Dear MSEM Community,
The Fall semester is officially underway! Our new cohort of future environmental professionals joined us at orientation, classes began this past weekend and all of our faculty have returned from summer break – recharged after time spent on research or travel. With everyone back, I am thrilled to share news with our community about this upcoming year. In addition to offering new exciting electives, as well as academic and professional development opportunities for our students, we are also prioritizing building strong connections with our community: our alumni, organizations and professionals in the field of environmental management, and the broader scientific community.
This fall we are starting strong with one of our largest cohorts in recent years; our incoming students bring a remarkable set of experiences from across the environmental field and adjacent disciplines and we look forward to seeing how they shape their coursework and research projects over the next two years. They join an impressive group of second year students who are already working on a wide range of pressing topics for their research: wildfire management, environmental health and ecosystem management, protecting biodiversity, and evaluating and mitigating risk from emerging contaminants and extreme weather events, just to name a few. Mark your calendars for May 14, our annual MSEM conference, when these students will present their final research projects.
As always, the MSEM curriculum is adaptive and responsive to the current needs in the field. This year, we have a number of new and exciting courses: GIS for Forest Carbon, GIS for Greenhouse Gas Accounting and Green Buildings, with an option for preparing for LEED certification. These new courses join the broad range of electives specializing on topics relevant to each of our four concentrations, alongside overarching classes like Environmental Law, Environmental Policy, and Sustainability: Leadership and Implementation. Stay tuned here on the blog and our social media accounts for features on both new and long-standing courses.
Environmental management is evolving rapidly. The challenges before us are increasingly complex, requiring critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration across disciplines. At the same time, technological advances, from monitoring methods and geospatial tools to data science, are opening new doors for innovation and for developing the knowledge necessary to guide complex environmental management decisions. As Dr. Kumar noted in his Plenary talk at USNCCM, where I presented some of my research earlier this summer, environmental and earth sciences are at a peak potential moment: questions once limited by scarce data or process uncertainty can now be tackled with new methods and expanded datasets. It is an important time to stay engaged with developments and to continue building cross-disciplinary skills.
Speaking of conferences, this past summer faculty and students attended scientific and professional conferences to learn, present and network. Always a highlight of the summer, our Geospatial Analysis Lab (GsAL) team, joined by USF students and alumni, participated in the ESRI User Conference in San Diego where students got to volunteer, attend workshops and launch or continue the development of their professional networks. Also representing GsAL, Professor David Saah gave the keynote address at the The Society for Conservation GIS Conference in June; shortly after, he and Maria Fernanda Lopez Ornelas traveled to Vienna for the European Space Agency – ESA’s Living Planet Symposium. Prof. Benning just came back from the Ecological Society of America Annual meeting, and Prof. Luengen and Prof. Siehr will soon be presenting their research at the Australasian SETAC and the Behavior, Energy, and Climate Change Conference (BECC) respectively. This coming semester, our students and faculty will be attending the upcoming Water Resources Science Symposium and State of the Estuary. If you are attending, connect with us! We’d love to meet you.
The MSEM program continues to work closely with local industry leaders, government agencies, and our outstanding Advisory Board to ensure our curriculum aligns with the needs of the profession. Our board includes MSEM alumni and collaborators from across the public and private sectors, bringing expertise from all fields within and adjacent to environmental management. We are always open to adding more voices, so if you or someone you know is interested, please reach out.
On behalf of all the faculty and staff, I welcome our new and continuing students to a year of growth and learning, and look forward to what this semester is going to bring. To our community, stay tuned with our blog and social media and connect with us at upcoming conferences and MSEM events throughout the year.
Amalia Kokkinaki
MSEM Program Director
