Even though the Johnson City resident will be focusing on geology with an emphasis on saltwater intrusion on aquifers and groundwater, it was her experience as an independent study student in the lab of Weixing Zhu, professor of biological sciences at Binghamton, that helped her discover her love of research.

She joined his lab in the summer of 2019 and has been working with doctoral student Vashti Mahadeo to collect, sort and identify ground arthropods (beetles, spring tails, mites and spiders) to compare biodiversity in urban and rural riparian (forested or wooded lands adjacent to a body of water) zones.

“She’s not even a biology major, but my work together with her interest in ecology overlap,” Mahadeo says. “She brings her geology background in and it meshes well.”

During the winter, Sprague-Getsy examined soil samples from these zones for pH and conductivity. She collected them with Mahadeo last summer. “She is almost like a graduate student in my lab because she is so highly dependable,” Zhu says.

“I’ve gotten so much out of the experience, from learning how to read papers to presenting research,” Sprague-Getsy says. “I get treated as an equal by Dr. Zhu and Vashti even though I’m an undergraduate student. I’ve really appreciated that and it has helped build my confidence.”

She presented her research on the biodiversity of coleoptera (beetles) in urban and rural riparian zones during the Illinois TRIO McNair Virtual Symposium in July 2020. Federal TRIO programs are educational opportunity outreach programs designed to motivate and support students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Sprague-Getsy was accepted into the competitive Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program in 2020, which provides research opportunities to disadvantaged undergraduate students with strong academic potential in preparation for doctoral studies.

During her Binghamton career, Sprague-Getsy has also been a student research collaborator at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a Binghamton University Acres farm intern, and a tutor and TRIO mentor through Student Support Services. She also completed an independent study under the supervision of Joseph Graney, professor of geological sciences and environmental studies, where she and another student tested the impacts of road salt and the combustion of wood chips at the campus heating plant and the resulting atmospheric emission of wood fly ash on the soils on and adjacent to the campus.

Zhu says he’s proud to be part of Sprague-Getsy’s success.

“She has used Binghamton University to its full advantage of what we can offer, and my lab is just one example,” he says. “If you look at her résumé, she is really engaged in different activities, particularly as a mentor. She’s a role model and an example, and she is exceptional at using the resources available to her to achieve a goal.”

Junior Kelly Young spent last summer tracking algae blooms from 438 miles in the air, via NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite, to learn more about when and where they happen.

Algae blooms occur when run-off drags excess fertilizer into bodies of water, providing the aquatic plant with abundant nutrients. Their population grows exponentially, and they consume all or most of the oxygen in the water. This creates a detrimental effect on the local ecosystem, often called a dead zone, where no life can prosper.

NASA provides open access to Landsat data so scientists can use it. Young believes that with more data on algae blooms, she can help predict and restrain their overgrowth.

“Once the blooms form, it’s really hard to get rid of them or decrease the effect that they have on the environment,” says Young, a double major in environmental studies and geography. “The goal is to be able to create a model to predict where the blooms are going to form and when they are going to form, so we are able to alert local agencies to better prevent the blooms from becoming full blown.”

Every 16 days, a satellite passes over New York’s Chautauqua Lake and Seneca Lake, measuring several ranges of light frequencies, called bands. Landsat 8 measures 11 bands, with only four of them being visible to the naked human eye.

But algae blooms in some lakes are so dense it doesn’t take a high-tech satellite to find them.

“In the summer the algae concentrations are very high so you visibly see it,” Young says. “So on an average day in the summer, if someone is walking by one of these lakes, they will be able to see the algae in a thick green color.”

Young developed a data-processing algorithm, which found that in these lakes harmful algae blooms are mainly focused in the southern basins between May and August. Findings like this help her research group narrow down the timing and location of algae blooms so eventually they can use drones to pick up more detailed readings.

Young says while Landsat data is a necessary beginning for creating a predictive model, there are some major faults that drones could fix.

“When I processed [the Landsat data] for chlorophyll, I found that some months that shouldn’t have a high concentration have a high concentration,” Young says. “That’s because the clouds distort the satellite and the data.”

Young’s research, which was funded by Binghamton University’s Summer Scholars and Artists program, received recognition on campus and beyond.

During the University’s November Geographic Information System (GIS) Day celebration, Kelly’s work won first place in the undergraduate poster competition. She also was invited to present her findings at the 2019 American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in San Francisco.

Timothy De Smet, director of Binghamton University’s Geophysics and Remote Sensing Laboratory, mentored Young throughout her summer research. He says her findings are vital in the continuation of algae bloom research, and that her inner drive is what led to the project’s success.

“She is extremely hardworking, whether it be as a campus tour guide, in class or on her research,” De Smet says. “She is smart, obviously, but also resilient — you need that grit to make it in research.”

This is not Young’s first experience researching algae; in her Brooklyn high school, she experimented using barley straw to decrease toxicity in algae. She also participated in the First-year Research Immersion program, where her group used drones.

Gonzalez, 22, is part of a team conducting a novel gentrification study concerning the area surrounding the new pharmacy school.

Gentrification typically comes in the form of businesses buying depreciated properties, resulting in increased property values in the surrounding area. This often leads landlords to hike rents, which causes lower-income residents to move.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 18.8 percent of Johnson City residents live in poverty, a figure 25 percent higher than the national average.

“It’s one of the most poverty-stricken areas in the country,” says Gonzalez, an accelerated student who is pursuing a bachelor’s in geographic information systems (GIS) and a master’s degree in urban planning. “Buildings are made out of sheet rock, plywood staircases, with multiple families living in them. People living in these terrible conditions all because they’re paying $50-200 for rent.”

These conditions make Johnson City a prime gentrification target, and the pharmacy school provides an opportunity to study the area and its residents before gentrification takes place. That’s what makes Gonzalez’s research important: Previous research has typically examined gentrification after it has already occurred, but not before the process starts.

Gonzalez and his colleagues will look at variables such as spatial makeup, rent cost, median age, ethnicity and unemployment during the next several years. They’ll compare the local data to national figures. The team also conducts interviews and surveys and is establishing relationships with area residents. The researchers say there’s a lack of research that documents individual cases of gentrification and tracks where people go when they are displaced.

The research team uses Story Maps, a website that documents statistics on a map over a timeline, to help tie together the different forms of data in a simple display, making it easier to observe the changes that take place over time.

Gonzalez, who grew up in Harlem, is familiar with how an area can change over time from gentrification.

“Watching my own home change and my friends move out of their homes really pushed me toward this research,” Gonzalez says. “Its purpose is to improve the area for the community, but if you’re pushing the existing community out as a result, who is the improvement for?”

Gonzalez learned about the project from John Frazier, director of the research team. Kevin Heard, associate director of the GIS core facility at Binghamton and part of the research team, says they’ve been impressed by Gonzalez’s positive ideas for the study.

“He takes initiative,” Heard says. “Anytime we bring up a project, he always shows interest.”

Gonzalez plans to apply to Harvard University and MIT for a program in urban design. Eventually, he wants to start an urban development consulting firm that helps with planning and designing new buildings and takes into account the existing demographics of an area.

Gonzalez may even want to go into politics. He’s already had a taste of that work while serving as the vice president of multicultural affairs (VPMA) on the Student Association.

“I really care about people who are of marginalized communities,” Gonzalez says. “That’s why I’m VPMA. I want to help out everyone who feels like they don’t have a voice.”

To learn more about Gonzalez and his team’s research, visit the Story Maps site.

The object in his hand is a PFM-1 “butterfly” blast mine, which has one purpose: to maim, not to kill. Left over from the Soviet-Afghan conflict, these mines are ubiquitous throughout Afghanistan, with an estimated 10 million of them still out there.

Jasper Baur, a sophomore at Binghamton University, is part of a team developing a means to detect these mines using sensors mounted on drones.

Butterfly mines are Russian-made plastic explosives that trigger once 25 pounds of cumulative pressure has been applied.

“It doesn’t even really kill people, it’ll just blow off limbs,” Baur says. “And children play with them because they look like toys. It’s really bad.”

These mines have stuck around for so long because they cannot be found with a metal detector, and there’s no other means of locating them safely.

The team hopes thermal imaging can change that.

At sunrise, the mines heat up faster than the environment surrounding them, and they take longer to cool after sundown. A mine can be detected by looking for heat differences during these times.

The researchers mounted a thermal imaging camera onto a quadcopter drone to see if they could detect the mines safely and accurately. The drone takes thermal pictures every few seconds while flying that are later analyzed by a computer.

The team first tested the device in a controlled environment by hovering it over mine replicas in different sandbox environments, with successful results. This fall, researchers finished their first pilot study in a state park near Binghamton, scattering replicas throughout the park and flying the drone over to detect them.

The team is processing the data from that study, and the device is nearly finished. The researchers’ task now is to work out the kinks in detecting the mines, focusing on how easily they can be detected and how many “false alarms” (things that look like mines that are not) come up.

Eventually, they hope to develop software that allows a computer to use the mines’ temperature values and scan through photos to detect them. Baur presented this research in November at the American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans.

Baur, a geology major and a fine arts minor, started this research in fall 2016, when he joined the Geospatial Remote Sensing stream of the Freshman Research Immersion program.

“Jasper is an ultra-high-achieving student,” says Timothy De Smet, research educator. “What makes him stand out is how much he actually cares.”

Baur, who plans to go to graduate school for geology or geophysics somewhere in California, says he became interested in geology as a kid.

“I had a big rock collection, I always liked collecting them,” he says. “Studying the land is very applicable to me. I was outside the other day, and noticed ‘Oh wow, this surface process is happening, and I know why.’”

Baur also has a passion for art, especially acrylic painting. He is vice president of the Binghamton University Fine Arts Society, a club that meets weekly for drawing sessions and monthly for gallery viewings in Binghamton.

“I really enjoy creating art in a social setting,” he says. “I’ll have my first gallery showing this December.”

Yet, besides the color of the skin, this change is nothing new in the American experience. For more than 150 years, foreign groups flocked to the United States in successive waves, concentrating in big-city neighborhoods and small rural towns, making many native-born Americans anxious as the immigrants changed the look and feel of their new environs.

“I try to show students historically that it’s a constant trend,” says John Frazier, who was recently named distinguished service professor by the State University of New York. “The role of human geography is to explain what places in the country are like and how they are changing, and in this context, due to immigration and ethnicity.”

Frazier, who received the Ethnic Geography Career Award from the Association of American Geographers for his pioneering work on ethnicity, is also the founder of the Conference on Race, Place, and Ethnicity, which he and a group of colleagues initiated at Binghamton University in 2002.

First the Irish came and met resistance. In Chicago, merchants displayed “Irish need not apply” signs and a candidate for mayor suggested decorating light poles with hanging Irishmen. Then the Italians came and met with the same antagonism. Then the Germans, the Scandinavians and so on.

“This country, for all of its wonderful traits, has a bias as part of the culture,” Frazier says. “So what I try to do is enlighten students because it’s easy to focus on the here and now, but you have to have a context for culture and for the history of this country to understand how intolerance evolved and how it affected everything from Europeans to African-Americans to Mexicans, Chinese and Japanese.

“It isn’t that we want to beat up America. We want to frame these experiences in periods of intolerance and learn from them and also relate them to today and our views of other cultures that are coming to the United States and how we can interact with them.”

He noted that students also need to understand what is different about the current period. He says one important difference is in the origins of immigrants, now largely Hispanics/Latinos and Asians, and many coming with capital that leads to different settlement structures. New immigrant gateways have emerged and many immigrants settle in suburbs.

Frazier spends a lot of time studying Queens, N.Y., the most diverse 100 square miles in the world. He looks at how ethnicity changes the visual landscape as an ethnic group moves into a neighborhood and expresses its values through clothing, landscape and building styles.

For instance, in Bellerose and Queens Village, which have rapidly increasing Asian, Indian and South Asian populations, it’s common to see houses influenced by Indian architecture, with paved-over yards and stainless-steel fences and railings.

Frazier digs past how things change and tries to understand why.

“It’s not just the patterns,” he says. “The other part is understanding what causes these processes to occur, being able to explain reverse migration, being able to explain why Puerto Ricans and, more recently, a diversified Hispanic population are moving to Allentown and York and Reading, Pa. It’s also understanding the issues and the impacts. That’s all in geography.”

He has found that different ethnic groups can move for the same reasons. For instance, when he looked closely at Allentown, which has seen a large influx of Hispanics in the last couple of decades, at the same time that Anglos and Germans have moved out, he came across answers that could have been given during the “White Flight” to the suburbs in the 1960s.

“‘Tranquility,'” they told him. “‘It’s a place that’s green. It’s low key. It’s quiet. It’s beautiful. It’s pleasant. And I can raise my family here.'”

Frazier says that understanding diversity’s past and current trends is essential in a country in constant flux, especially as the world quickly shrinks and we come into contact with other cultures more and more.

“We need to be tolerant,” he says. “But it’s one thing to talk about bringing together a large number of people from different backgrounds, another to get them to mix and do interactions that lead to cultural awareness and cultural understanding.”

Climate change and its anticipated health effects vary by place, with broad regional impacts and disproportionate risks among various populations. Emerging diseases are among the most far-reaching consequences of global warming. In the decades ahead, we need to develop a geographically based framework to identify vulnerable places and at-risk populations. That will require partnerships with health professionals and policymakers.

What’s an emerging disease?
Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, or ERIDs, are infectious diseases that have increased in incidence or geographic range, recently moved into new host populations, recently been discovered or are caused by newly evolved pathogens. Noteworthy also is their timeline; diseases have been classified as ERIDs if their incidence in humans has increased since the 1970s or threatens to increase in the near future.

ERIDs have received a lot of public attention due in part to recent pandemics and how rapidly they are diffusing globally. For example, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was the first pandemic to emerge in the 21st century. Following its initial diagnosis in November 2002 in Guangdong, China, it spread to more than 30 countries within six months. About 8,450 cases were diagnosed globally, with a 10 percent fatality rate.

Within a couple of years, concerns about SARS were overshadowed by the emergence of the H1N1 virus, which originated in Mexico and the southern United States in April 2009, and then spread to more than 206 countries in less than seven months. As of November 2009, H1N1 — also called swine flu — had infected 526,060 people, killing at least 6,770.

Commenting on this worrisome trend, epidemiologist Larry Brilliant noted that we might be entering the age of pandemics. This certainly may be the case since more than 30 new diseases have emerged or expanded their geographic territories during the last three decades. Some, such as the drug-resistant strains of Plasmodium falciparum malaria and tuberculosis, pose significant global health risks.

The climate change connection
Scientists are beginning to piece together the causal links between ERIDs and global warming. The underlying factors, the routes and the pathways of disease transmission, however, are complicated with potentially long latency periods. Alongside climate change and environmental disturbances, the underlying factors include the changing demographics of communities and human behaviors (urbanization, migration, risky behaviors); increasing global trade and travel; changes in industrial and agricultural practices (including food production, processing and distribution); the breakdown of public health measures in many countries; the overuse of antibiotics; and the development of resistant or new strains of disease pathogens.

More recently, some diseases have re-emerged because of bioterrorism (as in the case of anthrax), conflicts in world regions and persistent inequities among populations. Human susceptibility to ERIDs has also increased due to the aging population (longer life expectancies) and the adverse and synergistic effects of HIV/AIDs and other autoimmune diseases.

The spatial variability of climate change, the regional differentiation of its impacts and the rapid and intense spread of emergent diseases all suggest the need for a geographically based framework to identify vulnerable places and at-risk populations. Such a framework will require a deeper level of understanding of the biophysical changes that are occurring in these places, the demographic characteristics of those areas and the range of social, institutional, technological and behavioral adaptations that are — or, in some cases, are not — being put in place to alleviate these challenges.

Like the anticipated changes in climate, the potential for loss of life as a result of exposure to these hazards varies. Some places, particularly low-lying coastal areas and floodplains, urban heat islands and disease vector border regions, are more likely to bear the brunt of these hazards than others. Societal impact will also vary from place to place, with disparate risks among different populations depending on pre-existing disadvantages such as racial/ethnic disparities and income inequalities.

Within the United States, for example, Hurricane Katrina uncovered the deep divide by race and class in New Orleans. Our study of the hazardous exposures arising from this 2005 catastrophic meteorological event showed that the most vulnerable populations living in the maximum inundated areas were minorities and low-income populations. This study confirmed that the biophysical attributes, socio-demographic characteristics and the local context of communities are key drivers of vulnerability when evaluating the health impact of climate change.

A recent call for public health preparedness for global climate change published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine underscores the need to formally incorporate a place-based approach in developing health strategies for these environmental threats. A focus on place, the authors argue, would emphasize the local nature of both human exposures and responses to these hazards. A spatial perspective would bring attention to the local areas that would be most affected by these events. The geographically based approach will showcase the strengths of the local people, enabling the collective participation of local stakeholders in environmental health planning to promote sustainable and livable communities.

Why look to geographers for answers?
Geographers bring numerous tools to the table to work with public health professionals and policy makers. Geographers can offer a number of analytical approaches and technologies for disease surveillance and intervention, including geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, geostatistics and cartography.

One such example can be drawn from the landscape epidemiology approach, which relies on geospatial methodologies to delineate the geographic territories of transmissible diseases. Using this approach, the ecological niche of a transmissible disease can be delineated by overlaying the spatial distribution of the pathogenic agent with the distribution of the disease vectors and host populations. Within this distribution range, one can determine the biophysical and social conditions that favor the survival and transmission of the disease pathogen. This approach has been used to monitor vector-borne ERIDs such as the West Nile virus and Lyme disease in the United States.

Another example of geography in action can be seen in the fight against malaria, another ERID. The disease is now endemic in 109 countries, with nearly 3.3 billion people at risk, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Climate change, poverty, armed regional conflicts and the scourge of HIV/AIDS have all contributed to the persistence of this disease. These conditions, along with increasing globalization and international migration, have heightened concerns about its potential emergence or re-emergence in temperate regions. In the United States, for example, malaria is now the most commonly imported disease, with more than 1,000 cases reported each year. With the anticipated changes in temperature, rainfall and humidity, there’s a real possibility of re-emergence in the United States.

The use of geospatial models to predict malaria risk and transmission has been quite informative, with projected net increases in the global at-risk population to 8 billion by 2080. Though these models have been criticized for using coarse spatial resolutions and overly emphasizing temperature changes, the results provide a valuable starting point for countries to develop public health strategies. Along with the development of the predictive models, geographic fieldwork and site-specific activities have been beneficial in assessing the social, economic and behavioral factors that influence disease transmission, and the treatment or preventive practices used in high-risk communities.

One such study was recently undertaken in a low-income community in Sierra Leone, in which we assessed the prevalence, severity and duration of malaria episodes among 731 residents; their risk factors; knowledge, access and use of reliable treatment options; and the efficacy and benefits of alternative therapies. Chloroquine was still the most widely used therapy for malaria in this community despite the growing resistance of p falciparum parasites to this drug. The research findings provided a useful context for developing a health intervention program for the community. Educating residents about the environmental risk sources of malaria, in addition to promoting the use of bednets, homeopathic methods and artemisia-based therapies, offers hope for reducing the malaria burden in this community.

These efforts demonstrate the importance of scholarly engagements to develop and advance meaningful and sustainable approaches for dealing with environmental risks and health challenges that affect the livelihoods of residents in vulnerable communities.  As the threats from global climate change continue to emerge, the need for scientific networks that bolster such initiatives and collaborative partnerships across disciplines such as geography and public health becomes even greater.

For more on this topic

The Age of Pandemics by Larry Brilliant

The Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2009