(UB)
College of Arts and Sciences
University at Buffalo (UB)
College of Arts and Sciences
Department of Geography
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Research Highlights

The Department of Geography has a diverse and vigorous research tradition. We have four specialized concentrations within Geography

Geographical Information Science

  • Applications and developments of new technologies in Geographic Information Science
  • Remote Sensing
  • Ontology 

Projects:

  • Geospatial cryptography, genetic geographic information science, and wearable environmental sensors.
  • Individual-based epidemiological modeling and inter-operable environmental modeling

Faculties in this concentration:

Ling Bian

Thomas Bittner

Geoffrey Jacquez

Le Wang

Spatial Statistics

  • Development of statistical and modeling techniques for space-time data 
  • Theoretical advancement and methodological development in geospatial data fusion and uncertainty modeling
  •  spatiotemporal analysis

Projects

  • Applications in the fields of public health, spatial demography, and hedonic modeling
  • Dynamic migration modeling, demographic forecasting
  • geohealth, with an emphasis on chronic diseases such as cancer

Faculties in this concentration:

Peter A. Rogerson

Geoffrey Jacquez

Jared Aldstadt

Eun-Hye Enki Yoo

Economic Geography

  • Urban health and sustainability 
  • Examination of how natural, built, and social dimensions of urban environments affect opportunities for healthy living.
  • The intersection of critical development studies, economic geography and feminist theory. 

Projects

  • Uneven development of global production restructuring for workers, farmers, and communities, with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean.
  • Firm- and institutional-level processes and the role of geography in creating divergent regional trajectories of development and decline.

Faculties in this concentration:

Marion Werner

Sara Metcalf

Trina Hamilton

Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen

Jessie P. Poon

Earth Systems Science

  • Erosion and sedimentation in fluvial and hillslope systems through experimentation, theory, field studies, and numerical modeling.  
  • Understand and predict the fundamental process of turbulent flow and sediment transport and determine the impact of these processes on river form and function, water quality and ecology, landscape evolution, and watershed infrastructure and integrity.  
  • Forests and how their structure and species composition changes in response to disturbances that are natural (e.g. fire) and human caused (e.g. agricultural land abandonment), and to past and future climate change. He has secondary interests in conservation, restoration, and animal ecology.
  • Ecohydrology, bio-sphere-atmosphere interactions

Projects:

  • Develop and implement integrated, user-friendly analysis and modeling techniques using GIScience, Remote Sensing, Environmental Modeling, and readily available data sets to support rapid, practical and effective decision-making in managing natural resources and extreme events

Faculties in this concentration:

Scott Mackay

Chris. P. S. Larsen

Sean J. Bennett

Chris S. Renschler

  • GIScience, RS and Spatial Statistics
    9/28/26
    Small-area population estimates are critical in decisions concerning resource allocation, market area delineation, new facility/transportation development, as well as generating diagnostic indicators for environmental and socioeconomic assessments. Detailed and accurate population and socioeconomic information is only available for one date per decade through the national census. The recent advancements in remote sensing technology coalesced with existing knowledge in the field of applied demography can lead to developing an effective method to project population more accurately in different applications. 
  • Urban, Economic and Health
    9/28/26
    Recent research on green urbanism highlights how developer and gentrifier interests are privileged in sustainability policies that tie environmental cleanup to high-end residential and commercial conversion of industrial land, for instance, or that create exclusive recreational spaces at the behest of politically active gentrifiers. This collaborative project (with Winifred Curran at Depaul University) on community activism surrounding a decades-old underground oil spill in and along Newtown Creek (pictured) reveals an alternative possibility, however. Long-term resident activists have cultivated cross-class alliances with newcomers in order to gain increased political power and media attention, and they are actively working to construct an alternative vision for the neighborhood that maintains industrial jobs and a working waterfront even as the area's toxic legacies are cleaned up.
  • Earth System Science
    9/28/26
    Prediction of climate change impacts on terrestrial carbon fluxes is highly uncertain. Upland ecosystem models, even when constrained with flux tower data, fail to explain interannual variability in CO2 fluxes in the upper Midwest. One possible reason is lack of model mechanisms for wetland biogeochemistry and hydrology, where fluxes would be expected to vary with changes in depth to saturation. Wetlands are expected to be highly sensitive to climate change. We propose to develop a wetland-landscape model and assimilate long-term multiple flux tower observations to simulate wetland and upland mechanisms simultaneously, with evaluation against unassimilated flux observations. Model evaluation is typically limited to single sites and extrapolation of these results across larger regions is questionable. This research will improve understanding of carbon-rich forest-wetland landscape response to climatic change.
  • International Business and World Trade
    9/28/26
    The purpose of this project is to examine the knowledge acquisition processes of Asian manufacturing and information technology subsidiaries that recently entered the US market via foreign direct investment (FDI). The inquiry focuses on four of the fastest growing suppliers of inward FDI to the US from industrializing Asian (Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore).