College of Letters and Science, University of Wisconsin

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 ...

Naming Biases: Gender and Race Biases in Reference to Politicians

O'Byrne, Abigail (2025)

Implicit biases continue to promote gender and racial inequality in many professions. Our research investigated a particular variable, terms of reference, that may play a role in voter opinions of politicians and in ...

Evaluating the performance of PATMOS-x in global and regional analyses of clouds as they relate to Earth’s planetary albedo

Bortfeldt, Erica L. (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2025)

In 2023, the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System - Energy Balanced and Filled (CERES-EBAF) dataset revealed a record low planetary albedo. Due to the dominant role of clouds in Earth’s albedo, we hypothesize that ...

An unusual case of rapid cyclogenesis in the northeast Pacific basin

Beaty, Patrick T. (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2025)

In late November 2019, a record-setting extratropical cyclone rapidly intensified in the northeast Pacific basin over a relatively cold sea surface and near steep topography along the United States West Coast. Cyclogenesis ...

Impacts of temperature-dependent heating demand on wintertime emissions

Scalpone, Cara (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2025)

Most residences are heated by burning fuels, such as natural gas, heating oil, or wood, which emits combustion byproducts into the atmosphere. Space heating demand is dependent on outdoor temperatures, so the impact of ...

Invisible Threads: How Jet Stream Shifts areAmplifying Clear Air Turbulence in U.S.Aviation (1980 - 2023)

Rodríguez Nazario, Idamis E. (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2025)

Over the last 10 years, there has been a noticeable increase in Clear Air Turbulence (CAT)incidents reported by commercial airlines, including several recent accidents that have resulted in passenger injuries. This trend ...

Resolution Matters: An Effective Approach to Anomaly Detection

Zou, Bocheng (2025)

Unsupervised anomaly detection has been profoundly impacted by the advent of large-scale Vision Foundation Models (VFMs). The prevailing paradigm leverages features from a pre-trained encoder, where anomalies manifest as ...

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 ...