GEOG 431 is designed for students to understand the natural processes of aquatic ecosystems, management of water resources, and threats to sustaining water quantity and quality, for all types of freshwater surface, groundwater, rivers, lakes, wetlands. This course should appeal to water resource managers, geographers, ecologists, earth scientists, planners, other environmental professionals as well as non-science majors. This course will develop awareness and appreciation of the multiple perspectives about water as a precious resource, commodity, and sometimes hazard. Students in the course will first examine water Course Justification characteristics, sources, classification systems, and aquatic ecosystems. Next, we will examine water resource management, including issues surrounding irrigation; floods and dams; provision of safe potable water; threats to water quantity and quality including human and aquatic ecosystem effects; the water economy including virtual water and water footprints; water laws and policy; institutions for water management at the global, national, regional and local scale; and issues of water conflict, security, and climate change.

This course is designed to expose students to different GIS applications in water resources. It will emphasize geospatial data acquisition of hydrologic features, spatial analysis, and data representation. Students will learn through projects, lectures and hands-on computer lab exercises to investigate and solve water resource issues. Practical applications will focus on watershed and drainage network delineation, assessment of aquatic ecosystems, and surface generation methods using spatial hydrology models.

This course explores politics related to the use, transformation, valuation, and representation of the environment. Scholarship in geography and related disciplines has demonstrated that nature in general and specific environments in particular are unavoidably political. Environmental management can thus never be a purely scientific or technological challenge; it requires critical analysis of cultural, political, and economic contexts, factors, and effects. For instance, effective environmental management requires consideration of how culture shapes how we perceive and value our environments, who wins and who loses in any particular approach to environmental management, and what the relative advantages and disadvantages of competing institutional approaches to environmental management are.This course examines the development of environmental governance, with a primary focus on the United States. It explores both how various groups within society conceive of and value the environment, and multiple approaches to environmental governance and protection. It reviews the history of environmental movements and regulation, and contemporary issues and debates in environmental governance, with particular attention to the effects of institutional forms and social movements. In particular, it examines competing arguments for and against governance approaches centered on state action, market mechanisms, and prominent roles for NGOs and social movements.