Department of Geography

Fine-Scale Vegetation Change and Its Implications for Methane Emissions in Arctic Aquatic Ecosystems

Maraldo, Daniel J. (2025)

While small water bodies (ponds) make up a small fraction of the surface area of Arctic permafrost landscapes, they have been observed to emit disproportionately high volumes of methane and carbon dioxide. To assess drivers ...

Driftless Divided: Cardinal-Hickory Creek and Wisconsin Transmission Resistance

Shapiro, Gabriel Noah (2025)

Introduction to U.S. Transmission and Transmission Resistance: The U.S. is experiencing a renewable energy building boom. Transmission lines, along with wind and solar farms, are being proposed and built, across the ...

Mitigation of Spatial Bias in Social Media Data for Disaster Relief

Dhakal, Ashmita (2025)

Social media platforms generate large volumes of geotagged data that are becoming more valuable for disaster response and situational awareness. However, the opportunistic and skewed nature of Volunteered Geographic ...

Mapping Urban Coyote Ecology in Los Angeles: Insights from Citizen Science and Human Mobility Data

Zhang, Qianheng (2025)

Understanding how urban coyotes (Canis latrans) respond to human activities is a critical challenge in urban ecology, especially in an era of rapid urbanization. As coyotes adapt to urban environments, the list of citizen ...

GIScience Education from Faculty Careers to Student Training: A Dual Perspective on Academic and Professional Development

Chen, Yanbing (2025)

This thesis examines the educational and institutional state of Geographic Information Science (GIScience) through two complementary components: global faculty hiring patterns and the structure of U.S.-based professional ...

Land Titles and Deforestation: Evidence from Peru's Palm Oil Sector

Gunderson, Celeste O. (2024)

The rapid expansion of oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) in the Amazon raises critical questions about the relationship between land ownership and deforestation. Producers, particularly companies establishing large plantations, ...

When Kami Met Kuma: Feminist Popular Geopolitical Perspectives on Japanese Nationhood and Settler Colonization of the Ainu in Persona 4 Golden

Kao, Benjamin Chin-Hung (2024)

Reach Out To The Truth… When the player-protagonist 1 ambushes an enemy and enters a battle with an advantage, that is moving first, in the Japanese Role Playing Video Game (JRPG), Persona 4 Golden (P4G), an upbeat tune ...

Towards a Queer Understanding of Environmental Racism: An Exploration of LGBTQ+ BIPOC Experiences of Environmental (In)Justice in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Silverman-Rodriguez, Markia (2023)

This thesis centers on how--and to what extent--LGBTQ+ people of color (henceforth QTPOC: queer and trans people of color) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin experience and resist environmental injustices, and how environmental ...

Submerged Empire: Racial Grammars of Environmental Governance in Houston, 1900-1939

Ponnaganti, Amani (2023)

How do histories of colonial and racial dispossession shape contemporary urban environmental injustices? Building on scholarship that examines the legacies and afterlives of empire; I theorize grammars of governance as an ...

The Retail Divide: Examining the Impact of Retail Access on Basic Needs and Quality of Life in Milwaukee’s Timmerman West Neighborhood

Zajichek, Lydia (2025)

Introduction: In the United States, an estimated 39 million people, about 13 percent of the population, live in census tracts that are considered food deserts. Food deserts are areas where residents are low-income and ...

Utility-Scale Solar in the Chicago Metropolitan Area: A Site Suitability Analysis

Baxi, Ameya (2025)

In recent years, renewable energy has expanded in the United States of America (Fernández 2024). Renewable energy has been further incentivized by acts like the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which provides tax credits ...

Remote Sensing Analysis of the Relationship between Sand Dune Topography and Vegetation Response to Varying Precipitation in the Central Great Plains

Vo, Tien (2023)

The Central Great Plains is a premier site of sand dune landscapes. These sand dunes are largely covered by native vegetation and as a result, are often used for livestock grazing. The beef industry is an important sector ...

Settlement Colonialism: ANCSA, the Willow Project, and Colonial-Capitalism in Alaska’s North Slope

Purisch, Hans (2023)

I. Introduction The Willow Oil project is a recently-approved oil development project on the North Slope of Alaska. The project exists on a large piece of land settlers refer to as “the National Petroleum Reserve,” which ...

Optimizing Best Management Practices (BMPS) For Watershed Plans Considering Temporal Dynamics, Maintenance, and Investment Constraints

Qiu, Jianxiang (2023)

In an era increasingly challenged by environmental issues in watersheds, understanding and optimizing land-use management practices becomes crucial. This thesis examines the optimization of Best Management Practices (BMPs) ...