Geography student's project gets national attention

from an article by Bill McAuliffe at the Star Tribune:

"Erika Wertz might measure her college career in tree rings. Wertz, a University of Minnesota senior, has been studying what the rings in bur oak trees in the Red River Valley can reveal about floods in the distant past, which someday may also indicate what the future might hold for the flood-prone Red and its broad, populated, level valley. Wertz's research is similar to other studies in "paleoclimatology," in which researchers look for clues about past weather and climate events by studying ice cores as well as layers of pollen, volcanic ash and the like laid down long before the advent of modern record-keeping."

Read the full story here.

Brown Day Lecture April 27

Join us for the Ralph H. Brown Memorial Lecture by Susan Cutter, Carolina Distinguished Professor and Director, Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute, Department of Geography, University of South Carolina.

Where: 3M Classroom 1-106 Hanson Hall on the West Bank of the U of M campus.
When: Coffee/refreshments 3:15; talk starts at 3:30 and ends at 5pm with a Q&A

Moving from Hazard Vulnerability to Disaster Resilience: The Experience from Mississippi's Gulf Coast

For the past decade, hazards and disasters researchers have focused on what makes people and places vulnerable to natural hazards. The development of geo-referenced vulnerability metrics, especially those capturing social vulnerability (such as the Social Vulnerability Index), enabled comparisons between places in terms of attributes that influenced the ability of populations to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. Hazard vulnerability assessments (including both social and physical vulnerability) are now the basis for county and state hazard mitigation plans nationwide. Instead of focusing on vulnerability reduction as a pathway towards disaster risk reduction, federal agency interest is centered on enhancing the nation's resilience to natural disasters. Using Mississippi's Gulf Coast and its experience with Hurricane Katrina as an exemplar, this lecture describes the concept of disaster resilience and current efforts underway to measure disaster resilience from community to regional scales.