See All Awards

Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

Deadline for the 2027 awards: October 15, 2026, by midnight, Eastern Time

This award, together with the Marble-Boyle Undergraduate Achievement Award, the biennial William L. Garrison Award for Best Dissertation in Computational Geography, and the biennial Marble Fund Seed Grant Award for Computational Geography are activities of the Marble Fund and are supported by donations to the fund. This award is named for Dr. Duane Marble, creator of the Marble Fund, and who was instrumental in the development of GIS as a scientific academic endeavor.

The Award

This award recognizes excellence in academic performance for the best research in quantitative geography leading to the Master’s degree. The Master’s research award is designed to stimulate quantitative scientific investigations within the discipline of geography. This award is, however, not restricted to Master’s research conducted within the field of geography—students from other disciplines are encouraged to apply. The award is also not limited to degrees awarded in the United States.

The Marble Fund award for Innovative Master’s research in quantitative geography consists of a cash award of $2000, a formal certificate of merit, and a $1000 travel grant is available to recipients who attend the AAG in person. The formal presentation of the award will take place at the annual meeting of the AAG during a special Marble Fund session and at the AAG awards session.

Eligibility

Applicants must be in the final stage of graduating with a Master’s degree or having just completed a Master’s degree. This will be determined by being within 9 months of graduation at the time of application or having graduated within the 9 months prior to application deadline.
Research must demonstrate innovation in a quantitative methodology or a research question emphasizing quantitative geography. The research must be a thesis or research equivalent with the potential to be publishable in a refereed journal. Applied projects and portfolios are not appropriate.
There is no limit with respect to the number of students who can apply from each institution.
Applicants for the award do not need to be members of the American Association of Geographers, but membership is encouraged.
As with all other AAG awards, eligibility also rests on the candidate being in compliance with the AAG Professional Conduct Policy. Nominations may be rescinded, and the award may also be revoked for any candidate or awardee who is found in violation of the AAG’s Professional Conduct Policy.

Applications

A complete application must be received no later than the close of business on the deadline (Eastern Time).

An essay describing the Master’s research of no more than 1,000 words (excluding title and references). The essay should describe the significance or importance of the work, identifying the individual’s contribution to quantitative geography. The essay should show that the research has the potential to be publishable in a refereed journal. The submission should include a title, references, and the name of a journal where the research is potentially publishable.
The applicant’s academic curriculum vitae.
Applicants are required to arrange for a letter of recommendation from the student’s faculty advisor, department chair or program director. The letter must confirm the intended date of graduation or degree completion. A request for a letter of recommendation will be made by the applicant within the application portal.

APPLY

For questions or difficulties, please contact grantsawards@aag.org or call the AAG at 202-234-1450.

Marble Fund for Innovative Master’s Research Committee

Applications will be reviewed by the Marble Fund for Innovative Master’s Research Committee. The committee consists of three members, appointed by the Trustees. The committee is charged with reviewing the applications and recommending awards to the Trustees. The Trustees will make the formal awards.

AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography Recipients

2026

Lily Heidger

2025

Mohammad Shahriyar Parvez

2025

Jiahua Chen

2025

Honorable Mention: Devin Yongzhao Wu

2025

Honorable Mention: Zhongqi Zheng

2024

Xiaoqi Bao

2024

Carolina Fernandez

2024

Honorable Mention: José Arturo Jasso Chavez

2024

Honorable Mention: Talula Pontuti

President's Column

In Denver and Beyond, Moving Toward More Just Geographies

March 10, 2023

Aerial view of downtown Denver with mountains in the background. Credit: CANUSA Touristik via denver.org

Our annual meeting is just around the corner, and I am excited. This is our first opportunity to meet in person since 2019, and AAG members are showing up! In March, more than four thousand geographers are going to descend on Denver, CO, the Mile High City, bringing with them the “spirit of Geography” More than fifteen hundred geographers will join remotely. Together, this means that well over 50% of our membership will be gathering to share research, ideas, and catch up, with one another for our largest gathering since 2020.

The theme of the meeting, Toward More Just Geographies, sprang from the ideas espoused in my nomination statement, back in 2020 when I talked about what we needed to do to create a stronger, more just AAG and discipline, and in the process, make Geography a force for positive social change. The heart of the theme is that the reality of a just geography is on the horizon, something that we must work towards, continually, but perhaps something that we never fully achieve. This is not setting us up for failure but a recognition that justice is not a finite, unchangeable thing, rather it is something that is constantly evolving towards an ideal. Hence, it’s towards a just geography. Member response to this theme has been heartwarmingly high — 471 of our 1,283 sessions are Just Geography themed.

Set against a backdrop of the numerous responses submitted to the appeal for member ideas on what a just geography means to them, the Presidential Plenary, scheduled for Friday, March 24 at 6:30 PM Mountain Time, is structured as a panel, featuring Tianna Bruno of UT-Austin, Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes of Pomona College, and Kelly Kay of UCLA. Our speakers will reflect on how we can approach a Just Geography in the tools that we use (GIS), in the framing of our research questions, and in our mentoring of students and early-career geographers. These reflections are not intended to represent the only ways in which we can approach a Just Geography, indeed, the member responses are rich with ideas on that subject.

Our intention is for these discussions to continue beyond the time allotted to the plenary and across all the days of the meeting. To facilitate this, AAG staff are creating at the meeting site, space where a curated set of the ideas discussed at the plenary as well as those contained within the member responses to the appeal are projected so that people could come in, sit or walk around and see the statements and spark conversations.

And there’s more! Beyond the immediate Presidential Plenary plans, in this meeting there are clear examples of the ways in which the AAG is moving towards a Just Geography. We are changing the way in which AAG’s conferences interact with the community, becoming less extractive while moving towards long- and short-term community engagement. This goes beyond the customary, popular offerings among our members to encourage mentoring, career development, and professional celebration and recognition. This year AAG also moves to connect with our host community, for example by once again offering a land acknowledgment on our website and during the meeting, and for the first time providing free registration to any member of the 48 tribes and nations with ancestral ties to the land defined by the state boundaries of Colorado. Several participants have taken up this offer. AAG works with and will make a monetary contribution to the work of the Denver Indian Family Resource Center (DIFRC), which works to protect the rights and serve the needs of Native American and Alaskan Native families in the Denver area. The DIFRC will also be on a panel of other Indigenous-led Denver advocacy groups on Friday, March 24 at 11:45 AM MT to discuss Denver as an Indigenous place. This session is co-sponsored by the Indigenous People’s Specialty Group.

The move towards justness is everywhere in AAG 2023’s programming. As noted above, one in three sessions is devoted to our theme of Toward a More Just Geography. A focus on just geographies is also a factor in our choice of honorees such as this year’s Honorary Geographer, Rebecca Solnit, who has worked conscientiously from an intersectional view of activism for climate action. AAG has given one of its highest recognitions to a person whose work arguably centers on justness. You can see Ms. Solnit alongside AAG members Farhana Sultana and Edward Carr on Saturday, March 25, at 10:20 AM MT, discussing the new book to which Sultana and Carr are contributors, Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Narrative from Despair to Hope. Ms. Solnit will deliver the Honorary Geographer lecture on Sunday, March 26, at 11:45 AM MT. Local independent bookseller Boulder Book Store will sell copies of Ms. Solnit’s books onsite for signings.

Reducing our carbon footprint: Working with AAG’s Climate Action Task Force, we are applying the lessons we’ve learned to a less carbon-intensive meeting this year. The past three years have forced us to become more adept at organizing the virtual experience and now we are learning how to manage a more travel-intensive experience while continuing to reduce our carbon footprint. This is in line with a key commitment made by the AAG in 2020 to estimate and report the carbon footprint of the annual meetings, using the baselines that were established then. Our goal is to reduce the carbon footprint of our meeting by 45% by 2030, relative to 2010 values. Our meeting in Denver is likely to be on track for meeting that goal, something that unfortunately, is not as likely with our planned meeting in Honolulu. As laid out by AAG executive director Gary Langham recently, this is another aspect of the work we have been doing, which includes divesting from fossil fuels as well as making sustainable choices for our management and office space.

This year, AAG is investing significant resources in making the Denver meeting hybrid, increasing accessibility to members. At a time that many other organizations are pivoting back to in-person-only meetings, AAG has made a commitment to continue to offer virtual and hybrid experiences so that presenters and participants could take part without traveling to Denver, thereby increasing accessibility to the meeting. AAG has worked with other institutions to test “nodes,” the most active of which will be at Montreal, but there are others forming in other locations, such as UC-Fullerton in California. The organizers of these nodes are trailblazing for future meetings; as technology improves and costs drop over the years, we can look forward to these approaches becoming the norm for AAG meetings. Find out more about this year’s nodes.

Personal choices also matter. AAG is encouraging our meeting participants to make low-carbon travel choices to attend the meeting, and low-carbon transportation choices on the ground. We encourage you to signal us about your travel decisions using the #AAG4Earth hashtag, or to reach out to us at helloworld@aag.org.

All of these steps towards making a meaningful and memorable meeting, while small individually, move us along the path towards a Just Geography.

Visit the AAG 2023 website to learn more, register, or plan your participation.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0127

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.

Stories

Wayfinding: Tracing Pandemic Geographies Across Time

March 7, 2023

Credit: U.S. Department of State

Before COVID-19 locked down the world, AAG member Melinda Laituri was a world traveler. As director of the Geospatial Centroid at Colorado State University and principal investigator for participatory mapping programs for the U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Geographer, she used technology to stay connected to the world: “I have been exploring the world at my fingertips through virtual travel to exotic locations” she writes at the beginning of the book she co-edited during COVID-19. “I have visited places I never thought to explore before—Chernobyl, Mars, and Iceland’s oldest shipwreck. It isn’t quite the same but does fill a bit of the void.”

Laituri also channeled her love of place and adventure into her work with the Department’s Cities’ Covid Mitigation Mapping (C2M2) program, working with three participatory mapping hubs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. While program coordination was virtual, the city-level projects were very much physical, or sometimes hybrid: six sites in Latin America, three in Africa, and three in Asia. Projects varied: an examination of the pandemic’s impacts on domestic violence in Peru; an assessment of second-order impacts of COVID-19 (education, economic, healthcare) in several African cities; a crowd-sourced health access app in Mongolia; and a participatory project to map the pandemic impacts on tourism-related businesses in Nepal.

The observations gained from this work are collected in The Geographies of COVID-19: Geospatial Stories of a Global Pandemic (Springer), a set of case studied co-edited with Robert B. Richardson and Junghwan Kim. The co-authors describe the spatialized impact of COVID-19 this way: “These geographies are located in both time and space, revealing impacts that are both immediate and long-term. The story of the pandemic is dynamic, in constant flux, and flush with ephemeral observations.”

Photo of barista preparing a beverage in Kathmandu, Nepal. Credit: Rohit Khadgi — In Nepal, Asia Hub partner Kathmandu Living Labs compiled extensive information from tourism-based businesses to map and analyze the impact of COVID-19 on their livelihoods.

One through-line of the case studies is how a large-scale event like COVID-19 reveals and exacerbates the inequities of societies around the world. Across scales, distances, and cultures, these inequities and impacts are “compounded by the government and social responses,” the team found, but also hold the key to “revealing how geography and geospatial technologies can contribute to future solutions and adaptations.”

Throughout their book, the editors consider the act and tools of mapping, and especially the dimensions introduced by live, dynamic, and interactive mapping tools, and cautioning the reader regarding the unintended consequences of decisions about such factors as data collection and scale. “Our stories are only as good as the data we have,” and the digital divide—uneven internet access, lack of access to phones and other devices–influences which data are included. “The data are constrained by what is collected (or not), how numbers are aggregated, the level of precision of data collection instruments, and algorithms. Maps and associated models are simplifications…”

Additionally, the book highlights the need for practitioners of many disciplines to pool their knowledge for cross-cutting solutions. Citing the work of the World Health Organization in identifying 15 international laboratories “that coordinate with national labs around the world to increase connectivity within the science community,” Laituri et al say that such efforts can go forward still more efficiently with the support of the virtual geography based on shared data and geospatial tools for place-based, data-driven decision-making. Our responsibility as geographers and geospatial students, practitioners, and scientists is to ensure grounded, ethical, and sound scientific approaches in addressing the profound problems we face,” they assert.

The Geographies of COVID-19: Geospatial Stories of a Global Pandemic is available from Springer.

To find out more about the U.S. Department of State’s participatory mapping programs, see the MapGive website.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0128

Stories

On the Map: Traveling by Trolley Back to the Dinosaurs

February 22, 2023

A cheerful yellow sign announces “Trolley Rides Today.” Credit: Paul Swansen, Flickr — A cheerful yellow sign announces “Trolley Rides Today.” Image by Paul Swansen, Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)

By Samantha Hinton

From the Fossil Trace Golf Course to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Denver is a modern city where the age of the dinosaurs is still present.

One of the best ways to experience Denver’s dinosaurs is the Denver Trolley route (formerly called the Platte Valley Trolley route) to Lakewood Gulch, home to the site of the first Triceratops fossil ever found.

Map showing the Denver Trolley route starting at Confluence Park in downtown Denver and hugging the Platte River Greenway. Credit: Denver Trolley — The Denver Trolley starts at Confluence Park in downtown Denver and hugs the Platte River Greenway. Credit: Denver Trolley

In 1887, American paleontologist, John Bell Hatcher discovered the mostly intact triceratops skull and horns and sent it to colleague, Othniel Charles Marsh. Marsh mistakenly thought the bones were from a bison, and they were not confirmed to be from a triceratops until the following year when another set of remarkably similar fossils was discovered in the area.

The trolley trip to Lakewood Gulch combines history and paleontology with transportation geography. The current Denver Trolley system recalls the city’s once-extensive electric rail transit system. At its peak in the early 20th century, the trolley system had over 250 miles of track connecting the city and another 40 miles connected Denver to Golden and Boulder. In 1910, the system had 87,819,000 passengers.

Map showing the Denver streetcar routes in 1917. Credit: Denver Urbanism — Denver streetcar routes in 1917. Credit: Denver Urbanism

Also in 1910, there were only 3,000 automobiles in Denver. After World War II, the American economy highly encouraged modernizing everyday life. By 1928, there were 78,000 privately owned automobiles and trolley ridership declined by 59%. By 1951, all the city’s trolley lines were abandoned and replaced by a new urban bus system.

The Denver Trolley, a small section of that rail system, was later restored and reopened on July 4th, 1989, to revive some of the history and nostalgia along a route of some of Denver’s most popular attractions. The trolley runs Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from early spring to around Oct. 31. Tickets are $3 for adults and $2 for children. Other stops along the route include Confluence Park, REI’s flagship store, Elitch Gardens, and The Children Museum of Denver.

Sources: Denver Trolley Colorado, Denver The Mile High City; “Dinosaurs in Denver,” Fossils Facts and Finds; “Triceratops Facts You Need to Know,” Denver Urbanism; “The History of Denver’s Streetcars and Their Routes”

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0129

Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

The Award

Eligibility

Applications

Marble Fund for Innovative Master’s Research Committee

AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography Recipients

2026 AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

2026 AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

2025 AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

2025 AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

2025 AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

2025 AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

2025 AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

2025 AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

2025 AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

2025 AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

2024 AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

2024 AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

2024 AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

2024 AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

2024 AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

2024 AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

2024 AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

2024 AAG Marble Fund Award for Innovative Master’s Research in Quantitative Geography

In Denver and Beyond, Moving Toward More Just Geographies

Wayfinding: Tracing Pandemic Geographies Across Time

On the Map: Traveling by Trolley Back to the Dinosaurs