Spring 2016 Course offering

New Fall 2015 Course Offering

Costa Rica Study Abroad - Summer 2015

I taught two undergraduate courses in a KIIS study abroad program in Costa Rica during the Summer of 2015, Environmental Science and Global Environmental Change. Here are the readings for the courses. We visited Arenal Volcano, the Osa Peninsula, and did homestays.  My students and I explored ecotourism and its successes and criticisms; the pros and cons of different ways of producing coffee (and the varieties of ways coffee is processed); and how diversity can be defined and measured.  My twins, Kate and Sara, went with me. Here are my photos

Apiculture activity for Global Env Issues - GEO 162

To better understand the practice of beekeeping as part of our lectures on CCD, my students are asked to develop the startup equipment and costs for keeping a colony.

Watermark

In my GEO 162 Global Environmental Issues course student view at least one documentary film a week outside of class as part of the curriculum. This past spring we watched the film "Watermark" for the first time. It's from the directors of "Manufactured Landscapes" - I show clips from this film in class as well.  Here are a few images from Watermark. I've clipped stills of the more stunning scenes and put them into this Powerpoint file for classroom use.  Here are reviews of Watermark on MRQE.

Mapping activity with middle school students

This (very cold and snowy) winter I worked with a local middle school on indoor mapping activities. To teach them the components of a map and the conundrums of trying to represent a real world surface on a piece of paper, students mapped a fictitious island in a video game. Wii has a Resorts dvd that features an island where all its various sports activities take place. Studentswere able to fly around the island to identify the details of island shape, land cover, and scale. The students also had to figure out a way to represent the vertical relief on the island since a very large volcano is a prominent landform. A couple of their maps shown below can be enlarged if you click on them.

My movie list

I started this online film list back in 1998. I had had a decade or so of heavy film viewing -- I worked my way through my master's degree by working at a video store in Atlanta, Movies Worth Seeing. I've put the page back up, as my film viewing is slowly increasing now that the twins are little older.

Spring 2015 Course offering

Spring 2015 Course offering

Research opportunities - UK Department of Geography

Email me as ja.stallins@uky.edu if you have any questions.  Check out the rest of my blog for more detail about this research.

Honey bee pollen foraging and land use. I’ve collected pollen from an urban apiary here in Lexington. I would like to identify the pollen using standard light microscope protocols and assay the pollen for amino acid composition to determine its nutritional quality. A number of studies have commented on the higher diversity of plants in some humanized landscapes, however, whether or not this pollen is of high or low nutritional quality hasn’t been established. I’d work with you to learn some basic pollen id. I’d  love to have someone interested in learning how to be a beekeeper and setting up a colony in the spring. There’s a potential for some qualitative research – I would like to have someone interview beekeepers regarding general issues they have encountered regarding land use, land zoning, and finding forage for their honey bees.  Sadly, the political ecology aspects of beekeeping remain underdeveloped, and any of this work could easily become the basis of a master's thesis, dissertation, or an undergraduate research project.

Wildlife rehabilitation, race, and biodiversity. The analyses of this project are done. I’ve mapped the locations of where people live that brought injured animals to a wildlife rehabilitation center in Tallahassee, Florida – about 20,000 animals over a 7 year period. I used to geographically weighted regression to visualize who brings in these animals. There are a lot of points this work raises about race, class, and attitudes about wildlife. It also brings up the concept of incidental biodiversity – the biodiversity that is present but often undocumented except by chance encounter. I’d love to have someone take up some of the writing, or, replicate this project using wildlife rehabilitation data for our area in a thesis or PhD. It could be a good GIS learning experience if you were to replicate this project here in Kentucky.

Structure-from-motion photography. I am looking for someone to continue working with me on learning SFM. This involves using ground-based, paint pole, or kite-based photography to construct three-dimensional images. A friend of mine who works in stream restoration has given me the okay to come out sometime this January or February to map a work site of his. This project would be a good way to get some GIS and GPS experience; however, it’s like most on-the-fly work you do with GIS, sometimes you have to dig to figure out what button to push. I can get you started, but I have progressed to the point where I don't have enough time to refine the techniques.

LIDAR dune topography database construction. One of our PhD students is going to need some assistance constructing a database of topographic measurements from barrier islands along the Atlantic coast. You would learn how to download and set up lidar data sets and how to manipulate lidar data to get it into a format that we need for geostatistical analyses. There are several facets of this work that could easily become a master's thesis or undergraduate research project.

Barrier island dune vegetation analysis. A field class I taught last spring travelled to Sapelo Island, Georgia in May. We collected dune vegetation compositional data in a location that I had sampled about fifteen years earlier. I’m looking for someone to analyze this data under my guidance and make some statements about how the topography and vegetation has changed. You would learn how to use a PC-Ord ecological software package and gain experience with the trench-level work of exploratory statistical analysis.