Geography seminars

Frank Paul presents early findings from the Karakoram Anomaly Cross-ECV project. The research combines satellite Earth observations with climate data to improve glacier mass-balance modelling in a region where measurements are sparse and glaciers are changing rapidly. The talk examines how these complementary records can help monitor Karakoram glacier dynamics.

Extreme heat affects rural communities, coastal regions and marine environments in different ways. This webinar presents NOAA-supported research that helps decision-makers target resilience measures to local conditions. Case studies address rural Vermont, Charleston and the Northeast Pacific. The speakers examine rural heat risk in relation to exposure and transportation infrastructure; resilience strategies that connect heat with flooding, water management and sea-level rise; and the drivers and subsurface characteristics of marine heatwaves in ecologically and economically important regions. The discussion connects research with practical decisions about location-specific resilience. The event forms part of NOAA’s Climate Program Office Heat Research Webinar Series, supported by NIHHIS and the Climate Variability and Predictability programme. Online via Vimeo with advance attendee registration. Live captions are available and the webinar will be recorded.

Srinivasan Keshav (University of Cambridge) presents an interface designed to help ecologists use AI for remote sensing despite unfamiliarity with embeddings and algorithms. The Tessera Embeddings Explorer lets practitioners privately explore a region of interest, create habitat maps and perform regressions using their domain expertise and ground-truth knowledge. The talk demonstrates the tool and explains the design principles and the software architecture that follows from them, connecting usable ecological workflows with AI representations. Keshav is the Robert Sansom Professor of Computer Science at Cambridge.

Luís Bettencourt argues that cities and urban systems provide a more useful basis for understanding development than national averages and targets. Regional, urban and neighbourhood differences expose limitations of treating countries as uniform units. The proposed framework describes development as expanding physical, social and economic connections and interdependence. The lecture examines how this approach accounts for empirical patterns across periods and geographies, simultaneous changes in multiple development measures, and heterogeneity at both national and neighbourhood scales. It contrasts national target setting, with its ecological fallacies and distributional effects, with coordinated processes involving innovation communities, infrastructure connectivity and basic services.

Yael Parag proposes degrees of isolation and connection as a framework for analysing energy systems, rather than a binary distinction between isolated islands and connected grids. The framework links infrastructure design, governance, operating practices, resource dependence and collective perceptions across spacecraft, community systems, microgrids, islands and countries. Comparative cases examine how security, independence, climate goals, costs, technical constraints, ideology and geopolitics shape these arrangements and change over time. Montserrat illustrates both vulnerabilities and opportunities, including coordinated design of water, sewage and energy microgrids. The lecture also considers how regional exchange, cooperation and shared identity influence resilience, treating energy islands as evolving configurations within wider social and geographical settings.

The coupled hydrology and ice dynamics of the higher elevations of the Greenland Ice Sheet, where ice is beyond a kilometre thick, remains poorly understood. This lack of knowledge is a significant source of uncertainty in the models used to project the ice sheet’s sea level rise contribution, both in terms of surface mass balance and the potential for dynamic drawdown. I will discuss some of our recent and ongoing work towards (1) improving the accuracy of partitioning between refreezing and runoff processes, and (2) capturing the impact of surface meltwater on ice sliding where the ice sheet is more than a kilometre thick.

Freshwater fish assemblages reflect millions of years of geographic isolation, producing unusually strong regional endemism. This seminar traces how tectonic history shaped those regions and how human transport and local extinctions now disrupt them. It examines the social drivers and ecological consequences of introductions, the resulting reorganization of global fish distributions, and the lasting effects of changes imposed within only a few decades.

The efficacy of images to create quantitative measures of urban perception has been explored in psychology, social science, urban planning and architecture over the last 50 years. The ability to scale these measurements has become possible only in the last decade, due to increased urban surveillance in the form of street view and satellite imagery, and the accessibility of such data. This talk will present a series of projects which make use of imagery and CNNs to predict, measure and interpret the social and physical environments of our cities.

In urban environments, social boundaries are the areas that emerge from processes of economic inequality and social segregation. These boundaries are important, as they serve both as areas of interaction and conflict. By applying geographical thinking to classic methods in data science, we can better understand where these boundaries emerge and how they delineate communities. In this talk, I’ll explain a bit about the basics of “boundary detection” in urban analytics. I’ll present a new method, the “geosilhouette,” that builds on previous methods of identifying the boundaries between clusters. And, finally, I’ll show how this can change our understanding of urban community.