President's Column

Finally, a commitment to mitigate climate change and its effects

September 1, 2022

Sign with message, "System change not Climate Change"; Photo by Ma Ti, Unsplash

Credit: Ma Ti, Unsplash

On Wednesday August 10, AAG alerted its U.S. members to urge our representatives to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, a bill that promised the most major investment in climate action that the United States has ever made.  On August 16, 2022, President Biden signed that bill into law. It is being hailed as “the most ambitious climate bill in United States history.” This law has been a long time coming, is different in many ways from the original Build Back Better Bill and has a number of controversial elements that can and should be debated. As its name suggests, it is more broadly focused than climate change but, of relevance to our society is that it provides $369 billion in funding to mitigate climate change and its effects. The Act offers a multi-level approach to solutions, employing both science and technology. Its incentives, on the one hand, are designed to encourage companies to produce more renewable energy; and on the other, the rebates and credits are intended to help individuals to take advantage of these greener energy sources.

What does the Act provide?

An important aspect of this Act is that its provisions target actions that can have rapid results, significant reduction of emissions over a short time period. Princeton’s REPEAT Project’s Preliminary Report suggests that the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act will put the United States on track to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to roughly 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, i.e within the next eight years. More concretely, cumulative GHG emissions will be reduced by about 6.3 billion tons over the next decade, i.e through 2032. Such a reduction will have a significant impact on global atmospheric GHG concentrations since the United States is the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, having been outstripped by China in recent years.

Mitigation of climate change depends heavily on the reduction of emissions from fossil fuel-based energy use. However, we need energy to survive in this world that we have constructed. This means that as we reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, we must look to alternative energy sources. The Inflation Reduction Act provides support for this transition. Specifically, this Act provides incentives for clean technology manufacturing to deploy more solar, wind, and batteries on the grid, extending existing credits another 10 years. It also provides tax credits for individuals for clean household choices such as heat pumps and solar power, as well as significant tax breaks for purchasing electric vehicles, making electric vehicles more accessible for the middle- and lower-income population. It provides funding for forest resilience, water, and habitat projects, aimed at stemming the loss of important sources of carbon sequestration.

Addressing Environmental Justice

Climate change affects everyone for sure, but it does not affect everyone equally. It bears repeating that low-income communities and communities of color are disproportionately affected. These are people who have contributed very little to the factors that have spurred climate change and do not share in the spoils of industry, but their communities are polluted and depressed by the industries that rely heavily on fossil fuels and they are the most likely to be most adversely affected by climate change impacts. Any action to mitigate the effects of climate change must offer solutions that are centered on the needs of these communities, and they must involve the communities in creating these solutions. The Inflation Reduction Act provides billions for environmental justice actions, including $27 billion for a new Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to support clean projects in low-income communities and communities of color that are hardest hit by climate change; plus, a new $3 billion block grant program for neighborhood access and equity for community groups, tribes, and local or state governments; and $3 billion directed toward reconnecting communities that were divided by highways. However, the Act contains compromises that may result in worsening of the conditions under which racially and economically disadvantaged communities currently live, thereby negating its potentially positive aspects.

Is this Act sufficient?

With good reason, a question being hotly debated is — Is the Act sufficient? Clearly, it isn’t. First, its potential impact on GHG emissions (40% reduction) while significant and desirable falls short of the President’s 2021 pledge of a 50% reduction over 2005 levels by 2030. Second, and not necessarily secondary in importance, the Act contains compromises that weaken the potential of its environmental justice actions. This Act, while not perfect, is a start. It represents a significant commitment of resources from the government, and an opportunity for action.

The path of climate change mitigation is long and complex. We did not wake up overnight to find that the climate has changed. No: by our actions, we (noting that this “we” does not include the communities that have contributed little to climate change) systematically set the agents of climate change into motion over a long period of time and the damage is severe. But all is not lost. We have the technology, the resources and the will to slow that change and give us a chance to develop some resilience. However, it is going to take time and it will involve a variety of approaches.

This Act provides resources for us to do some of that work and gives us at least a start. We now must make sure that those aspects of the Inflation Reduction Act that address the mitigation of climate change and its effects are activated. And it is of paramount importance that we seek any opportunity to ensure that the needs of the most vulnerable and the worst affected among us are addressed, and that their contributions form part of the solutions. The work of climate justice is not done. The momentum that we will inevitably gain from those actions can be used to agitate/advocate for more efforts to combat climate change. Forty percent reduction is a good start, but further reduction is needed.

One last word

Transitioning from fossil fuel energy to green energy sources facilitated by the Inflation Reduction Act will reduce GHG emission no question, but it will not solve all of our environmental problems, including that of climate change. Ultimately, in order to reduce our environmental impact, we have to reduce our dependence on energy. Here is where the triplet — Reduce, Reuse, Recycle — becomes relevant. We pay a lot of attention to Recycle, and we should. Reduce and Reuse get short shrift by comparison. I would argue that we should first pay attention to Reduce, there is a good reason why it is the first word of the triplet. We should consider how much we consume in order to determine what changes we have to make individually and then devise ways in which we can act to reduce our dependence on materials that require energy use for production.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0117

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at raphael [at] geog [dot] ucla [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

President's Column

Confronting the Extremes of Climate Change

August 9, 2022

Protesters march for climate change with sign, saying "Listen to the Science" Credit: Mika Baumeister for Unsplash

Credit: Mika Baumeister, Unsplash

It is extremely hot. Again. Everywhere. To date, the 2022 northern summer has been defined by extremely high temperatures and extreme dryness. Across the US, record temperatures are being set. Record temperatures have also been set in the UK and in Europe. Extremely rare wildfires have occurred near London, and across southern Europe numerous wildfires are occurring. Across China heatwaves are becoming hotter and lasting longer and high temperature records are being broken. These extreme temperatures, a clear expression that our climate is changing, are not unique to 2022; the last seven years have been the hottest on record and 2022 is on track to be the eighth. And, the 2018 National Climate Assessment, has noted that not only was the number of hot days increasing every year, but also that the frequency of heat waves in the United States had shifted from an average of two per year in the 1960s to six per year by the 2010s. The extremes are becoming normal, commonplace.

Who is bearing the brunt?

While our attention is understandably focused on temperature extremes, and the associated wildfires, in this moment, there is sea level rise threatening island countries (nations), global reduction in biodiversity, drought, floods and increasing negative impacts on human health. We are moving inexorably to a world in which it will be distinctly more uncomfortable to live. And while this discomfort is increasingly borne by everyone, it disproportionately affects the poorer, the disadvantaged, among us. The impacts are not equitably distributed, neither globally nor within countries. In fact, as a number of studies show, climate change has a disproportionately larger impact on low-income communities and BIPOC communities around the world. Some 56% of the world now lives in cities and the warming already due to the urban heat island phenomenon is amplified by the increasingly frequent heatwave occurrence.

The crisis of climate change is not new

None of the information given in the preceding paragraphs is new to us. The speed with which information is disseminated around the world means that almost everyone has heard some version of this. Almost everyone is aware. But this knowledge, this awareness, does not seem to be spurring us to some unified swift action. Here I am referring to the ordinary citizen as well elected officials. There seems to be a disconnection between the growing recognition of the impacts of climate change and the will to act. This inertia is peculiar, especially considering that when natural disasters occur — hurricanes, earthquakes, etc. — the world (governments as well as individuals) rushes in to provide aid to the stricken regions. As scientists, geographers have been among those sounding the alarm that we are facing a disaster of potentially infinite proportions, one that will affect all of us, yet even we seem unable/helpless to act. How will we — all of us, including those of us who have tried to act — rationalize the general, present inaction in 10 to 20 years from now when we are living with consequences?

What can we do?

My students continually ask, “What can I, a single person, do to stop climate change?”. This is a question that I am also asked outside the classroom, once people realize that I am a climate scientist. It is an indication that people want to do something to mitigate the effect of climate change, but the size of the problem is so daunting that it is difficult to imagine that an individual can do something that will effect change. This explains some of the inaction that we see — the “problem” is so large that we throw our hands up in despair, we give up. But we shouldn’t. We can do a lot on an individual basis. As my colleague Katharine Hayhoe has pointed out, history is replete with examples of large societal change that did not begin at the top but was spurred by individuals, “ordinary people who used their voices.” Here is an article which lists some simple but effective examples of some things that an individual can do.

Now, individual action is important and necessary because change begins with the individual. However, we can do a lot more if we are organized. Geographers are fortunate, we have an organization — the AAG — through which we can and should act. Not only on the issue of climate change, but on a variety of issues that are relevant to us as geographers. Am I advocating for the AAG to become a more activist organization? Yes, I am! The good news is that the AAG is already taking some vital steps toward such advocacy:

We have the Climate Action Task Force (CATF) formed because AAG members petitioned to reduce the level of CO2 emissions generated by our Annual Meetings to one that is commensurate with IPCC recommendations. Quoting immediate past President Emily Yeh, “the Task Force is seeking ways to position AAG as a leader and model of how large organizations can respond to climate change in a manner that both meets the needs of their members and is environmentally and socially just.” I encourage you to read and support what the CATF is doing.
AAG has issued several statements on climate change, most recently the statement calling for Immediate Executive Action on Climate, urging the Biden Administration to use its executive powers now to rapidly begin to mitigate the present and severe threats of climate change.
Our recent major overhaul of our website features an Advocacy hub that not only informs members about issues and key policy developments but also provides opportunities to mobilize signatures and actions. Current focus areas are Climate Change, the Geographies of Inclusion, Redistricting, and Supporting Science. I encourage you to visit the site, find out what the organization is doing, and participate. Write to helloworld@aag.org with suggestions for approaches to organized change.

When we look back 20 years from now, what do we want to say we have done to mitigate climate change? We have the chance to write that script now. We can do this as individuals – even if the steps we take are small, the cumulative effect of small steps is large. especially when taken in concert with other people. The AAG, our organization of geographers, must also act for us and take steps to mitigate climate change.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0112

Brent Sams

Education: Ph.D. in Horticulture (University of Adelaide), Master of Geography (Virginia Tech), B.S. in Geography (University of North Alabama)

The following profile was compiled by Brendan Vander Weil (Texas State University) for the Encoding Geography initiative. To learn more, visit: https://www.ncrge.org/encoding-geography/

Describe your job, employer, and the primary tasks you perform in your position.

My current role as a Viticulture Research Scientist at E&J Gallo Winery is to design and execute research projects focused on understanding how fruit chemistry/quality change over time and space. I am interested in these changes from the within-vineyard scale to the regional scale. To accomplish this, I (with a lot of help from others) use a wide variety of field measurements (fruit zone light exposure, vine canopy temperature, soil cores, and many others), proximal sensing (electric conductivity, elevation mapping), and remote sensing (satellite, UAV, commercial aircraft). I spend a good deal of time analyzing how these measurements are connected.

How has your education/background in geography prepared you for this position?

The interaction of geography and computer science is essential for my role, along with many others in my department. At the project level, I work with different types of datasets that must be organized so that they can be analyzed and interpreted together. I rarely start any of this in GIS, but in a statistics package/program. I don’t have a background in computer science or coding/programming, but these have been very useful skills to develop. Once I have a product/model/application, it needs to be available for use by our stakeholders. This can be a dashboard, a database, or other digestible format which usually implies additional knowledge of other programs or applications. Probably the most specific use of geo-computation in my role is in the geostatistical analyses of grape samples collected from different densities and locations.

What is an example of applying geography concepts and skills in order to analyze and solve problems in your work?

Recently, we’ve been working on a project to combine data from multiple vineyards to add statistical robustness to the spatial analysis of low-density grape samples. To validate the method, we divided up the vineyards into fishnet grids to create a Monte Carlo simulation that would iterate through many different combinations of field samples based on their locations.

What types of geographic questions did you ask and think about in your project?

We were interested in how wine grape chemistry changed over time and space, and at specific locations from the within-vineyard scale to the regional or statewide scale; how farm management and the environment are connected; and how we could use all of these variables to make predictions about where to find the best fruit. All this information needed to be synthesized and made into something that could be analyzed by a computer. Sometimes in the quantitative analysis world we are faced with qualitative variables and how to incorporate things like, “How does this vineyard manager decide when and how much water to irrigate?.” These then need to be summarized into something we can include in a mathematical model.

What types of data did you acquire to support your project?

For this project, we were mostly interested in the chemistry of grapes processed in a lab after the sample location was tagged with a GPS unit. In a related project and at the same locations, we measured soil texture, the fraction of useful light into the fruit zone of the canopy, and yield.

What types of content knowledge and skills (both geographic and more general) did you use to evaluate, process, and analyze the data you gathered for your project?

Everything starts with the synthesis of what’s been done, where, and how. Experimental design and sampling strategies are also necessary. There are a lot of measurements specific to grapevines that we used, but general statistical knowledge was also necessary for writing reports, publications, etc. I use R and R Studio quite a bit, as well as several GIS applications with a bunch of different spatial analyses. One specific example is the use of k-means classification with raster datasets to assess patterns that exist between different layers such as interpolated chemistry maps with soil maps or imagery.

How did you communicate the results of your project (e.g., writing technical reports, making maps and geo-visualizations, creating graphics, data tables, etc.)? Do you have a recent product or publication to share with us as an example?

There will be a few publications from this data set, as well as reports to internal stakeholders. You can find those publications below:

Sams, B., Bramley, R.G.V., Sanchez, L., Dokoozlian, N.K., Ford, C.M., and Pagay, V. (2022) Remote sensing, yield, physical characteristics, and fruit composition variability in Cabernet Sauvignon vineyards. American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 73, 93-105.

Sams, B., Bramley, R., Sanchez, L., Dokoozlian, N., Ford, C. and Pagay, V. (2022) Characterising spatio-temporal variation in fruit composition for improved winegrowing management in California Cabernet Sauvignon. Australian Journal of Grape and Wine Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajgw.12542
Sams, B., Bramley, R., Aboutalebi, M., Sanchez, L., Dokoozlian, N.K., Ford, C.M. and Pagay, V. (2022) Facilitating mapping and understanding of within-vineyard variation in fruit composition using data pooled from multiple vineyards. Australian Journal of Grape and Wine Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajgw.12556

What are the criteria that you use to assess the quality of your results?

I’m an applied researcher in the private sector, so while the publications are nice, I really want to know if something works. Does it help us do something, save us money, or even make us more money?

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 2031418, 2031407, and 2031380 (Collaborative Research: Encoding Geography – Scaling up an RPP to achieve inclusive geocomputational education). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation

See All Profiles

Tracy Whelen

Education: M.S. in Geography (University of South Carolina), B.A. in Geography (Mount Holyoke College)

The following profile was compiled by Brendan Vander Weil (Texas State University) for the Encoding Geography initiative. To learn more, visit: https://www.ncrge.org/encoding-geography/

Please describe your job, employer, and the primary tasks you perform in your position.

I am a Geospatial Consultant and participant in the Business Insights & Analytics Leadership Development Program at Travelers Insurance. Travelers is a leading property and casualty insurance company, offering a wide range of personal and business insurance products primarily in the United States and Canada.

I recently completed an enterprise rotation in Enterprise Data & Analytics, working on data management and quality assessment of enterprise geospatial datasets and ad-hoc geospatial business consulting requests.

I am currently in a rotation for Claim Business Intelligence & Analytics. My work includes geospatial information delivery and analysis for Claim senior leadership and field offices. Part catastrophe response, part improving everyday claim handling processes.

Prior to joining Travelers, I received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geography (Mount Holyoke College and University of South Carolina, respectively). In between my degrees I worked as a GIS Specialist in a remote sensing lab at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

How has your education/background in geography prepared you for this position?

All the data I work with has a spatial component to it, and we often work with thousands (sometimes millions) of records at a time, necessitating strong geography and computer science skills to efficiently store, process, and analyze data, and to deliver actionable outputs.

Relevant courses from my education that I use today in my job include:

Geography

GIS/spatial analysis (intro and advanced)
Remote sensing
Spatial modeling
Web GIS
Basic human and physical geography
Electives: Meteorology, hazards geography, business geography

Computer Science

Introductory scripting (if statements, loops, functions, etc.)
Python
SQL
Data structures
UI/UX design
Javascript (web app development)

Math

Discrete math (basic logic and set theory)
Statistics (non-spatial and spatial)

What geographic skills and information do you use most often in your work?

Geographic concepts that I use in my daily work are important for things such as asking what business problems have a spatial component to them or analyzing the spatial relationship between two or more datasets (e.g. spatial joins and other geospatial analysis). I also need to understand a wide variety of spatial data formats, how to convert between them, and what formats are most appropriate for a given use case (e.g. basic raster and vector formats, enterprise SQL databases, APIs, published feature services, etc.). Finally, I need to know when to use geographic coordinates versus a projection (and what an appropriate projection might be).

What is an example of applying geography concepts and skills in order to analyze and solve problems in your work?

One of the many risks Travelers seeks to mitigate are natural hazard events, such as wildfires and hurricanes that climate change may make more extreme. Sustainability at Travelers means performing today, transforming for tomorrow and fulfilling our promise to our customers, communities and employees. Where these two come together is how our Claims department responds to natural hazard events, especially large wildfires or damaging wind events. The following videos capture the spirit of what we do, and the geospatial component of Claims catastrophe response.

Note that Travelers is organized along an Agile structure, with cross-functional teams continuously delivering improvements. While there are always new products and applications being developed, there are also lots of long-term operational systems being continuously used and improved upon. Often employees build on past work and may not see a large project or system from beginning to end. My team’s catastrophe response work is an example of this type of long-term system, and my answers are on behalf of the team.

What types of geographic questions did you ask and think about in your project?

The broad business question underlying this issue is, “How can we optimally respond to catastrophe events, meeting customer needs with the most efficient use of business resources?” Underlying questions include:

What location has been/will be impacted?
What is our exposure in the area? (i.e. number of policies, associated financial exposure)
Where have claims already been reported?
How many claims might we expect?
What types of claims do we expect to see from this event? (e.g., wind, water, fire, etc.)
What types of damage occurred, and how severe is the damage?
- Will this impact our ability to respond, either because an area is inaccessible or because local offices or employee homes have been damaged?

Where can we acquire the necessary data from?
Can we develop models to more efficiently review post-event imagery as part of the catastrophe response process?
- If so, what features are we trying to spot in the imagery?
- How does this vary by event type?
- What might be appropriate modeling algorithms to use?
- What are some of the challenges the model might encounter?

My team does not directly answer all these questions, but we need to be able to provide appropriate data to the senior leadership and other decision makers or support staff who can build a final answer.

What types of data did you acquire to support your project?

Business data (e.g. claims, policies)
Event data – wildfire boundaries, hurricane wind footprints, precipitation measurements, tornado damage reports, etc.
Aerial imagery and derived model output
Property geometry data (e.g. building footprints, parcel boundaries)

What types of content knowledge and skills (both geographic and more general) did you use to evaluate, process, and analyze the data you gathered for your project?

In the moment skills that we use on this project for responding to a single catastrophe event include:

Querying databases (spatial and nonspatial joins, filters)
Combining and reformatting a variety of data formats
Running models in python scripts
Common sense/data quality checks

For long-term projects, the output of which gets used in catastrophe response (multiple team effort), the skills we use are:

Internal model development in partnership with data scientists
- Curate input data (image locations, image clipping geometry, training data, etc.) using SQL and python
- Evaluating model results against other sources of truth

Evaluating new 3rd party datasets (accuracy, timeliness, availability, cost, other potential sources for the same information)

We publish web GIS content as both data layers and maps, creating different versions for different user groups in order to control access to sensitive information. We also use frequent email communication, whether it is one on one, small group with specific questions and answers, or larger list-serv communications (with standardized templates) at key time points during catastrophe response (e.g. web map published, imagery collected, etc.). Additionally, we communicate results through spatial SQL data pulls (tabular format)

See the below list for examples of broader enterprise or external communications about projects and programs mentioned in this interview.

Gartner Eye on Innovation Award Americas: 2019 Winner Regional Winner – Travelers
- https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/gartner-announces-winners-of-the-2019-gartner-eye-on-innovation-

Travelers 2021 Q3 Earnings call. Note CEO Alan Schnitzer’s introductory remarks including, “location intelligence at the parcel level” and our “AI Assisted Claim Damage Detection Model was a key part of our Ida claim response”

The Tech-Enabled Insurance Claim Revolution, Travelers Institute Wednesdays with Woodward webinar by Patrick Gee
- https://www.travelers.com/travelers-institute/webinar-series/symposia-series/claims

Interview of Adam Sobek (Travelers AVP of Geospatial) at NearMap Navig8 Conference 2020 (Travelers’ use of imagery, including for catastrophe events)
- https://www.nearmap.com/us/en/navig8-2020 – see interview with Adam Sobek

Travelers Claims and Geospatial videos (see Question 2 links)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlhtoWvCrVQ
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHfC-dq-hOk

Business Insights and Analytics Leadership Development Program recruiting materials
- https://cdn-static.findly.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/1053/2021/06/07142123/Sell-Sheet-BIALDP-06-2021.pdf

What are the criteria that you use to assess the quality of your results?

Most important criterium: Has the business need been met?

Other important criteria:

Validate data quality

Spatial scale and level of accuracy
Minimizing false negatives, minimizing false positives.
Minimizing process (time, number of steps)

The business need at hand dictates which criteria are important, which varies from question to question. Examples include:

Level of address accuracy needed to plot individual policies versus summarize at a zip code level
Some analytics results are only valuable if they can be completed faster than more manual processes out in the field.

See All Profiles

Stories

Member Profile: Tim Fullman

April 12, 2022

Map showing Arctic Refuge Birds-Eye-View program area created by Marty Schnure

The twice-annual migration of Alaska’s caribou is one of the world’s great journeys. Yet the number of caribou making that trek has been declining for decades due to a variety of factors, including habitat disruption from human activities and a changing environment.

Geographer Tim Fullman, senior ecologist with The Wilderness Society, is one of the people working to understand how to conserve the critical habitat on which caribou rely. Using analyses drawn from spatial and interdisciplinary sources, Fullman tracks and predicts herd patterns as they move over Alaska’s public lands. Much of his research focuses on the Western Arctic Caribou Herd (WACH), among the biggest of the state’s 32 caribou herds.

Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain: A Narrow Margin The geography of the Brooks Range creates a natural bottleneck in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where the coastal plain and foothills are much narrower than in the central and western Arctic. Oil development in the already-constrained coastal plain and foothills of the Arctic Refuge would leave little or no room for the Porcupine Caribou Herd and other species to shift. — Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain: A Narrow Margin: The geography of the Brooks Range creates a natural bottleneck in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where the coastal plain and foothills are much narrower than in the central and western Arctic. Oil development in the already-constrained coastal plain and foothills of the Arctic Refuge would leave little or no room for the Porcupine Caribou Herd and other species to shift. Map created by Marty Schnure

Fullman works alongside many partners, from Indigenous community leaders to hunters to tour guides to local, state, and federal wildlife and land professionals. All share a common cause: to preserve the future of Alaska’s caribou in the face of potential impacts from construction projects, energy investments, and climate change. The stakes are high. Alaska’s caribou, once totaling over a million, number 750,000 altogether today. The WACH, alone, has declined by as much as 50 percent since 2004.

In his work, Fullman spends a lot of his time using predictive models, forecasting potential impacts and scenarios that he says are also intimately connected to what we know about now and the past. “To do effective conservation means understanding the past so that we know why things are the way they are now,” he says, “and then using that information now to change the course of the future.”

Geography: The Critical Lens

Starting his career as a wildlife biologist, Fullman discovered that his fieldwork would benefit from an advanced understanding of terrain, place, and migrations. After completing a PhD in geography at the University of Florida, he returned to his work studying large herbivores, this time in Alaska. (Previous research had taken him to southern Africa, where he studied elephants).

Now, he says, his geography expertise takes people by surprise. “In my professional role, I don’t think many people know that I am a geographer, because my title is senior ecologist, and people think of me doing wildlife work,” he says. “Yet I’ve been fascinated as I’ve interacted with more people to come across a number of people with geography backgrounds who are doing work in landscape, ecology, environmental policy, and similar work.”

Why are so many geographers drawn to conservation—or rather, why are many conservationists drawn to geography? “This training seems like it has prepared a number of us to be able to make connections and share, and especially to use maps and other representations to talk about and communicate things in ways that connect with people.”

Geography’s interdisciplinary nature is also a plus: “One of the things that has helped me is that my geography department did not focus a lot on wildlife, but I had colleagues doing human dynamics, economic geography, all sorts of things that fall under the umbrella of geography. I think that prepared me to understand how social science is done, to understand how economics is done, and yet to see the connections where spatial processes and things that happen at space and scale and time influence across all these areas. I think of that as being at the core of geography and what we do.”

Birds-eye view of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain, known as the 1002 Area, outlined in yellow. This area, which is a critical calving and post-calving habitat for the Porcupine Caribou Herd, was leased by the Bureau of Land Management for its oil and gas program during the Trump Administration. Map created by Marty Schnure

Fullman applies ideas and methods from other disciplines to aid in his modeling work. One of these is circuit theory, adapted by ecologists from the world of electronics, which recently helped Fullman and his colleagues model the impacts of road construction on caribou and other species’ habitat. Another tool is the Monte Carlo simulation, used by Fullman and other researchers to test development restriction scenarios for the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A): four from the Bureau of Land Management’s current Integrated Activity Plan, and one put forward by the Western Arctic Caribou Herd Working Group, to which Fullman belongs.

Map showing caribou seasonal ranges and proposed development projects created by Marty Schnure — Map showing caribou seasonal ranges and proposed development projects, created by Marty Schnure

Fullman’s training as a geographer has helped him embrace the many perspectives and complex realities of Alaskan habitats. In studying the ancient presence and fragile present of the caribou, he recognizes the long lineage and millennia-old knowledge held by the Indigenous communities within and around the NPR-A. As he brings new tools to the study of the herds, he embraces opportunities to learn and follow traditional ecological knowledge. “I am very classically trained as a scientist but yet through my time in Alaska, it has stretched my view,” he says. “What does it look like to meaningfully combine and blend all the ways of seeing the caribou?”

“Caribou Tell Us a Little Bit About Ourselves”

Fullman’s work contributes to understanding the pressure on caribou, which is part of a much larger and concerning trend of long-range and major migrations of all species—and humans.

“Caribou tell us a little bit about ourselves. They face some of the same challenges we do: warming climate, increasing development, and changing habitat – but with arctic temperatures increasing at double the rate of the rest of the planet, they’re feeling these challenges first,” says Fullman.

“Are we willing in any place to curb our desire to develop?” he asks “There are some places that are too important and too special.”

Find out more about AAG’s work to address climate change

Stories

Member Profile: Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux

April 12, 2022

Geography: The Critical Lens

“Caribou Tell Us a Little Bit About Ourselves”

Fullman’s work contributes to understanding the pressure on caribou, which is part of a much larger and concerning trend of long-range and major migrations of all species—and humans.

“Are we willing in any place to curb our desire to develop?” he asks “There are some places that are too important and too special.”

Find out more about AAG’s work to address climate change

Stories

Wayfinding: Finding Heat Vulnerability Before It’s Too Late

April 12, 2022

Geography: The Critical Lens

“Caribou Tell Us a Little Bit About Ourselves”

Fullman’s work contributes to understanding the pressure on caribou, which is part of a much larger and concerning trend of long-range and major migrations of all species—and humans.

“Are we willing in any place to curb our desire to develop?” he asks “There are some places that are too important and too special.”

Find out more about AAG’s work to address climate change

Translating Geography Degrees into Environmental, Conservation, and Sustainability Work

February 23, 2022

Stories

Wayfinding: Young Geographers Unearth Clue to Climate Change in the Andes

January 3, 2022

Geography: The Critical Lens

“Caribou Tell Us a Little Bit About Ourselves”

Fullman’s work contributes to understanding the pressure on caribou, which is part of a much larger and concerning trend of long-range and major migrations of all species—and humans.

“Are we willing in any place to curb our desire to develop?” he asks “There are some places that are too important and too special.”

Find out more about AAG’s work to address climate change