The Rocky Mountain Region is proud to announce our two student scholarship winners for the 2019-2020 program. Lawrence Beals, a Masters Degree candidate at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Department of Anthropology and Geography, was awarded $1,000 in the Masters Degree category. He is researching sites in Mexico, Honduras and Columbia to determine how LiDAR density patterns affect our ability to differentiate archaeological features on the landscape using the LiDAR datasets from that area. Lawrence is also exploring how to effectively merge Unmanned Airborne Vehicle (UAV) and airborne LiDAR datasets. This is part of an ongoing initiative he is spearheading to reduce research data acquisition costs and ensure data is of sufficient quality to support the research efforts in the Center for Archaeology and Remote Sensing (CARS) laboratory at CSU. He hopes to go on to pursue a Ph.D. and research how complex societies have dealt with collapse scenarios brought on by resource depletions or external pressures, specifically looking at what lessons can be learned and applied to the current climate change issue. Lawrence Beals plans to pursue a career as an Archeologist.
Applications from Masters Degree candidates were assessed by a review committee in 9 areas: appropriateness of field of study, quality of narrative, communication, letter of recommendation, enthusiasm, scholastic ability, extracurricular activity, quality of research, and appropriateness of research. Ph.D. candidates were also assessed in all of the above areas, plus uniqueness of research, and innovation of research.
Georgios Charisoulis, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Department of Geography, was awarded $1,5000 in the Ph.D. category.
Georgios is using Boulder County as a study site to research suitability modeling of renewable energy facilities, specifically, biogas anaerobic digestors, near rural farms. Anaerobic Digestion (AD) breaks down organic waste (e.g., crop waste or manure) by means of fermentation within a digester to produce natural gas. AD has not been widely incorporated into energy systems in the United States, but is more commonly used in the European Union.
Georgios’ work addresses an important problem that has long challenged location-allocation modelers in the geospatial sciences, namely, how to site public or private facilities within specific community constraints when data for source or target locations are not available. His goal is to establish robust location models of known reliability when data are aggregated or missing. A second important contribution of this research is the refined spatial search strategy afforded by the Archimedes Spiral. This search methodology is innovative in allowing for systematic compartmentalization of space and prioritization of specific sub-regions within a study area. An extensive search of published literature shows that this type of spatial refinement has not been applied to location-allocation modeling, and so evaluating this search strategy can inform expectations about processing times as well as improvements in the accuracy of selected site locations. A third contribution of this research is in working with open-source data and software code, following best practices of reproducible science.
The Board of Directors of the Rocky Mountain Region wants to congratulate Lawrence Beals and Georgios Charisoulis, our scholarship winners, and wishes them much success in their future research and career endeavors.
5/29/2020