http://www.syndicatemizzou.org/articles Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:07:14 GMT Connecting you with the University of Missouri’s innovative research and creative activity http://www.syndicatemizzou.org/articles/show/57 Going far beyond maps, as one might presume, “Geography is the study of human-environment interactions,” explains Soren Larsen, Assistant Professor of Geography at MU. The discipline as a whole covers activity ranging from physical geography (e.g., wind erosion and weather patterns), techniques (e.g., modeling air pollution with GIS, or Geographic Information Systems, to understand the interactions between humans and the environment), and something called human geography, a subfield that focuses on the political, economic, cultural, urban, and regional elements of human-environment interactions. Human geographers cast their eyes on “the impact of the environment on human behavior,” as well as “the impact of human activity on the environment.” Within human geography Larsen specializes in cultural geography. While traditionally that may have entailed mapping the distribution of various cultural traits to track changes over space and time, cultural geography today is much more _process_-focused, drawing heavily upon the methodologies and theories of anthropology, psychology, sociology, and philosophy. Thu, 24 May 2007 16:38:29 GMT http://www.syndicatemizzou.org/articles/show/57 (LuAnne Roth) http://www.syndicatemizzou.org/articles/show/59 Traditionally a great deal of natural resources management has involved field-based surveys and plans, explains Hong S. He, Associate Professor of Forestry in the School of Natural Resources at MU. But recently these scientists and managers have come to realize that they also need to pay attention to the larger spatial configuration of natural resources. This realization has a lot of implications for wildlife conservation and biodiversity: “You can’t really consider one spot without considering the things around it,” he explains. Wildlife species require, for instance, multiple habitats, and watershed problems have shown that “if we pollute one area, it can spread over the landscape.” As an area of research, landscape ecology refers to the study of response to various natural and social factors over large spatial and temporal domains. Wed, 19 Sep 2007 05:00:00 GMT http://www.syndicatemizzou.org/articles/show/59 (LuAnne Roth)