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We reflect on Geography in the US university by focusing on the paths taken by undergraduates into and beyond our classrooms. Those paths reveal aspects of Geography that appear unique to this national context, and include the structural barriers to US students' entry into Geography, from their highly uneven exposure to Geography in school to their unfamiliarity with it as a university degree. Yet many students still manage to find the field, with the troubling exception of Black and Indigenous students. We also highlight the paradox whereby graduates of this 'invisible' field are in high demand within government and industry, even as their training encourages them to simultaneously critique the tight coupling of Geography with those structures of power. We suggest that these are the distinctive and constitutive attributes of Geography in US universities that shape undergraduates and the geographies that they take out into the world. We reflect on Geography in the US university by focusing on the paths taken by undergraduates into and beyond our classrooms. We suggest that these are the distinctive and constitutive attributes of Geography in US universities that shape undergraduates and the geographies that they take out into the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite more than 40 years of counterdrug interdiction efforts in the Western Hemisphere, cocaine trafficking, or "narco-trafficking", networks continue to evolve and increase their global reach. Counterdrug interdiction continues to fall short of performance targets, due to the adaptability of narco-trafficking networks and spatially complex constraints on interdiction operations (e.g., resources, jurisdictional). Due to these dynamics, current modeling approaches offer limited strategic insights into time-varying, spatially optimal allocation of counterdrug interdiction assets. This study presents coupled agent-based and spatial optimization models to investigate the co-evolution of counterdrug interdiction deployment and narco-trafficking networks' adaptive responses. Increased spatially optimized interdiction assets were found to increase seizure volumes. However, the value per seized shipment concurrently decreased and the number of active nodes increased or was unchanged. Narco-trafficking networks adaptively responded to increased interdiction pressure by spatially diversifying routes and dispersing shipment volumes. Thus, increased interdiction pressure had the unintended effect of expanding the spatial footprint of narco-trafficking networks. This coupled modeling approach enabled the study of narco-trafficking network evolution while being subjected to varying interdiction pressure as a spatially complex adaptive system. Capturing such co-evolution dynamics is essential for simulating traffickers' realistic adaptive responses to a wide range of interdiction scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given some limitations of satellite imagery for the study of land cover change, we draw attention here to a robust and often overlooked data source for use in student research: USGS topographic maps. Topographic maps offer an inexpensive, rapid, and accessible means for students to analyze land cover change over large areas. We demonstrate our visual-assessment based method using 1:24,000 topographic maps to examine urban expansion and surface mining shrinkage over thirty years in Ohio. Compared with alternative methodologies, the simple method we propose yields surprising robust results. The pedagogic potential of historic USGS topographic maps for land cover change research is just one reason to justify their maintenance in federal depositories.