About

The GeoGraphics Lab at the Penn State Department of Geography is a multimedia cartography laboratory that specializes in cartographic design, production, and research. The lab offers professional geospatial visualization services, including map design, production, and research, serving a diverse range of clients such as commercial, nonprofit, and government organizations, as well as members of the central Pennsylvania community, PSU Geography students, and faculty. Their expertise encompasses creating static print and digital maps, with solutions also available for interactive digital maps. The lab is supported by the Peter R. Gould Center for Geography Education and Outreach and is committed to taking on new challenges in the field of cartography and geospatial visualization.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Ecology
• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Social Science
• Geography
• Sociology
• Regional science
• Environmental science
• Business
• Environmental planning
• Civil engineering
• Cartography
• Economic geography
• Environmental resource management

Selected publications

• Arrayed relations and runoff regulations: Stormwater governance and the hydrosocial territorialization of Pennsylvania grid-scale solar development

  Environment and Planning E Nature and Space · 2026-02-25

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Solar photovoltaics are crucial technologies for purposive low-carbon energy transition, yet there is uneven oversight of the development of grid-scale solar facilities around the US. Where other forms of regulation are absent, National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) construction site permitting programs may take a prominent role in governing solar development. In this paper, we use the lens of hydrosocial territorialization to reveal how socio-material relations and power dynamics configured through this Clean Water Act program shape Pennsylvania solar energy landscapes. We specifically ask: 1. How has water regulation come to regulate grid-scale solar development? 2. How does the NPDES governance process work when regulating grid-scale solar developments, specifically, and who and what influence the process? 3. How does solar development, regulated through the NPDES program, become a form of hydrosocial territorialization? 4. How does conceptualizing grid-scale solar development as a hydrosocial territorialization process inform geographic scholarship on energy transitions? Through a case study in Pennsylvania, where grid-scale solar development has rapidly increased in some agricultural regions, we reviewed regulatory documents, conducted key informant interviews with individuals involved in NPDES governance, and conducted a focus group of residents who live near grid-scale solar development. Through our analysis, we uncover nuances in these hydrosocial relations that are not included in regulatory documents. Through their authority, expertise, and discretion, engineers, contractors, and county and regional officials influence the hydrosocial territorialization process; at the same time, vegetation and soil materialities also shape solar facilities. As development progresses around the United States, the NPDES program will continue to spur generation or modification of relationships, knowledge, and regulatory interpretations, reconfiguring rural geographies and solar landscapes in the process.

  PublisherDOI

• Recognizing senses of place in just energy transitions: Insights from rural Pennsylvania solar development

  Geoforum · 2026-02-24

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  • Senses of place compose a spectrum of flexibility to grid-scale solar development. • Misrecognition, related to private property rights, impedes place-based transitions. • Just transitions contend with relationship between recognition and sense of place. Renewable energy development that is compatible with local senses of place where it is built is thought to be an optimal way to pursue place-based energy transition. However, this is contingent upon the recognition of different senses of place that are formed by diverse sets of place meanings and attachments that vary across differently positioned members of local communities. In this paper, we parse why there are discrepancies within local community acceptance of and opposition toward grid-scale solar development in two rural Pennsylvania townships by analyzing the ability of different senses of place to flex with the changes that this development brings. We draw upon a series of 26 interviews and a focus group we convened with residents of and informants familiar with the case study area and recent grid-scale solar projects to study this relationship, and we argue that senses of place exist along a spectrum of flexibility from accepting of a dynamic working landscape to protective of an amenities landscape. Multiple forms of misrecognition, influenced particularly by the legal and cultural embeddedness of private property rights, impede the achievement of a just, place-based transition that is informed by people across this spectrum. We present our findings with four vignettes that illuminate some of these complexities. Based on our findings, we argue that a place-based approach should center recognitional justice to not only identify and respond to place meanings and attachments but also parse how they are constructed and emerge from within existing systems of power.

  PublisherDOI

• Stencil adventures: Learning from political ecology to advance energy justice

  Dialogues in Human Geography · 2026-04-08

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This commentary engages Festus Boamah's article calling to ‘discipline’ energy justice (EJ) scholarship more centrally in human geography. While I commend the ambition and provocation of the article, I raise several cautions about attempting to house EJ in a specific discipline, geography or otherwise. Rather than disciplining EJ, I recommend that EJ can learn from the experiences of political ecology, which is a heterogenous community of practice united by shared commitments to making the world a better place. Boamah's ‘normativity stencil adventures’ can be a powerful means for advancing both EJ and political ecology as they afford scholars an opportunity to analyze the intricacies of the places where injustices occur and to build solidarity across places to collectively advance justice and equity for all.

  PublisherDOI

• Why more drilling doesn’t need to mean more harm to the environment

  Nature · 2025-01-28 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Using Geoscientific Analysis and Community Engagement to Analyze Exposures to Potential Groundwater Contamination Related to Hydrocarbon Extraction in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

  PubMed · 2025-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  INTRODUCTION: Community concerns about the potential health effects of energy development have grown in recent years. This project evaluated the links between unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD) and potential water contamination in Beaver, Greene, and Washington counties of southwestern Pennsylvania (SW PA). This region, with its long history of hydrocarbon development, including coal mining and conventional oil and gas development, has many overlapping sources of potential contamination. Additionally, it is one of the most active UOGD regions globally. As the study progressed, we extended many of our statistical investigations of groundwater in SW PA to the entire state. METHODS: We used statistical analysis to isolate the influences of geogenic and anthropogenic processes on groundwater chemistry and to identify potential linkages between UOGD and water contamination using a groundwater chemistry dataset of over 7,000 samples in SW PA, each with approximately 40 reported chemical analytes. We primarily targeted contamination by salt species found in brines. We conducted six community focus groups in the tri-county region during the summers of 2022 and 2023, which helped identify areas of community concern and interpret our preliminary findings. The focus groups highlighted wastewater mismanagement as a key area of community concern, which we examined in our geoscience analysis. Where possible, we also extended our statistical analysis to the entire state (28,609 groundwater quality analyses) so we could assess the effect of different land uses and geology on water quality. RESULTS: Across the SW PA region, we observe small but statistically significant increases in barium (Ba) and strontium (Sr) in groundwater within 1 km of UOGD, with higher concentrations associated with greater proximity to and density of unconventional oil and gas (UOG) wells. Statistical inferences from the groundwater data point to spills of briny wastewaters on UOG well pads as the likeliest explanation for these increases. For example, Ba and Sr have an even stronger relationship with the locations of spill-related violations at UOG well pads. We found a statistically significant increase in salt concentrations near wastewater impoundments that are no longer in operation because of reprimands by the state regulator and environmental violations. These relationships persist even after better controlling for other geogenic and anthropogenic salt sources using a fixed-effects model. The information gathered from the focus groups suggests that communities are most concerned about potential radiation exposure from UOGD wastewater management, which may increase cancer risks. The geoscientific analysis does not reveal evidence across the region of increased concentrations of species associated with radiation risks in groundwater related to UOGD. This lack of evidence is partly because few groundwater analyses measure or detect radium, the biggest source of radiation in Pennsylvania groundwater. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that the statistically significant increases in salts associated with UOGD are likely due to wastewater spills or leaks from impoundments rather than hydraulic fracturing itself. Our inference that wastewater spills and leaks from impoundments are the most likely mechanism related to increases in brine concentrations aligns with community concerns about wastewater management. This research, along with other previous or ongoing studies, documents that contamination is localized in areas we refer to as "hotspots." Therefore, although geospatial analysis shows extremely small regional increases in brine salt concentrations in groundwater near UOGD, we conclude these increases are due to numerous, well-distributed spill and leak incidents across the shale play, despite their localized impact. The increases in brine salt concentrations in groundwater samples were never observed to be above contamination levels that pose risks for human health according to US Environmental Protection Agency guidelines. However, in areas with dense UOGD, our analysis indicates that some toxic species could be of local concern, given dissolved species ratios and Cl levels in the wastewaters generated through oil and gas development (known as produced water) in Pennsylvania. This result is predicated on assumptions about the average species concentrations in produced waters, the spatial density of UOG wells, and the locations of hotspots. High ionic strength wastewater released into groundwater could also induce secondary mobilization of hazardous species like radium via cation exchange. To address public concerns, additional groundwater testing, especially for radium, should be conducted in identified hotspots, near problematic impoundments, or near spills.

  Publisher

• An anatomy of inscrutability of the unconventional oil and gas development-water-health nexus in Pennsylvania

  Energy Research & Social Science · 2025-10-29 · 2 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Hydrocarbon Extraction and Risk to Groundwater in Pennsylvania: Part 1. Using Geoscientific Analysis and Community Engagement to Analyze Exposures to Potential Groundwater Contamination Related to Hydrocarbon Extraction in Southwestern Pennsylvania

  PubMed Central · 2025-12-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Renegotiating the Energy Transition 

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Cracking Appalachia: A Political-Industrial Ecology Perspective

  Annals of the American Association of Geographers · 2025-02-03 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper presents a political-industrial ecology (PIE) analysis of a petrochemical ethane cracker plant located above the Marcellus Shale Basin near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The analysis is motivated by community concerns that the cracker is more than just a plant and that current regulatory practices render the broader petrochemical ecosystem within which the plant exists largely unknowable. By integrating theory and methods from urban political ecology and Vienna School social metabolism, I present a metabolic tour of the petrochemical ecosystem to better render it visible and to situate it within the evolving global petrochemical economy. Within Pennsylvania, the plant exists in an ecosystem of over 20,000 energy infrastructures whose exact numbers and locations are largely unknown due to regulatory practices and exemptions unique to the energy industry. Because of this infrastructure buildout, the Marcellus Shale Basin is now interconnected to the US Gulf Coast, Canada, and Europe, resulting in more globally integrated, separate markets for natural gas and petrochemicals. As reconceptualized through PIE, this paper demonstrates how metabolism, a resurgent concept within various social and engineering science disciplines, can be a method for advancing community-engaged research by simultaneously embedding industrial ecosystems within place and assessing their broader socioecological significance.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Hardening and Hollowing Out Private Property: Rentiership, Dispossession, and Planetary Extraction in the Marcellus Shale

  Antipode · 2025-12-11

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Southwestern Pennsylvania (SWPA) has long been an energy extractive periphery, continuously remade through cycles of dispossession and accumulation. Here we examine the changing dynamics of private property in these cycles and its central role in the latest phase of extraction—unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD). Drawing from literature on extractive dispossessions and rent circulation, we argue that UOGD has resulted in the “hardening and hollowing out” of property rights in SWPA. Unlike past extractive phases, landowners profit from UOGD primarily by renting their land, which hardens formal aspects of property rights. Yet, the environmental degradation of UOGD has left many feeling they have lost the landscape they knew, hollowing out communities. Residents' experiences, gathered through focus groups and interviews, demonstrate how geographies of planetary extraction are experienced in SWPA as contradictory processes of rentiership and dispossession.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Rob Bailis

  10 shared

• Karen Bakker

  University of British Columbia

  7 shared

• Erika Weinthal

  Duke University

  7 shared

• Tao Wen

  5 shared

• Kate J. Neville

  University of Toronto

  5 shared

• Saumya Vaishnava

  Pennsylvania State University

  5 shared

• Susan L. Brantley

  Pennsylvania State University

  5 shared

• Samuel Shaheen

  Pennsylvania State University

  4 shared

Education

• PhD

  Yale University Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

  2013

• MPP

  University of California Berkeley

  2007

• BSc, Economics

  George Washington University

  2000

Awards & honors

• NSF CAREER Award (2018)