Events

The Department of Geography and Environmental Systems (GES) will host a series of balloon launches on campus.

Launch Schedule:

• Wednesday, October 28, 2026: Morning launch

• Friday, October 30, 2026: Morning launch

• Friday, October 30, 2026: Afternoon launch

Please refer to the schedule above for the planned launch sessions. 

For launch locations, please see the attached map below.

Please join us for the Laura Torres-Vargas' dissertation defense.

Venezuelan Women's Migratory Movements

Perceptions of Agency, Land, Community, And Government in Colombia, Panama, and the USA

Location: Sondheim 001 / Cart Lab, UMBC; Friday, October 23, 2026; 12 pm ET

Abstract: Migration has become a central topic in global public discourse, shaping laws, political debates, and the lived realities of migrant communities. Migratory movements are not always voluntary; they often arise from accumulated social, economic, and political pressures. For Venezuelan women, these conditions have driven migration to countries such as Colombia, Panama, and, in many cases, the United States. Throughout these journeys, Venezuelan women encounter shifting social, political, and embodied realities that reshape their sense of community, identity, government, borders, and personal agency. For Venezuelan women, these pressures have generated migration flows toward Colombia, Panama, and the United States, among other countries. Their journeys il lustrate what feminist migration scholars describe as embodied mobility: movements that transform not only geographic location but also subjectivity, identity, and relations to community and state. As they navigate documentation regimes, border infrastructures, and shifting power relations, Venezuelan women renegotiate their sense of belonging, agency, and the meaning of the social, political, and bodily self. Drawing on 40 interview cases where Venezuelan women migrated across Colombia, Panama, and/or the United States, this research found that documentation processes, power negotiations, and the formation of support networks and migratory webs, are central to how women experience the migration journey. Through interviews, counter mapping, and discourse analysis with Venezuelan women in these three countries, the study examines how external factors and social ly constructed identities -such as employment opportunities, education, gender, class, and age- shape their social relations, border and bodily experiences, and interactions with governmental systems.

Speaker: L. Delta Merner
Affiliation: Union of Concerned Scientists

The Geography and Environmental Systems (GES) Seminar Series welcomes department alum L. Delta Merner, Research Director of the Climate Hub for Climate Litigation at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Science in the Courtroom: Informing Climate Litigation Through Attribution and Evidence

As climate litigation accelerates globally, courts have become critical venues where scientific research is translated into legal accountability. This talk examines the evolving nexus between science and legal practice, exploring how scientists can meaningfully engage with legal questions.

I will present findings from a 2026 qualitative study identifying the scientific research areas now most critical for informing climate accountability. Key priorities include source-to-impact attribution methodologies, localized climate attribution, non-economic loss quantification, climate-health linkages, and deception campaign impact quantification.

Drawing on recently published work I will demonstrate how emerging scientific frameworks are already shaping legal arguments. I will also highlight concrete examples of science informing climate cases such as the recent landmark win in Australia's to an overview of the evolving U.S. climate docket. The talk concludes with guidance for scientists seeking to contribute to climate accountability through judicial pathways.

Join the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems for the first seminar of the Fall 2026 semester.

Dr. Matt Fagan
Geography and Environmental Systems
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

The Limits of Pixels: Overestimation of Forest Edge Effects Using Remote Sensing

Most forests lie within 1 km of a forest edge, where edge effects can influence carbon storage, temperature regulation, and biodiversity. Yet estimating these effects using remote sensing is challenging. Four persistent methodological and definitional issues shape these estimates: spatial scale, forest definition, forest type, and the substitution of space for time.

Surveying the recent literature, Dr. Fagan will explain how these issues have likely led to the systematic over-measurement of edge effects in urban, riparian, and upland forests.

The full Fall 2026 GES Seminar Series schedule is attached.

New and returning Geography and Environmental Systems (GES) majors are invited to join us for our Student Welcome!

Come meet GES faculty, staff, and fellow students while learning more about the department and connecting with the GES community. We look forward to welcoming you and kicking off the new academic year together!

The event will take place outside between Sondheim Hall and the RAC.

The Department of Geography and Environmental Systems at UMBC invites you to a special presentation by John Galetzka of NOAA’s Continuously Operating Reference System (CORS) Network.

UMBC is part of the CORPS Network. A GPS/GNSS base station operated by the University from the roof of the AOK Library is one of hundreds of independently operating base stations across the US that contribute continuous positional data to the CORPS Network. These base stations improve the precision of data gathered by GPS satellites, allowing us to pinpoint our locations. We leverage this information every time we navigate on our phones.
Mr. Galetzka's work involves planning, installing, and maintaining base stations across the world (in some pretty interesting places). He will be on campus to tour UMBC's facility. He generously offered to present on the CORS Network and the role of our base station plays in it to the UMBC community.

Please join us for this engaging presentation and discussion on the technology behind modern navigation and geospatial precision.

The Purple Giants within Tropical Forests: A Complex Legacy of Deforestation and Fires, by Felipe Saad

The Department of Geography and Environmental Systems at UMBC invites you to attend the PhD Dissertation Defense of Felipe Saad

Abstract: Emergent trees play a disproportionate role in tropical forest function, yet their low density, long lifespans, and uneven distributions have limited understanding of their responses to disturbance. This dissertation develops an open-access, multi-sensor remote-sensing framework to detect individual crowns of Dipteryx panamensis and estimate persistence and mortality risk across northern Costa Rica and southern Nicaragua. First, I compared four optical and radar sensor configurations and found that models combining phenological and SAR structural information most accurately mapped D. panamensis across forest and non-forest environments (F1 = 0.94). Second, Bayesian hierarchical state-space models applied to 77,270 trees over nine years showed high baseline persistence (98.2%) but higher mortality risk under pasture isolation, fire exposure, and cumulative forest clearing, with weaker and more localized edge effects. Finally, a propensity-score-matched evaluation of protected areas showed that demographic protection did not always align with legal protection: annual mortality risk was lower in Costa Rica than Nicaragua overall, but increased inside protected areas in both countries, especially for disturbed trees in Nicaragua. Together, these results show that open-access remote sensing can move beyond forest-cover mapping to monitor individual tropical trees and evaluate conservation outcomes using demographic indicators.

Join us in celebrating the end of the academic year immediately following Commencement. The Year-End Celebration will take place outside the basement level of Sondheim Hall near the pool. In the event of inclement weather, the celebration will be moved indoors to the basement level of Sondheim Hall.

We look forward to coming together as a community to close out the academic year!

Join us for the final GES seminar of the academic year featuring five graduate student presentations:

• Anisha Jayadevan: Planting trees in open natural ecosystems leads to limited carbon gains
• Hasan Ahmed: Tropical forest structural responses to fragmentation vary regionally and along biophysical gradients
• Megan Curtiss: Differential Tree Growth Responses Across Urban Site Types
• Leo Pecora: Looking Ahead: Digital Extraction of Geomorphic Metrics for Stream Assessment
• Felipe Saad: Persistence of Tropical Giants Across Disturbed Landscapes

Please join the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems for our Spring Seminar Series.

Dr. Sarah Paige (University of Heidelberg) will present:

"How a Medical Geography Research Program Informed a Global Policy to Prevent, Detect, and Respond to Novel Zoonotic Disease Outbreaks."

This talk highlights how geographically informed research, particularly from the Kibale EcoHealth Project (KEP) in western Uganda which helped shape global health security frameworks. KEP supported interdisciplinary research from 2005–2017 on bat behavior, microbiomes, and zoonotic spillover risk in a region with high levels of human–animal contact. The project's findings contributed to the formation of a One Health Committee and influenced global policy approaches to emerging infectious diseases.

All GES Spring Seminars are held on Wednesdays from 12–1 PM in Sondheim Hall, Room 001.

Faculty, students, and guests are welcome.