Berries from my garden, Summer 2019

I planted blackberry bushes two years ago, and gooseberry bushes last winter. They are just beginning to produce.  So far, the birds haven't discovered them.

Comparing resilience properties through the data modeling of state space

This is a poster I presented at the recent Association of American Geographers conference in Washington, D.C. Click on the image to download the pdf.

My family, late summer early fall 2018

This is my older daughter Sophie. She is helping one my PhD students, 
Karen Kinslow, do some topographic surveying. Sophie is a junior in high
 school this year.

These are my twins, Sara (left) and Kate (right). They are in the fourth grade
 and this is the first day of the school year.

My garden in 2018: tromboncino

Tromboncino, or zucchetta, can be eaten as a summer squash or allowed to cure and eaten as a winter squash.  The top photos is the summer tromboncino. At the bottom are the ones that made it through to the curing stage. I have them now, in my basement root cellar and will be eating them through the spring of 2019. They taste a lot like acorn squash but are much easier to peel. I use a puree of boiled or roasted winter tromboncino as a base for a tomato pasta sauce and for when I make pinto or black beans. I've baked it into breads and added boiled slices of it to miso soup.

Mapping with elementary school students

Late this spring I visited Picadome Elementary School here in Lexington to give a talk about geography and mapping. I wanted to convey what geographers do, and how mapping is more than just state lines and capitals. Here is my presentation.  Many of slides are linked to videos and online visualizations. The students were really taken with the idea that the internet could be mapped, and the Japanese earthquake visualization, as it often does, had their full attention. The grade levels ranged from second through fifth. After the presentation, the students and I made smell maps. We walked around the school and wrote down what we smelled on post-it notes. Then they tagged the smell locations on the large air photo of their school shown in these photos. From there, we talked about how what smells we mapped would differ for an old person and a younger person, and among people with different sets of experiences. We discussed how time of the year would matter too - December would produce a different set of smells.  This tied in to the overall theme of how representation and the senses are part of geography as well as science. How we sense and categorize is a basic attribute of knowledge production, and geographers foreground these lines of inquiry in their work. Of course, we didn't have such an explicit discussion of these topics. I just wanted to give them an inkling of how mapping is much more dynamic and complex than what they might think. More of what we talked about was how to describe the smell of a crowded playground on a hot day? Exactly what do sweaty fifth graders smell like?  Wood chips and warm tennis shoes under a salty beach blanket. Thanks to Ms Courtney the science specialist at Picadome, as well as Jeff Levy at University of Kentucky Department of Geography for printing out our air photo poster.  Ms Mullins and Ms Exterkamp also allowed me to come into to their classes - they taught my kids this year, third graders.

Microgeographies of my summer

I grew cherry tomatoes and three large tomato varieties, okra (grew like a weed), tomatillos (pests set in, I won't try these next year), banana peppers, zucchini (I'll plant more next year but be choosier about the variety), green beans (attack of the Mexican bean beetle), parsley, basil. My blackberries were in the their first year of growth so they did not produce berries. My garden is hemmed in by mint, various Aster species, and some ornamental flowering plants planted by someone who lived in the house before me.

Data structure and resilience properties

In my 2017 article in Geomorphology, I describe more of the theoretical basis for linking the multivariate data structure of state space to its resilience properties. It could be considered a followup to my 2005 paper in Geomorphology. I wasn't in a rush, but back then the availability of lidar data and the software tools to manipulate these data weren't quite as on hand as they are today. I had thought about making topographic state space back in 2005, and added a preliminary figure in my Ecological Complexity paper.

Inferring barrier island dune resilience from multivariate topographic data structure

Are severe thunderstorm warnings issued equitably?

Space and place are the new DNA

Space and place are the new DNA