Department of Geography Newsletter 2022

GEOSPECTRUM

NEWS FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY • 2022

CHAIR’S LETTER: DARLA MUNROE

Dear alumni, friends and fans of Ohio State Geography,

This will be my last chair’s letter as part of this wonderful geography department. In mid-August, my family and I will be relocating to Cambridge, MA, so that I may take the job of Director of Research at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

I have so enjoyed the last four years of leading this vibrant community, and have appreciated working with faculty, staff, students, and alumni in this capacity. Some of the most important developments of the last few years include new faculty, new academic programs (most notably our planned Master’s in Geographic Information Science and Technology), curricular innovations, and alumni events, like our last party in 2019 at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

In the last academic year, we renewed our commitment to a residential campus in our teaching and research missions, albeit with greater flexibility than before. Our colloquium series remained largely online, but we were lucky to have three in-person speakers during the academic year. Hybrid workplaces and meetings have now become the norm. There are costs and benefits to these new trends – it is much easier to keep up with faculty and student meetings, even with other obligations. And therefore, it’s arguably harder to “unplug” and check out than before. It is unlikely that our university spaces and places will return to a pre-2020 state; rather, we can hope to build on what worked in our virtual connections, and restore and refresh our physical spaces.

I am proud to have been a part of this department these last 18 years; it’s amazing how quickly time passed. I will be forever grateful I had this opportunity to lead, to serve the department and the university in a new capacity, and for all the collaborations and friendships I built along the way.

Here’s to a great 2022-2023, and I hope to see many of you at the AAG in the future!

Warmest regards,

Darla Munroe

July 2022

Our first in-person (with Zoom attendance optional) since March 2020. Mae Miller ’13, Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley, gave a talk titled “On Safe Harbors, Worlding Education, and Transnational Black Feminist Geographies in the Early Twentieth Century.”

INTERIM CHAIR’S LETTER: MAT COLEMAN

Dear geographers, and friends and families,

As the incoming interim chair, I want to thank Darla Munroe for her service to the department as chair over the past several years; and more than that, for her many contributions to our family since she started here in 2004. I must say that – as a dedicated Blue Jackets fan – I’m not entirely sure why anyone in their right mind would up and move to Bruins territory? Notwithstanding, we wish Darla the best of luck on her new adventure and look forward to seeing her at professional events in the future!

I want to welcome our incoming 2022 cohort of undergraduate and graduate students. You are joining a vibrant community of researchers, and we look forward to working with you! I also want to say congratulations to those students – undergraduate and graduate – who earned their degrees over the past year. Having been at Ohio State since 2005, I can honestly say that the students who have maintained focus throughout the pandemic deserve our greatest respect. It hasn’t been a walk in the park for any of us, but it certainly hasn’t been easy for our students.

Despite Darla’s departure, and my new role in the department, it’s not all change around here. Ningchuan Xiao will continue to lead the Graduate Studies Committee; Nancy Ettlinger will continue to lead the Undergraduate Studies Committee; and Kendra McSweeney will continue to lead our Personnel Committee. I am grateful to be able to work with such a talented and supportive leadership team. It takes a village – including all my other faculty colleagues that I don’t have the space to mention here.

And yet some things are changing. This year we welcome associate professor Jana Houser to our faculty. Jana is coming to us from Ohio University. Her work on tornado evolution, not to mention storm-chasing skills, is a welcome addition to our ranks of climate-related, physical geography, and atmospheric science faculty. But that’s not it. Tammy Parece is joining us from Colorado as a senior lecturer, and Chayanika Singh is joining us from Texas as a lecturer. Tammy and Chayanika are taking up key teaching positions in support of our energetic GIScience curriculum; we are

thrilled to have them here. Apparently, it’s not only UCLA and USC who want into the Big10!

I also want to celebrate and recognize our staff, without whom I doubt anything would get done – our academic advisors, Ali Grandey and Jocelyn Nevel, who steer our undergraduates through Ohio State’s curricular labyrinth with compassion and skill; Brett Gregory, our fiscal guru, who pays the bills and makes sure the lights are on (except when we’re trying to reduce our carbon use); Jens Blegvad, our systems manager and tech whizz, who never loses his cool; and Kim Miller, our office associate and frontline firefighter for literally everything and everyone! I am also very excited to welcome Michelle Hooper, our new GIS administrator; Lyjah Williams, our new associate fiscal officer; and, Joslyn Branham, who is joining us as our new graduate program coordinator. We are a growing family!

I am thrilled to have the opportunity to help lead the department this year. It has been a wonderful home for me since I started my career, and I intend to do everything I can to make it even better.

Go Bucks, Mat

Coleman

August 2022

ON THE COVER

“The Real Estate City”: An old industrial plot bought by a private real estate developer at the intersection of State St. and McDowell St. in the rapidly gentrifying Franklinton neighborhood. View of downtown Columbus in the background. GEOG 5502: Urban Spaces in the Global Economy, Professor Madhumita Dutta, Autumn 2019 Class

Inclusive Accessibility: Redefining urban mobility from the users’ perspectives

ARMITA KAR PhD Candidate

Our travel needs and experiences differ depending on age, gender, race, and income. We use these past experiences and concerns regarding street conditions and safety to choose our everyday mobility. Thus, a transportation system that addresses these mobility concerns and eliminates its problematic parts will ensure better and safer access to essential services. Such an accessible transportation system is critical to achieving economic stability, urban equity, health, and environmental protection. In our study on inclusive mobility, we adopt a bottom-up approach to learning about people's mobility needs and concerns. Later, we measure the access of individuals and communities to essential services considering their spatio-temporal activity patterns and mobility concerns. Finally, we plan to use this knowledge in designing need-specific accessibility-oriented multimodal transportation systems.

The inclusive accessibility measure designed in this study is a time geographic approach integrated with humanin-the-loop machine learning algorithms and network analytics. We use machine learning techniques to learn and predict individual-level mobility concerns and clustering and classification algorithms to generalize their similarities by social cohorts. Then, we use the space-time prism approach of time geography to explain accessibility based on human activities and spatio-temporal interactions and their deviations while accounting for mobility perceptions.

We are conducting a travel survey to capture the diverse travel experiences of Columbus residents. Participating in this survey is a 3-step process. The baseline and end surveys are online. In the pop-up survey, participants track their trips for 7-days using the ArcGIS field maps mobile app and share street photos of their routes. In the surveys, we ask participants to score different streets of Columbus based on their infrastructure conditions, safety, and the quality of the surrounding environment.

Here, we illustrate the study concepts using the survey dataset of one user. The user provides their willingness to walk on certain streets (green: agree; red: disagree; orange: indifferent). Based on participants’ input about where they prefer to walk or not on a sample of streets in Columbus, we predict their reaction to other streets that are not included in the survey sample. Figure 1 presents this result, representing locations where the user may experience mobility barriers while walking on Columbus streets.

We also analyze the extent to which the user can reach destinations, given the barriers that they face. Figure 2 shows how far the user can reach in an hour using transit and walking, starting from home at 8 am. Figure 2a outlines the “basic” accessibility based on the regular transit schedule with adequate sidewalks that can accommodate

the user’s short walking access to the bus stops within 15 minutes. What if we take into account other psychological and physiological barriers that we identified in Figure 1? Figure 2b presents accessibility after eliminating the road connections where the user has more concerns and does not prefer to walk. As we can see, considering these barriers significantly shrinks this person's walking and transit access. The area that feels accessible to the user is much smaller than the area measured as accessible using the basic approach, which is widely used in the existing literature.

We can now apply this to a real-world scenario. Let's say the user needs to be at work by 9.30 a.m. and plans to drop by a pharmacy during the trip. The errands at the pharmacy will take at least 15 minutes. Figure 3 presents accessibility as a combination of all possible routes that the user can take between home and office and visit any pharmacy across that route. If this person takes any of these routes, s/he will be able to spend at least 15 minutes at the pharmacy and reach the office on time. The difference between Figure 3a and 3b is the consideration of mobility barriers. As we can see, the area accessible to the user becomes much smaller when we do not use the streets with higher mobility concerns in route planning (Figure 3b) compared to the basic measure,

including all streets (Figure 3a). Let’s see an example route visiting the same pharmacy for both cases during the trip between home and office. The trip start and end times are shown on the maps. The vertical lines indicate how long the person stays at each location. As indicated, the trip takes longer when we plan routes considering the mobility barriers (Figures 3a and 3b).

The social contributions of this study are multifaceted. Accessibility measures designed in this study mirror personalized and community-specific mobility needs and perceptions. This measure will help us explain the inequalities around the urban transportation system from a mobility justice perspective. Practitioners and researchers may apply this measure to plan for cities that ensure free and affordable movement across all transportation modes and safe travel experiences for all communities regardless of their identities.

Figure 1: Predicted mobility marriers during walking trips

Figure 2a: Transit + walking accessibility measured from home without considering personalized mobility barriers

Figure 2b: Transit + walking accessibility measured from home considering personalized mobility barriers

Figure 3a: Transit + walking accessibility between home and workplace without considering personalized mobility barriers

Figure 3b: Transit + walking accessibility between home and workplace considering personalized mobility barriers

EMILIO MATEO PHD ’22

From measuring stream discharge in rivers that relentlessly try to sweep you away downstream, to collecting many years of data from weather stations at 16,500 ft of elevation beneath towering glacier-covered peaks, fieldwork in physical geography depends upon observations of the natural world.

Throughout my doctoral studies at Ohio State, I traveled to the Cordillera Blanca in the Peruvian Andes to conduct fieldwork multiple times. My recently completed dissertation, entitled Hydrological shifts and the role of debris-covered glaciers in the Cordillera Blanca, Peru, aimed to assess the changes that are occurring on the surface of debris-covered glaciers (glaciers partially covered in a layer of rocky debris), and their impacts on downstream water quality and quantity in a tropical mountain environment. Debris-covered glaciers are typically situated in a unique position between the debris-free ice above and the meltwater streams below. Studying meltwater chemistry and discharge from debris-covered glaciers relative to debris-free glaciers allowed for a comparison between two water sources in a semi-arid climate. Without conducting fieldwork, obtaining these water samples and observations would have been impossible.

I first became interested in water resources in mountainous and glacierized regions during my undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan. During a summer at Camp Davis, in northwest Wyoming, we learned valuable field techniques such as how to core trees and soil, measure river discharge, and assess fish populations, to understand the distribution and function of forests, rivers, and alpine ecosystems in the Rocky Mountains. Following this experience and during multiple internships in the year following my undergraduate studies, I decided to further pursue research related to hydrological processes in mountain environments. Following my master’s research which I conducted in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado, I came to Ohio State with an interest in studying water and glaciers in South America.

When I began my doctoral studies, my initial fieldwork plan involved the installation of dozens of temperature-recording dataloggers within the rocky layer on the surface of debriscovered glaciers, the collection of over 100 water samples across at least 2 years, and many discharge measurements in the streams throughout the region. I was able to make multiple trips to the field, hiking and camping at many field sites, wading in rivers to gather streamflow measurements, and sometimes mountain biking to weather stations to check on their status.

After beginning the fieldwork entailed for my project, the COVID-19 pandemic intervened. During my trip to Peru in March 2020, I was preparing for a multi-day backpacking trip to collect many of the dataloggers I had deployed when I became aware that Peru would be closing its borders the following day. Instead of backpacking to my field sites, I packed my bags and made the 6-hour journey to Lima where I was able to catch a flight home just hours before the final flights left the country.

With my fieldwork now shortened due to circumstances beyond my control, I found alternative ways in which to complete my dissertation. I used significant amounts of historical streamflow data in conjunction with our group’s recently collected data to statistically analyze shifts that have occurred in the hydrological system at multiple temporal resolutions. Also, instead of relying on my uncollected field dataloggers, I utilized remote sensing to better understand the spatiotemporal patterns of ponds on debris-covered glaciers in this tropical region for the first time. Finally, I was able to use my partially complete water sample dataset to begin to examine the differences between the meltwater flowing from debris-covered glaciers and debris-free glaciers. Although my original research plan was forced to be heavily altered, I was able to pivot using these updated data sources and complete my dissertation this spring.

Following the completion of my dissertation, I began working as a Climate Science Fellow for Aspen Global Change Institute (AGCI), a non-profit organization based in Aspen, Colorado. AGCI conducts interdisciplinary research, education and outreach, and collaborates with resource managers and policymakers, to further scientific understanding of Earth systems and global environmental change. I plan to continue working in water resources research, while also conducting outreach and working with science policymakers to continue improving the relationship humans have with the natural environment and water.

Map of the study area within the Cordillera Blanca, Peru, identifying some streamflow gauge locations.

Top: The two glacierized peaks of Huascarán with the Kinzl debris-covered glacier flowing from between the two and down the right side of the image.

Middle left: Representing the “O-H-I-O” with the assistance of my advisor Bryan Mark (right), committee member Rob Hellström (second from right), and our Llanganuco valley weather station!

Middle right: Measuring streamflow within the Querococha valley, enjoying the tranquility of the mountains.

Bottom right: Trekking up Yanamarey glacier to check ablation stakes deployed by our Peruvian colleagues at the Autoridad Nacional del Agua (National Water Authority) office.

PRANAV PADMANABHAN BA student

My name is Pranav Padmanabhan, and I am a fifth-year undergraduate in Geography and Disease Modeling. While in Columbus, I volunteered at Safe Point, a syringe exchange run by Equitas Health, where I was introduced to the world of harm reduction.

Harm reduction as it applies to preventing drug overdoses and the spread of diseases like HIV has many definitions. As a public health philosophy, it’s the “acceptance that a continuing level of drug use in society is inevitable and defines objectives as reducing adverse consequences,” in opposition to formerly hegemonic strategies of abstinence and criminalization. It typically includes distributing the overdose-reversal medication naloxone, sharing information and supplies like syringes to facilitate safer use of drugs, and more recently, drug checking through fentanyl test strips and spectroscopy machines. SAMHSA’s definition explicitly mentions easier access to “substance use disorder treatments.” However, decades before its embrace by government public health, harm reduction consisted of underground, grassroots mutual aid networks of activists illegally handing out syringes on the street and getting arrested for it. To many of these activists, harm reduction isn’t just a targeted strategy focused on individual behavioral changes, but a broader movement to secure the bodily autonomy of all people who use drugs. This view challenges the medicalization of addiction and drug use, instead viewing it as a cultural phenomenon shaped by one’s environment. It’s also the recognition that the cause of the overdose crisis is not individual choices or even the so-called “disease of addiction,” but prohibition and the only way out is a safe, accessible supply of all drugs.

My honors research thesis explores the dichotomy within the “harm reduction” umbrella, using Columbus as a case study to compare two paradigms of harm reduction in practice and situate them within a larger sociopolitical context of the neoliberal takeover of social justice movements in the United States. As a geographer, I am particularly interested in how biopolitical harm reduction manifests specific “sites of health” that reinforce the surveillance of people who use drugs, as opposed to outreach that brings resources to where people are and whose goal is building community networks that resemble “right to the city” movements. Throughout the summer and fall, I am interviewing harm reduction outreach workers representing a wide range of organizations to learn more about how, where, and why harm reduction is practiced, as well as their outcomes.

The purpose of this research is to center on the person-first, no-questions-asked practice of harm reduction that stands in opposition to the “data-driven” model prevalent in public health research and practice, which often alienates groups of people who use drugs who have been historically monitored

and criminalized by the state. While I am using a framework of two intersecting but distinct philosophies of harm reduction to better illustrate the landscape of harm reduction in Columbus, these boundaries are muddied in practice; for example, Safe Point itself is a government-funded, nonprofit-run, specific point of care, but is also a community site where grassroots organizations freely mobilize, and many of its employees are also volunteer activists. The institutionalization of harm reduction is not ubiquitous, and partnerships between progressive organizations like Safe Point and radical activists have resulted in spaces that lie in a gray area between a site of biopower and liberation.

Changes in the law and mindset by state actors are crucial, as harm reduction policies are necessary to save lives, but relying solely on government funding and support is flawed because it leans heavily on the whims of those in power, who are the furthest removed from the material realities of the overdose crisis. By highlighting the work of activists who have gone unnoticed by academics and policymakers, we can gain a fuller picture of what works and how various players in the harm reduction space coexist and can complement one another, as well as how the forces of commodification and depoliticization of healthcare services have impacted people who use drugs and those who service them.

This project is being advised by Dr. Kendra McSweeney, whose expertise in both qualitative community-based research and the global drug trade has been invaluable. I have also been inspired by multiple classes in the Geography department, including Dr. Mat Coleman’s Political Geography class, where I first learned about theories of biopolitics, Dr. Madhumita Dutta’s Urban Spaces class which focused on organizing and hidden labor within cities, and Dr. Elisabeth Root’s Spatial Data Analysis course which provided me with the GIS skills to create the project’s output.

Rojika Sharma, a first year Master’s student in Human Geography was selected 2022-23 Archival Creators Fellow of South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA). Through the Archival Creators Fellowship Program, fellows partner with SAADA to create archival collections that reflect the histories and perspectives of marginalized groups within the South Asian American community. The theme of this year’s fellowship is place, with projects highlighting how South Asian Americans have made space for their communities in the geography of the American landscape. As a SAADA fellow, Rojika will focus on the Bhutanese-Nepali Community of Central Ohio, where she will gather stories in connection to land practices, attachment to place, and aspiration of community spaces. Her project will highlight the narratives and lived experiences of the South Asian refugees in the Midwest.

FACULTY HIGHLIGHTS

MADHUMITA DUTTA Professor Faculty member

Madhumita Dutta

published an illustrated non-fiction narrative titled Mobile Girls Koottam –Working Women Speak based on a set of conversations (originally produced as Tamil radio podcasts) between migrant women workers who worked in an electronics factory in Tamil Nadu, India. Published by Zubaan, an Indian feminist publishing house, the book narrates the lives of working-class women, each from their own unique and nuanced perspective, the nature of their work, their dreams and desires, and their critique of a casteist patriarchal society. Challenging what theorisation and research can be, the book offers us a look into the complex lives of young rural migrant women in their own words and invites readers to engage in a process of learning and unlearning, and to interrogate our privileges as we imagine the life-worlds of working-class women. Consisting of transcripts from the titular radio podcast, the book brings to the page conversations that are at once playful, joyous, angry, and thoughtful on diverse topics like tea stalls for women, factory work, menstruation, and much more, made all the more lively through illustrations by Madhushree. The book has received wide attention from the mainstream media in India, academic journals and grassroots feminist and labor organizations.

JIAN WANG

PhD Candidate

Two PhD candidates, Luyu Liu and Jian Wang, were awarded Presidential Fellowships last fall. The Presidential Fellowship is the most prestigious award given by the Graduate School to recognize the outstanding scholarly accomplishments and potential of graduate students entering the final phase of their dissertation research or terminal degree project.

ROJIKA SHARMA

MA Student

LUYU LIU

PhD Candidate

Estimating exposure and health impacts of trafficrelated air pollution during daily travel

HUYEN LE Assistant Professor

Traffic pollutants, such as particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5), are harmful to human health and represent a major cause of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, mental illness, and premature deaths [1]. PM2.5 from the transportation sector was responsible for nearly 29,960 premature deaths, accounting for 28% of all premature deaths from exposure to anthropogenic PM2.5 in the US in 2011 [2]. The exposure level is higher for vulnerable road users (e.g., non-auto users) and those who live or travel on heavy traffic roads, often overrepresented by low-income individuals and racial minorities.

To date, most studies have investigated the impacts of PM2.5 on human health based on exposure at home locations, overlooking non-home and traffic-related exposure. This tendency might over- or underestimate the health impact of PM2.5 as it ignores the fact that humans are highly mobile. Research is needed to quantify on-/near-road exposure accounting for spatio-temporal patterns and different travel modes (e.g., driving, walking, biking). Here, we propose generating and integrating more refined measures of spatiotemporal air pollution [8, 9] and mobility data to quantify PM2.5 exposure during daily travel and its physical and mental health outcomes, in combination with socioeconomic and racial disparities in the Columbus metropolitan area. It requires a convergence of expert knowledge, data, and methods from different fields, including environmental, geographical, behavioral, health, and data sciences.

The overarching goal of this project is to estimate the exposure to on-/near-road PM2.5 and its potential short- and long-term health impacts. The project is led by Dr. Huyen Le and is conducted in close collaboration with experts from environmental engineering (Dr. Andy May) for sensor testing and communication (Dr. Joseph Bayer) for survey construction, as well as students from Geography (Armita Kar, PhD student) and Biomedical Engineering (Dema Alkashkish). We deployed 35 PurpleAir mobile sensors to measure PM2.5 concentrations at various locations near heavy-traffic roads across the Columbus metropolitan area. These data were used as inputs for machine learning

and statistical models to predict PM2.5 concentrations at locations where sensor measurements are unavailable. We also used GPS and survey data from a smartphone app, as well as a follow-up health survey after 2 years to understand the daily travel patterns and health behavior of 300 participants in Columbus.

The air quality data, coupled with mobility and survey data, will allow us to understand how exposure to traffic-related PM2.5 during everyday travel affects residents’ health outcomes. This study’s results will answer the question “Is the on-/near-road air healthy?” This information will subsequently enable evidence-based decisio- making at city and regional levels regarding transportation planning and land use, with the ultimate goal to promote public health and equity.

Acknowledgements: This project is funded by the Sustainability Institute and Translational Data Analytics Institute at Ohio State.

References:

[1]A. J. Cohen et al., “Estimates and 25-year trends of the global burden of disease attributable to ambient air pollution: an analysis of data from the Global Burden of Diseases Study 2015,” The Lancet, vol. 389, no. 10082, pp. 1907–1918, May 2017, doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(17)30505-6.

[2]A. L. Goodkind, C. W. Tessum, J. S. Coggins, J. D. Hill, and J. D. Marshall, “Fine-scale damage estimates of particulate matter air pollution reveal opportunities for location-specific mitigation of emissions,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., vol. 116, no. 18, pp. 8775–8780, Apr. 2019, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1816102116.

Fig 1. Activity locations of study participants in Columbus (based on GPS tracking)

GEOG/EARTHSC 4911

Earth’s Climate: Past and Future

Professor Matthew Saltzman, Earth Sciences, and Professor Bryan Mark, Geography, are co-teaching a new course in the spring: GEOG/EARTHSC 4911: Earth’s Climate: Past and Future. This class will examine Earth’s climate and its natural development as understood from the geologic record spanning the full history of the planet, as well as how the future climate is likely to evolve. Only by understanding the mechanisms controlling Earth’s climate over millions of years — plate tectonic cycles, solar cycles, biogeochemical cycles — can we fully grasp the ways in which human activity now dominates the changes to climate.

GEOG 1900

Extreme Weather and Climate

This course surveys characteristics and processes of Earth’s atmosphere and how it interacts with the planet’s surface, oceans, and human activity. The course focuses on how these interactions work to produce extreme weather events and climate extremes and how they affect people. As part of this course, students get to participate in the blimp lab which takes them out onto The Oval to study the weather.

Fig 2. PurpleAir sensors measuring PM2.5 concentrations in Columbus. Map generated by Armita Kar.

Fig 3. Predicted PM2.5 concentrations in Columbus. Map generated by Armita Kar.

STATE CLIMATE OFFICE OF OHIO (SCOO)

2021-22 activities

The State Climate Office of Ohio (SCOO) has forged onward with its mission to serve as stewards of climate information and related services, research, education and outreach activities for the people of Ohio.

This year we have continued collaborating with regional partners to deliver climate services in Ohio and beyond. These activities include coordinating the state’s weekly contributions to the US Drought Monitor, participating in USDA Midwest Climate Hub Midwest (MCH) Agricultural Climate Team, North Central Climate Collaborative, ECOP Climate Program Action Team, and serving as a Board Member on the Mid Ohio Regional Planning Commission’s Sustaining Scioto Project. Aaron Wilson serves as Extension Liaison to the MCH and provides a yearly delivery of the North Central Region Climate Services Climate and Drought webinar. Since July 2021, Aaron has led the Midwest Chapter of the Fifth National Climate Assessment (2023 release) as Chapter Lead Author.

Research Projects

Our areas of active research include integrated modeling (climate, ecosystem services, economy) to farmer adaptations to climate change, hydrological extremes (droughts/floods), and the development of the National Soil Moisture Network.

This year, SCOO researchers (Wilson, Cervenec, Mark) continued work on a USDA NIFA project – “Regional Integrated Modeling of Farmer Adaptations to Guide Agroecosystem Management in a Changing Climate.” This cycle, we completed videos and outreach infographics for use in communicating with the wider community. These assets may be viewed at u.osu.edu/agroecosystemresilience/. We are currently developing a tabletop exercise for farmer adaptation, to collect evaluation data next season.

We also completed work with private industries including Honda and Owens Corning. With Honda, we examined the impacts of climate change on flooding resilience on the Marysville Campus (Wilson and Quiring). With Owens Corning, we analyzed the impacts of climate change-related risks to their global facilities and the climate changerelated risks and opportunities for one of their product lines (Quiring).

We have two ongoing projects that are funded by NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS). The first focuses on developing an objective, impacts-based framework for drought mitigation in Ohio (Quiring (PI), Wilson (Co-PI)). We recently launched an Ohio drought monitoring portal and will be finalizing the other components of this project later this year. The second project supports the continued development of nationalsoilmoisture.com. Over the last year, we have added new in situ networks, modernized the cyberinfrastructure and developed additional products that quantify uncertainty in the national soil moisture maps. We have new awards

with USDA (developing farm-scale soil moisture and ET data for CONUS) and NSF (surface-atmosphere interactions on convection initiation in the central US) (PI: Trent Ford (IL State Climatologist) and Quiring (Co-PI)), and submitted a proposal to the USDA AFRI- Sustainable Agricultural Systems call with collaborations with the State Climate Offices of Minnesota and Missouri, along with the USDA Midwest Climate Hub and the National Institute of Applied Climate Science.

Climate Atlas: We advanced our interactive web-based climate data atlas for the state by continuing our collaboration with a faculty member, Dr. Thomas Bihari, in the Computer Science and Engineering Department. Throughout the summer and autumn of 2021, MS candidate Ashwin Nair continued on the prototype based on mesonet data mined from the OARDC Ag Weather Net (https://www. oardc.ohio-state.edu/weather1/). A cohort of students implemented python climate packages to create potential display graphics. As a team, SCOO guided development, iterating between climate service goals and code implementation.

Outreach and Education

Members of SCOO engage in a wide range of outreach and education activities. These include courses taught in the Geography Department at Ohio State University by SCOO members DeGrand, Mark, Quiring, and Wilson. Public talks at various meetings around the state were given by SCOO members Wilson, Quiring, Mark, DeGrand, and

Aaron Wilson, Iliyana Dobreva and Wes Haines manage the SCOO booth at the Farm Science Review, September 2021.

Cervenec. These are too numerous to identify individually. Engagements include the following groups: Soil and Water Conservation Districts, Ag Lenders and Commodity Groups, various Universities, non-profits, and state and municipal agencies.

Outreach events at the BPCRC are planned/coordinated by Cervenec. These are too numerous to identify individually, as they reach approximately 11,000 people in-person annually in normal year (~6,100 from April 2021 to April 2022 due to ongoing pandemic disruptions), but a review of BPCRC’s events page (byrd.osu.edu/events) provides a sample of the Center’s engagement with the academic community at Ohio State and with Columbus and central Ohio generally. During the pandemic, novel virtual events were developed and the team maintains many of those engagements. The team fields information requests from high school students writing reports for their school newspaper to local television weather forecasters covering a local event and provides presentations to groups that range from scouts completing merit badge programs to faith-based groups hosting environmental workshops. The pandemic has disrupted a lot of in-person programs but afforded the team some new ways to reach audiences virtually that will be maintained.

Climate Monitoring and Impact Assessment

SCOO continues to partner with the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences Wooster Campus in the maintenance and expansion of its 13 Ag Weather stations located at research farms around the state have

all upgraded to cell modem transmission thanks in part to previous funding from the MCH.

In partnership with the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center and the Ohio State Sustainability Institute, SCOO has expanded a network of small climate stations around the Columbus campus for the purpose of monitoring the urban heat island effect in the campus area. Data from these stations is being displayed on our Mesonet web page (scoo. byrd.osu.edu/mesonet/dashboard) and partners are starting to co-locate instruments for measuring other variables.

Geddy Davis helped secure Columbus as a NOAA funded Urban Heat Island Campaign (noaa.gov/news-release/noaaand-communities-to-map-heat-inequities-in-14-us-cities-andcounties) for 2022. The team also partnered with a regional planning authority, agencies, and non-profit organizations to apply for an NSF CIVIC planning grant to better model flood risk in Central Ohio.

Communication & Web Services

A big part of the SCOO mission involves communication, and our webpage is our main portal to deliver content and services. The SCOO homepage (climate.osu.edu/) completed a college-wide site upgrade this year. From April 20, 2021 to April 19, 2022, the SCOO website has seen over 8,800 sessions (versus ~4,100 in prior year) by more than 6,501 users (versus ~3,600 in the prior year). SCOO continues its social media presence through Facebook with 295 likes/322 followers (facebook.com/ohioclimate) and Twitter with 166 followers (twitter.com/Ohio_Climate).

Energent Solutions has partnered with SCOO this year to provide financial assistance for an undergraduate student, Geddy Davis, to update monthly and seasonal climate summaries for Ohio. These and other products, such as video updates that review the current status of drought, precipitation receipts, soil moisture, and river levels as well as forecasts in the near, short and long term, are made available through the SCOO website and social media accounts.

SCOO continues to maintain its web-based decision tool, “FARM” (Field Application Resource Monitor) designed to help ag producers comply with State regulations regarding the timing of application of granular fertilizer or manure with respect to forecasts of precipitation. This app is free and may be used on any device at the FARM website (farm. bpcrc.osu.edu). FARM currently has 378 active user accounts monitoring 818 different fields, and 32 users subscribed to the daily field updates. We also have our first paid subscriber, which allows for access to additional fields and provides a financial mechanism for future enhancement of the tool as we increase subscriptions.

Media Appearances

SCOO responded to numerous media requests throughout the previous cycle. This includes participating in the program QED with Dr. B, which aired on Columbus PBS Affiliate WOSU. SCOO has contributed to podcasts including Sound of Ideas (NPR-Cleveland), All Sides with Ann Fisher (NPRColumbus), Cloudy with a Chance of Podcast (WHIOTVDayton), interviews with local tv news outlets including 10TV, NBC4i, the Columbus Dispatch, the Cincinnati Magazine.

Jim DeGrand leading GEOG 5922 students in setting up weather instrumentation at the Ohio State Waterman Farm during autumn 2021. Jim is setting his sights on new horizons as he retired last June. He will be sorely missed.

CENTER FOR URBAN AND REGIONAL ANALYSIS (CURA)

The Center for Urban and Regional Analysis (CURA) is an interdisciplinary group of scholars in social, natural, and environmental sciences; applied economics; agriculture; engineering; health and medical professions; and the humanities. Our mission is to serve as a transdisciplinary research and outreach hub that leverages innovations in geographic information science and geospatial data analytics to better understand the issues and challenges facing cities and regions in Ohio and beyond. We serve as a bridge across academia, industry, the public sector and the community through basic and applied urban research, researchbased undergraduate and graduate training, and outreach. Our focus is on the environmental, social, and economic sustainability of cities and regions in an urbanized world. Ghost Neighborhoods of Columbus is an ongoing effort that highlights CURA’s mission and capabilities. The project reconstructs urban neighborhoods lost to highway construction and urban renewal during the 20th century.

Ghost Neighborhoods of Columbus

The 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act impacted lives and cities across the U.S. by constructing what we now call the Interstate Highway System. Planners of the system routed some highways, often purposely, through neighborhoods occupied by people of color. Once thriving and full neighborhoods, these neighborhoods were split and, in some cases, even fully demolished for these urban highways. Within the span of a few years, these neighborhoods lost not only homes and people, but shops, jobs, and their vitality. One result was an economic downturn in many of these neighborhoods that lasts until the present day. The remaining residents still live with the negative consequences of these highways, including spatial disconnection, poor air quality, and noise and road trauma. Some of the most impacted neighborhoods in Columbus include Hanford Village and Bronzeville on the east side, and Flytown just north of downtown.

Hanford Village is a good example of a neighborhood heavily impacted by highway construction. This was a vibrant community for newly returning Black World War II veterans. Hanford Village’s George Washington Carver Addition was platted in 1945, and 146 homes were constructed during 1945-1947. Currently, the neighborhood is only a small fragment of what it once was. The construction of Interstate 70 and Alum Creek Drive demolished or moved 67 of the homes in this subdivision.

CURA has launched the Ghost Neighborhood of Columbus project to help people understand what was destroyed by urban highway construction during the 20th century, and to support research on reconstruction of the wealth, vitality, and activities that have vanished. The Ghost Neighborhoods team includes CURA Director Harvey Miller, Associate Director Ningchuan Xiao, Outreach Coordinator Gerika Logan, geography PhD candidate Yue Lin, undergraduate history majors Eva Heyer and Michael Smith, and faculty affiliates Jason Reece (Knowlton School) and Joshua Sadvari (Ohio State Libraries). The core data we are using to

reconstruct these neighborhoods are Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps: these are hand-constructed maps of US cities dating back to the 19th century, created for fire insurance purposes, containing a wealth of building-level data.

The Ghost Neighborhoods project will highlight these lost and damaged neighborhoods by using machine learning/ artificial intelligence techniques to extract data from the Sanborn maps to create and populate a GIS database, allowing the creation of 3D visualizations and supporting spatial analysis. The 3D visualizations will show existing and demolished structures. The figure below shows one of the first visualizations produced by the research team: buildings in Hanford Village in 1961. The blue double lines show what is now I-70, and the red buildings are those that were destroyed by its construction.

The team will also be doing archival research to gather and georeference historic photographs, narratives and other

Columbus Dispatch map showing three of the neighborhoods in Columbus most impacted by urban highway construction

Photos of Hanford Village, Columbus (Columbus Dispatch)

GIS map showing Hanford Village in 1961, just before I-70 was constructed through Columbus. Red buildings are those destroyed by highway construction. The George Washington Carver Addition is located at the curve of I-70 to the right of the map. The query window shows information about the highlighted building (outlined in light blue).

archival material that can bring these lost neighborhoods to life in a story map format. We will also be linking these building data to historic city directories that contain owner and business information organized by street address. The Ghost Neighborhoods team is starting with Hanford Village but will move on to Bronzeville (including the Mt. Vernon Ave corridor) and Flytown. We also plan to conduct a similar effort for the Franklinton neighborhood across the Scioto River from downtown, befoer the devastating flood of 1913. Eventually, we will scale this up to other cities in Ohio and elsewhere in the nation.

Follow our progress: cura.osu.edu/projects/existing/ghost-neighborhoods.

Contacts:

Harvey Miller, Director: miller.81@osu.edu

Gerika Logan, Outreach Coordinator: logan.433@osu.edu

Sanborn Fire Insurance map. The left side shows streets and buildings on the east side of Columbus in 1961. The legend on the right side illustrates the rich information available in these historic maps; some date back to the 1880s.