Today, we welcomed Alanna Post to the show. Alanna is a PhD student in the MSU Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences with a dual major in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. She received her B.S. in Ecology and Environmental Biology from the Biology department at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and her M.S. in Biology from Sonoma State University (Rohnert Park, CA). She is interested in forest ecology, disturbance ecology, and remote sensing. Alanna's research focuses on understanding post-fire forest recovery dynamics through the lens of forest structure.

Alanna discussed her research as well as the influence she experienced from reading A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. On April 14, 1948, Oxford University Press informed Leopold that it wished to publish his manuscript. One week later, Leopold suffered a fatal heart attack while fighting a grass fire that had escaped from a neighbor’s farm near the shack. In the months that followed, Leopold’s son, Luna, took the lead in getting the manuscript into print.

If you would like to learn more about Alanna’s research, please visit the Ecological Remote Sensing and Modeling Lab at https://www.ersamlab.com/. If you would like to learn more about Aldo Leopold and A Sand County Almanac, visit https://www.aldoleopold.org/.

Our sponsor for this episode is the Undergraduate Degree Program for the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences at Michigan State University. Choose from Bachelor of Science concentrations in Earth Observation & Geospatial Analytics, Physical Environment & Climate, or Human-Environment & Economic Geography. Or tailor your path through human, physical, and regional geography courses with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Ready to map your future? Visit geo.msu.edu and talk with an academic advisor today.

Today, we welcomed Dr. Sue Grady, a professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences at Michigan State University.

Dr. Grady is a health and medical geographer. Her research focuses on women’s health, specifically maternal and infant health. She is interested in understanding how local environments in which women live impact their health (i.e., increase the opportunity for infectious disease transmission and/or contribute to chronic diseases), which in turn, impair their pregnancies, leading to adverse maternal and infant outcomes. Most of her current research focuses on reducing maternal and infant mortality. She is studying perinatal regionalization in Michigan to improve our understanding of inpatient hospital referral patterns of high-risk African American mothers and infants. Dr. Grady utilizes geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial epidemiological methods, including multilevel modeling, to disentangle these complexities. The students she mentors are interested in a variety of health and medical geography topics.

Dr. Grady discussed her research as well as the official declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020.

If you would like to learn more about Dr. Grady’s research, please visit https://geo.msu.edu/directory/grady-sue.html or her Google Scholar page at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=IdbEU9oAAAAJ&hl=en.

If you would like to learn more about the American Association of Geographers Health and Medical Geography Specialty group, visit ⁠ https://www.aag.org/groups/health-and-medical-geography/.

Our sponsor for this episode is the MSU onGEO Professional GIS Certificate Program. If you are looking to revamp your current career, earn continuing-education credits, or simply learn new and marketable geospatial skills, visit today to learn how to earn a professional certificate in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) or Geospatial Data Analytics & Visualization. Learn more at https://ongeo.msu.edu/.

Today we welcomed Kyla Dahlin an associate professor in the ⁠Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences at Michigan State University. Dr. Dahlin is also a member of AgBio Research, the Department of Plant Biology, the Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior (EEB) program, and the Environmental Science and Policy Program (ESPP) at MSU. Dr. Dahlin’s research aims to better understand and quantify ecosystem processes and disturbance responses through the application of emerging technologies, including air- and space-borne remote sensing, spatial statistics, and process-based modeling. She is currently interested in semi-arid forest/grassland transition zones, where vegetation patterns are readily observable but poorly understood. Dr. Dahlin approaches questions by integrating observational data, modeling, and focused field experiments to both refine our understanding of ecosystem function and to improve our ability to predict how ecosystems and the climate will change in the future.

Dr. Dahlin discussed her research as well as the failed launch on February 24, 2009, of the first Orbiting Carbon Observatory.

If you would like to learn more about Dr. Dahlin’s research, please visit the Ecological Remote Sensing and Modeling Lab at ersamlab.com. To learn more about the work of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), check out the NEON Science YouTube channel. If you’d like to get involved with some fun and interesting citizen science efforts, download iNaturalist and Seek.