Archive for February, 2012
Gusties Intern at City of Saint Peter
Geography major Stephanie Korba ’12 did a January Term career exploration under the supervision of Mr. Todd Prafke, the City Administrator for Saint Peter, MN. She researched pawn shop fees in other communities and presented her results to the City Council. She also researched access charges for connecting new developments to sewer, water, and electric, […]
Dr. Sigler featured on Planetizen
Congratulations to Geography Professor Thomas Sigler whose essay “Is there such a thing as ‘rural’ gentrification?” was published yesterday in Planetizen, an on-line resource for urban planning and development.
IronSheep
The annual scholarly meeting of the Association of American Geographers takes place next week in New York City. In edition to paper and poster presentations, there will be a mapping contest, IronSheep, that mimics the Iron Chef TV program. Teams will work under stringent time limits to create maps and other visualizations from “crowd-sourced” data […]
Spring planting in February? It’s happened!
A mild Minnesota winter like the one we’re having makes one wonder if spring is nearly here. According to today’s WeatherTalk newsletter by Mark Seeley of the University of Minnesota Extension, Minnesota farmers began spring planting in February once: “Historical records show that February of 1878 was so mild that many Minnesota farmers were in […]
Sustainable farming conference
Interested in sustainable, local agriculture? The annual conference of the Sustainable Farming Association of Minnesota will be held on Feb. 18, 2012, in Saint Joseph, Minnesota. Learn more at http://www.sfa-mn.org/conference/.
Are restored wetlands as good as the originals?
In the U.S., landowners who want to drain a wetland are required to replace it with a newly created wetland (or buy a new wetland, as here). New studies suggest that the ecosystem services provided by restored wetlands are more limited that the original wetlands. The magazine Good Environment writes that “Even though [wetlands] cover […]
Our Gorgeous Blue Marble
Check out the latest “blue marble” image of the Earth from space. This one was taken on January 4, 2012, by NASA’s newest Earth-observing satellite, Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP). This satellite contains five different instruments that measure and monitor vegetation, sea surface temperature, cloud cover, ice movement, and atmospheric moisture, among others.