Year: 2012

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.

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…

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…

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/.  

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…

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.

William Blake starts his Auguries of Innocence with the line, “To see a world in a grain of sand.” Well, perhaps you can see the world in a grain of sand–if that grain happens to be from California. You see, according to some Hollywood executives back in the 1920s, California can offer geographical facsimiles of…

Gustavus’ new small wind turbine was dedicated yesterday. See this website for all the details.

The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that a police undercover GPS tracker put on a suspect’s car to monitor its movement was unconstitutional. Find out more from this New York Times article. What do you think about this kind of police surveillance–should it be allowed or not?