Two (2) $1,500 scholarships to undergraduate or first-year graduate students studying GIS at a Montana college or university through the MAGIP Higher Education GIS Scholarship

• Sierra Curtis, The University of Montana  Sierra is currently a senior at Bigfork High School and will attend The University of Montana this fall. She is already an experienced geospatial technology user and recently presented some of her work at the 2016 MAGIP Conference. She will use the scholarship funds to support the development of a comprehensive story map chronicling the state of human trafficking around the world. 

• Philip Williams, The University of Montana   Philip Williams will be a first year graduate student in The National Center for Landscape Fire Analysis, at the University of Montana. At the Center, he will be working with a team of scientists that are learning to apply autonomous aerial systems to forestry and wildland fire situations. In that work, they will be merging GIS-enabled data models with cloud-based radiometric processing algorithms to ensure timely delivery of fuel models from airborne sensors.

• Chris Bilbrey, Montana State University  Chris Bilbrey is a graduate student working on a Master of Science degree at Montana State University, in the Department of Earth Science. Chris will be using a suite of geospatial tools to develop new field measurement techniques for quantifying the spatial variability of snowpack and how that relates to snowpack stability. 

• Jeremiah SunderRaj, The University of Montana  Jeremiah SunderRaj is an undergraduate student at The University of Montana, were he is a dedicated and passionate young spatial ecologist. Jeremiah and one of his professors just completed a preliminary analysis of wolf watching spatial data this semester, and it was so productive and such an interesting avenue, that he will be working with Yellowstone National Park next year as a full-year independent study to further refine a system for managing wildlife viewing and vehicle traffic.

• Michael Frothingham, Montana State University  Michael Frothingham is also a first year graduate student in the Department of Earth Sciences at Montana State University. He will be developing a modeling routines that all the integration of field data and digital spatial data to better understand the relationships between geologic units. Along with that, he is also proposing digital cartographic methods to streamline geologic map production. 

• Holt Hancock , Montana State University Holt Hancock is a first year graduate student in the earth science department at Montana State University and is the 2015 recipient of the MAGIP Higher Education scholarship. In his project, titled “Snow Drift and Avalanche Hazard in the High-Arctic Maritime Snow Climate of Svalbard, Norway” Holt will have the opportunity to work a team of international, world-class arctic scientists and develop a time-series GIS model of snow redistribution by wind. The goal of producing this model is to initiate a plan for passive snow mitigation strategies for a transportation corridor in Norway. Results of his work will be highly applicable to Montana and our relationship with snow related transportation hazards.

• Nathaniel Robinson, University of Montana  Nathanial is a PhD student in the College of Forestry and Conservation at the University of Montana, and he will receive a scholarship of $1,000 towards his project titled “An Analysis of Changing Rangeland Dynamics in Kenya”. Nathaniel will be working closely with Kenyan community-wildlife conservancies in the Masai and Samuru regions and with the Nature Conservancy to address pressing wildlife conservation needs that incorporate historic land use practices of nomadic pastoralists who contributed to creating and maintaining productive habitat for centuries. His work will not only help develop new applications for GIS and remote sensing in conservation and resource management, but also be immediately used by Kenyans to conserve wildlife populations, maintain habitat quality, and retain seasonal migration routes, while addressing the livelihood needs and interests of resident pastoralists.

• Sarah Benjaram, Montana State University Sarah is a first year graduate student in the earth science department at Montana State University and she will receive $500 towards her project titled “Morphologic and Climatic Controls on Soil Weathering in a Glaciated and Unglaciated Landscpe”. Soils are a critical resource for proper ecosystem functioning, and in her work she will try to quantify the impact of physical and chemical factors that control soil formation in glaciated and unglaciated mountain ranges. The Bitterroot and Sapphire mountain ranges of western Montana share a similar lithology but have been shaped by very different processes. She will take advantage of raster processing and remote sensing to quantify various elements of her study area, and ultimately make inferences about soil formation and fertility. Her work has direct implications for resource managers because upland soil erosion and its effects on streams may impair water quality in mountainous systems and are specifically recognized as environmental threats in her study area. Sarah will share her findings with the public by working with geology classes at Bitterroot College in Hamilton, MT and also lead an erosion dynamics workshop for girls in 6th through 8th grade through a Montana State Extended University program.

• Garin Wally, University of Montana Garin is a graduate geography student at the University of Montana and will receive $250 towards a project he calls “Open River Map: Mapping Water Hazards with Twitter”. In this project Garin is proposing to take advantage of social media and associated “big data” to facilitate citizen science and in real-time track river hazards in an infrastructure independent manner.  He plans to build an application that collects tweets from volunteer fishermen who record the locations and types of hazards with their twitter accounts. His application will collect the tweet information and convert it into spatial data and produce a simple map of the reported hazards. The script within the application will be run once daily and appended to the running log of hazard locations. While this may be a simple concept we are excited about the interaction between social media and geospatial processing in this project.

• Jon McFarland, Montana State University  Jon is a freshman at Montana State University with a passion for watershed and fisheries management. Although Jon has barely completed his first year of college he has already lined up a volunteer-based internship with the Raincoast Conservation Foundation in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. As part of his work with Raincoast, Jon will be working on two distinct projects related to salmon and historic impacts to their habitat and abundance. Both projects are designed to inform and guide current salmon initiatives in habitat restoration of the Fraser River estuary and salmon rebuilding objectives. Both require GIS skills and product development. On the historic abundance reconstruction, the maps he will help develop will visually illustrate and describe the spatial and temporal issues involved in historic run reconstruction. In the second project, and primary initiative, GIS is the principle tool of the project. To assist Jon he will receive $250 towards his internship. 

• Loga Fixico, Salish Kootenai College