Fall Quarter

Cultural geographer, performer, and author Dr. Carolyn Finney. Dr. Finney’s book, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors examines the representation, participation, and history of African Americans in U.S. parks and public lands. Her work asks us to reconsider public lands as racialized spaces and to explore the implications of this for the environmental movement.

Dogs or Killers? The return of the Wolf has divided America, jeopardizing their recovery, but is it even really about wolves anymore?​

A Feature Documentary by COLLIN MONDA

Photo by Mark Turner (turnerphotographics.com)

There’s never been a more exciting time to be a cartographer than now! In fact, when it comes to defining society in the spaces where we live, we all participate in cartography in one way or another. This talk will encourage the entire audience to create maps, and to do so with boldness and creativity. We’ll touch upon some cartography rules, why they are important, and how to expertly break them.

Scientific discoveries are often the result of serendipity- including the discovery of something completely unexpected which leads to more questions than answers. A chance recording of bowhead whales in Disko Bay, Greenland, and piggy-backing a hydrophone on an oceanographic mooring in Fram Strait revealed unexpected information about bowhead whale singing behavior.  Many tens of distinct songs are sung by a population in a single season.

African parks are home to many species of threatened wildlife, with relatively small teams employed to protect them. This project uses a branch of artificial intelligence called machine learning to automatically analyze both daytime and nighttime (infrared) aerial imagery from the parks to then alert park rangers to potential threats. The goal of this technology is to allow for more efficient deployment of the rangers to stop poaching and other illegal activity. Prior knowledge about machine learning/technology is not required!

Pacific oysters are an integral part of Puget Sound's ecology, economy, and culture. However, the environmental, economic, and social benefits of oysters are endangered by ocean acidification. In this talk, This talk will explore how ocean acidification affects multiple generations of oysters. Temporarily exposing adult Pacific oysters (Crassostrea gigas) to low pH prior to gametogenesis affects larval abundance.

Photo by John Scurlock

A presentation of selected black & white images of mountains and glaciers, representing eighteen years of aerial photography conducted in remote regions extending from California to the Northwest Territories, and from the Pacific Coast to Wyoming and the Canadian Rockies.  Included will be a brief discussion of glacier photography, as well as the technical aspects of "landscape photography" from the air.