Events

GES Seminar: Graduate Student Talks

Final GES seminar featuring grad student research

Location

Sondheim Hall : 001

Date & Time

April 29, 2026, 12:00 pm1:00 pm

Description

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

Grad student seminar flyer

GES Spring Seminar: Dr. Sarah Paige

Medical geography and global disease policy

Location

Sondheim Hall : 001

Date & Time

April 1, 2026, 12:00 pm1:00 pm

Description

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.

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

REPOST: GES Spring Seminar: Dr. Sarah Paige

Medical geography and global disease policy

Location

Sondheim Hall : 001

Date & Time

April 1, 2026, 12:00 pm1:00 pm

Description

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.

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

GES Seminar: How Cool Are Your Trees? Heat and Vegetation in Cities

Urban heat, tree canopy, and human scale cooling in cities.

Location

Sondheim Hall : 001 (Cartography Lab)

Date & Time

March 5, 2026, 12:00 pm1:00 pm

Description

How Cool Are Your Trees? Heat and Vegetation in Cities

Every year people die because of extreme heat. Trees help combat the lethality of an increasingly warm planet, where cities are even warmer. Vegetation provides shade and evapotranspirative cooling, which lower temperatures and may save lives.

This talk draws from a review of more than 115 research papers from across the globe on urban vegetation and heat from 2018 to 2024. The When, Where, and How of urban cooling will be discussed, with attention to current knowledge and knowledge gaps.

We will also zoom into New Haven, CT to examine how bike mounted temperature sensors better reflect lived experience and demonstrate local level cooling from tree canopy cover with and without cloud cover. Ongoing bike based heat research in Baltimore will also be shared.

The goal is to describe the state of the field and provide a specific place based example of how trees provide cooling at the human scale.

GES Spring Seminar: Dr. Dexter Locke

Heat, vegetation, and urban tree cover

Location

Sondheim Hall : 001

Date & Time

March 4, 2026, 12:00 pm1:00 pm

Description

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

Dr. Dexter Locke (United States Forest Service) will present a talk titled:

"How Cool Are Your Trees? Heat and Vegetation in Cities."

This seminar examines the relationship between urban vegetation, tree canopy, and heat exposure, highlighting how green infrastructure can shape environmental and social outcomes in cities.

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

Faculty, students, and guests are welcome.

GES Spring Seminar: Dr. Dawn Biehler

Animals, urbanization, and green space in 19th-century NYC

Location

Sondheim Hall : 001

Date & Time

February 11, 2026, 12:00 pm1:00 pm

Description

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

Dr. Dawn Biehler (UMBC) will present a talk titled:

"Reordering the more-than-human city: Stories of animals, urbanization, and green space in nineteenth-century New York."

This talk explores historical relationships between animals, urban development, and green space, and how these interactions shaped the modern city.

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

Faculty, students, and guests are welcome.

Art–Sci Fire Conversation: “There’s No Fire Season; It’s Fire Year”

A public art and climate science conversation on wildfires.

Location

Off Campus : The Peale

Date & Time

November 22, 2025, 3:00 pm4:00 pm

Description

Join climate scientist Dr Charles Ichoku and interdisciplinary artist Timothy Nohe for an art and science conversation on our new era of "fire year."

As wildfires grow more frequent, more destructive, and more entwined with human settlements, the boundaries between natural disaster and human infrastructure are dissolving. In this public conversation and lecture, climate scientist Dr. Charles Ichoku and interdisciplinary artist Timothy Nohe explore the new era of fire year, where traditional "fire seasons" could collapse especially in regions that are becoming drier into a continuous, climate-fueled threat.

Dr. Ichoku, Director of the GESTAR-II Consortium and a leading researcher working with NASA on global wildfire emissions, brings a planetary perspective: monitoring and modeling fire dynamics from space and airborne platforms. His work captures fire's massive scales, how it affects the atmosphere, carbon cycles, and climate systems.

Nohe's telematic artwork "Fire Year" revisits the tragic Los Angeles fires of January 2026, a period marked by his daughter's evacuation from UCLA. As an artist, he is committed to communicating the alarming impact humans have on the environment.

Art–Sci Fire Conversation: “There’s No Fire Season; It’s Fire Year”

Location

Library and Gallery, Albin O. Kuhn : Light reception to follow

Date & Time

November 20, 2025, 4:00 pm6:00 pm

Description

Speaker: 
Nancy Hiemstra
Stony Brook University
Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies

Abstract:
Drawing on two decades of research, this presentation examines how the U.S. detention system operates through—and benefits from—chaos, producing disordered geographies that obscure responsibility and extend confinement. It shows how this manufactured disorder enables and conceals the system's core profit-making logics, where expansion is driven less by policy effectiveness than by opportunities for revenue generation. Companies providing food, medical care, commissary goods, and oversight mechanisms generate income through confinement, creating webs of economic dependency that blur public and private boundaries. The presentation also considers how recent shifts in immigration enforcement are fueling explosive growth in immigrant confinement and concludes by outlining strategies to cut through the chaos and disrupt the financial logics sustaining detention's expansion across the United States
Chaotic Economies of Confinement
Chaotic Economies of Confinement: Profit, Dependency, and Extraction in U.S. Immigration Detention

GES Balloon Launch Across Campus

Experience campus from above with our GES 286 balloon flight

Location

On Campus : Centered on the Quad

Date & Time

November 19, 2025, 9:15 am10:30 am

Description

Join us tomorrow morning for a special GES 286 balloon launch across campus. Weather balloons equipped with downward-facing cameras will be floating up to 450 feet above campus as students collect geospatial images for their environmental data projects.

This hands-on activity is part of the course "Exploring the Environment: A Geospatial Perspective" taught by Dr. Charlie Kaylor. Students will be deploying balloons from six different locations around campus, all centered on the Quad.

If you're walking across campus between 9:15 and 10:30 a.m., look up and you'll see the balloons in action.
To learn more about how these launches support geospatial learning, check out this UMBC Magazine feature:

Getting Your Research Off the Ground—Balloons Give Students New Perspectives

Come by, watch the launches, and see geospatial science in action!

ges balloon gis geospatial campus-launch

Surfrider Foundation Guest Speaker Session

Exploring grassroots environmental justice with Surfrider

Location

Administration : 101

Date & Time

November 10, 2025, 12:00 pm1:00 pm

Description

Join us for a Guest Speaker Session with Dr. Shannon Lyons, East Coast Regional Director of the Surfrider Foundation.

The Surfrider Foundation works to protect and preserve the world's oceans — focusing on plastic reduction, water quality, beach access, and sustaining marine ecosystems.

Dr. Lyons will share insights into Surfrider's national and local initiatives, community organizing, and environmental justice efforts. Students will also learn about opportunities to engage through Surfrider's student club networks and advocacy programs.

Surfrider Speaker Session