Many countries have started ambitious tree planting programs to recognize the benefits of forests to mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon to support rural livelihoods. Restoration ecologists caution us, however, that planting trees is not always the same as restoring a forest. India has been continuously committed to planting trees on a large scale for…
Category: Climate and Environment
Research Quick Take: Spatializing the Municipal Bond Market: Urban Resilience under Racial Capitalism
The number of majority-Black cities and towns in the United States has more than doubled in the past 50 years, including 21 cities of more than 100,000 people. An ongoing and dynamic process of “white flight” is mainly responsible for this trend. While many US cities are global cities, hubs of wealth, power, information, and…
Research Quick Take: Identifying county-level factors for female breast cancer incidence rate through a large-scale population study
Geographers can bring a unique spatial perspective to topics in a variety of disciplines. Zhao et al. (2020) use spatial statistics to improve our understanding of breast cancer. To do so, they analyze the spatial variation in the incidence rate of female breast cancer across the United States. This is the largest scale study, as…
Amazon distribution center provides lessons for promoting economic development
This post first appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat. Something extraordinary is unfolding on 118 acres of land in the northwest corner of Mahan and I-10 in Tallahassee. It’s not just the 2.8 million square foot building, or the $200 million worth of concrete, steel, piping, and engineering. The sprawling Amazon fullment center may well be…
Meet a Social Scientist: Sarah Lester from the Department of Geography
Why did you decide to become an academic? Honestly, I’ve never been someone who was necessarily set on becoming an academic. I earned my PhD in marine ecology, but was always most interested in and motivated by research questions with implications for marine conservation, natural resource management, and marine policy. My early exposure to academia…
Meet a Social Scientist: Xiao Feng from the Department of Geography
Why did you decide to become an academic?Being a scientist is cool. When I was young, I like nature and the diverse natural creatures, and I also love seeing maps, which leads to me to study biogeography and how biodiversity is distributed across the world. What do you find most fulfilling about your job?It is…
Research Spotlight: Planning for Climate Migration and Climate Gentrification in Florida
Sea level rise is one of the clear and present dangers associated with climate change in Florida. With the longest coastline in the lower 48 states, an economy fueled by beach tourism, and a population crowded into our coastal counties, Florida’s coastal cities and towns face an accelerating rate of sea level rise that will…
Research Spotlight: Environmental injustice in Clean Water Act enforcement: Racial and income disparities in inspection time
Race and income-based disparities often manifest themselves as delays in policy delivery. For example, discrepancies exist in the speed and depth of disaster recovery assistance efforts across different communities. In the area of health care, the race of the patient has been associated with longer wait times in emergency rooms. There is also mixed evidence…
Research Spotlight: Urban Remote Sensing (2nd edition)
Remote sensing is the technology of acquiring information about the environment through interpreting energy patterns recorded by sensors mounted on various aerospace platforms. While this technology has traditionally been the colony of geoscience and national security communities, its relatively recent applications to the urban environment (urban remote sensing) have been predominately driven by the innovations…
Research Quick Take
Here at the College of Social Sciences and Public Policy (COSSPP), our faculty have been quite busy! Here are some of the projects that our faculty have recently published. “The Conditional Nature of Political Risk: How Home Institutions Influence the Location of Foreign Direct Investment” by Dr. Quintin Beazer and Daniel J. Blake In his…
Wicked Problems, Wicked Solutions 