 100 visits during the academic year.��

Keith is committed to building and encouraging a diverse research community and believes that society collectively benefits from the storytelling and communication that is made richer by our differences. Efforts to be more inclusive improve our knowledge and better serve smart decision strategies of individuals, organizations, and policymakers. Keith has authored over 32 publications, some of which are ranked in the top 1% of referenced Earth Science papers. His work has been featured broadly in media including the New York Times. He received an Outstanding Mentor Award from the University of Colorado in 2021. In his free time, Keith skis, snowboards, bikes, and floats rivers —increasingly finding himself in hot pursuit of his two young kids as the family recreates in Colorado and beyond.��

Colorado is home to several magnificent outdoor sites. This picture was taken in March 2023 by the frozen Sprague Lake in the Rocky Mountains National Park.

Hi, I'm Rafael. I’m from Brazil and my background is in geophysics, specifically in geological mapping and exploration. Since joining Morteza Karimzadeh’s team as Postdoctoral scientist in June 2022, I have been mainly working on developing new algorithms to map sea ice in polar regions using remote sensing data, with a particular focus on Synthetic Aperture Radar and machine learning techniques.��

My current research has important implications for understanding the dynamics of sea ice, its impact on climate and ecosystems in polar regions, and for safer navigation in ice-infested waters. Leveraging my expertise in geophysics, I bring a unique perspective to my work on this project. I am passionate about using spatial data to better understand the Earth's natural systems and visualize them in new and innovative ways.��

In addition to my research, I also enjoy mentoring and collaborating with students in my lab group to help them develop their skills and gain new insights. I believe that working with students is an essential part of being a researcher, and I find it extremely rewarding to learn from their fresh perspectives and develop new approaches to solving complex problems.��

I am especially excited about the outcome of my work as the co-investigator on a NASA proposal that focuses on using ICESat-2 lidar data to map sea ice in polar regions. We recently received notification that this project will be funded by NASA, helping us explore an alternative and nove