UB
Courses
GEO 101:
Physical Environmental Geography I
GEO 106: Global
Climate Change
Global warming is constantly
in the news – high temperatures, low
lake-levels, big storms, and growing
deserts. This four credit course examines
past, present and future global warming by
considering causes of warming, methods of
modeling the future, predicted environmental
and social impacts, and possible solutions.
GEO
199: UB Seminar: Just Add Water
"Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink," wrote Samuel
Taylor Coleridge in The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner, about a journey
spanning oceans of unthinkable size and
undrinkable water. Roughly
three-quarters of the Earth's surface is
covered with water, yet this stuff is
getting more difficult to obtain where
or when society needs it, in a form that
is safe for drinking, for irrigating
crops, or sustaining ecosystems.
Sometimes there is just too much of it.
The American writer Mark Tawn wrote,
"Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt
anybody." In this course, we will
examine how science seeks to address
societal concerns by looking through the
lens of big ideas in water resources.
GEO 347:
Climatic Geomorphology
Recent events (e.g., flooding,
mudslides, sinkholes, tsunamis) highlight
the impact of land forming processes on
human societies and socioeconomic systems.
With these and other events in mind, this
course examines how land surface forming
processes interrelate with climate and land
use. The first part of the course focuses on
the role of climate, vegetation, and other
factors on landform changing processes. The
latter part considers how these processes
are expressed in different systems,
including humid and semi-arid watersheds,
glaciated landscapes, permafrost, karst
landscapes, and in coastal
environments.
GEO
504: Graduate Seminar
GEO
561: Ecohydrology
This course deals with hydrologic
and ecological mechanisms underlying
climate-soil-vegetation dynamics and
land-water dynamics. The evolution of
terrestrial ecosystems depends on the need of
vegetation for inputs of light, water, and
nutrients. These inputs are variable in time
and space, and how they are assimilated
depends on plant characteristics and ecosystem
structure. Thus, vegetation plays an active
role as both cause and effect of the
space-time dynamics of soil water and climate.
Specific topics will include preferred states
in spatial distribution of soil moisture,
hydraulic limits to plant water use,
ecological optimality, vegetation-hydrology
linkages at catchment scales, carbon and
nutrient cycling, and vegetation competition.
Courses
previously taught at UW-Madison
- Regional Hydrology
- Remote Sensing Visual Image
Interpretation and GIS Integration
- Computational Aspects of GIS
- Environmental Monitoring
Practicum
- Environmental Monitoring
Seminar
