Geography Blog

Category: Geography course highlights

  • Imagining responses to climate change through agriculture

    —

    by

    averslui

                  Students in the GEG-150 Culture, Self, and Agriculture 2019 January-term course studied agriculture’s role in society and developed proposals to respond to climate change through agriculture. The course combined themes from last year’s Nobel Conference on soils and the coming Nobel Conference on climate change. Read more about…

  • Students network with remote sensing scientists

    —

    by

    averslui

    The GEG-345 Remote Sensing of the Environment class took a field trip to the USGS EROS Center near Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to tour the facility and network with data information, remote sensing, and international relations professionals. EROS Center processes, stores, and makes available to scientists and the public petabytes* worth of environmental data and…

  • Human Impact on the Environment class explores the North Woods

    —

    by

    averslui

    Students of GEG-230 The Anthropocene (Human Impact on the Environment) and Professor Jeff La Frenierre took a weekend field trip on May 12-14 to see firsthand some of the ways in which Minnesotans have impacted their environments, and how these impacts are being managed to provide necessary resources in a more environmentally-sustainable manner. On Saturday,…

  • Geography students help bring in the wildflowers

    —

    by

    averslui

    Working with Gustavus Linnaeus Arboretum Director Scott Moeller, students in GEG-105 Physical Geography paired with students from John Ireland Catholic School to plant wildflowers in the deciduous woods of the Arboretum on Tuesday, May 9. The deciduous trees, planted about 40 years ago, are now large enough to begin shading out invasive grasses; this will…

  • Urban Geography field trip to Twin Cities

    —

    by

    averslui

    Dr. Joaquin Villanueva‘s Urban Geography class took a field trip to the Twin Cities last month.

  • Photos and data from weather balloon launch

    —

    by

    averslui

    Dr. Jeff La Frenierre‘s GEG-108 Weather, Climate, and Society class, in conjunction with Dr. Chuck Niederriter and the Department of Physics, launched a weather balloon last month. Here are some photos and data collected by the balloon’s instruments.

  • Weather balloon launch

    —

    by

    averslui

    As part of Dr. Jeff La Frenierre‘s GEG-108 Weather, Climate & Society course, the Department of Geography and Department of Physics will launch a weather balloon carrying instrumentation on Tuesday, October 28, at 12:30pm from the Nobel Hall parking lot area. All are invited to the launch! Update: Due to high winds forecast for Tuesday,…

  • Coneflower Prairie

    —

    by

    averslui

    Under a sky of brilliant blue, students in GEG105 Physical Geography: Earth System Science braved the cold this morning to walk through the lovely Gustavus Coneflower Prairie, a representation of the grassland biome which once stretched like a vast ocean of grasses from Saint Peter west to the Rocky Mountains. When asked if it was…

  • Not your typical soil probe

    —

    by

    averslui

    What happens when you ask a local farmer if you can take a soil sample from his field? He says he has something better than a soil probe: he has an excavator and he’ll dig you a 6-foot trench. So students in GEG-105 Physical Geography: Earth System Science this week were treated to a view…

  • “Overpopulation is not the problem”

    —

    by

    averslui

    This recent op-ed piece in the New York Times by geographer and environmental scientist Erle Ellis sums up perfectly last week’s lesson in GEG/ENV-250 Nature & Society. Here’s an excerpt: “Unable to explain how [human] populations grew for millenniums while increasing the productivity of the same land, I discovered the agricultural economist Ester Boserup, the…