Maria Lane

University of New Mexico | UNM · Geography & Environmental Studies

A recent opinion piece rekindled debate as to whether geography's current interdisciplinary make-up is a historical relic or an actual and potential source of intellectual vitality. Taking the latter position, we argue here for the benefits of sustained integration of physical and critical human geography. For reasons both political and pragmatic,...

Historical investigation of arid landscapes and communities in the American West has long focused on the pivotal influence of federal reclamation policy, typically characterizing its implementation as the application of scientific and technological methods to a variety of water resource management issues. This paper departs from traditional views o...

Over two decades spanning the turn of the twentieth century, astronomers’ claims about the landscape and climate of Mars spurred widespread scientific and popular interest in the possibility that the red planet might be inhabited. This essay offers a new explanation for the power with which the notion of an inhabited Mars gripped noted scholars and...

Agroecology (AE) is a discipline of study that is consistently expanding in the scientific, sociopolitical, and environmental fields, both globally and regionally in Latin America. This study focuses on understanding the dynamics and diversity of motivations that farmers have when deciding whether to adopt AE or not in the Northern Andes of Ecuador...

Review forum of "Arid empire: The entangled fates of Arizona and Arabia"

At the turn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Rio Grande Project radically changed irrigation practices and the legal structure of water deliveries along the entire reach of the Rio Grande. The construction of Elephant Butte Dam and other modern water infrastructure in the Lower Rio Grande Basin of New Mexico set the stage...

Twitter provides short messaging updates for fast dissemination along with retweeting and directed-following functionalities for user interaction, which makes it a popular tool for institutional outreach activities. This study analyzed U.S. geography departmental Twitter accounts and tweet histories through spatial–temporal analysis, frequency anal...

Research into outer space has burgeoned in recent years, through the work of scholars in the social sciences, arts and humanities. Geographers have made a series of useful contributions to this emergent work, but scholarship remains fairly limited in comparison to other disciplinary fields. This forum explains the scholarly roots of these new geogr...

Las variaciones naturales y antropogénicas de los sistemas climáticos son cada vez más evidentes. El cambio climático se ha convertido en el tema central de la investigación para la toma de decisiones a todo nivel. El objetivo principal de esta investigación es identificar la evidencia de cambios en ciertos elementos climáticos, como la precipitaci...

Suitability models can help identify prime environments for a specific form of agricultural field, ak chin, that is difficult to locate with standard archaeological field methods. Using data from western New Mexico, we applied remote sensing and a geographic information system to develop suitability models based on a small training data sample. Thr...

In this slim volume Kenna Lang Archer traces the history of water development schemes for the Brazos River of Texas between 1821 and 1890. Using a wide variety of historical sources—including government documents, media reports, advertisements, and artwork—Archer chronicles various and competing projects that emerged in different times and places a...

With this book, Elinore Barrett complements her earlier Conquest and Catastrophe (New Mexico, 2002), with a painstaking reconstruction of early Spanish settlement in what is today New Mexico. Where Conquest and Catastrophe focused on Spanish-colonial impacts on indigenous Pueblo settlements along the Rio Grande, Barrett’s new book looks at the cont...

Boulder Dam, constructed in the 1930s to impound the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona, was widely considered the most ambitious engineering project of its time. Built during the Great Depression, it used state-of-the-art technology to provide flood control, drinking and irrigation water, hydroelectricity, and recreational facilities on a s...

High mountains, polar expanses, volcanic peaks are exciting and special environments. 13 leading international geographers explore different aspects of these environments - disorientation, exploration, native knowledge, polar research. This is the first book to do this.High places - be they mountain peaks or the vast expanses of the polar latitudes...

Dr Maria Lane is an assistant instructor in the Department of Geography and the Environment, University of Texas at Austin.At the turn of the twentieth century, a popular mania developed around the idea that Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings. This obsession was originally based in the science of the time, but it outlasted astronomers' certai...

Over two decades spanning the turn of the twentieth century, astronomers' claims about the landscape and climate of Mars spurred widespread scientific and popular interest in the possibility that the red planet might be inhabited. This essay offers a new explanation for the power with which the notion of an inhabited Mars gripped noted scholars and...

The practice of transportation planning at the regional level has evolved substantially over the past several decades. Once defined as largely a technical exercise, in which the calculation of required roadway capacity was the preeminent activity, transportation planning now encompasses a wide range of sometimes conflicting problems and demands, fr...

What makes people behave in environmentally responsible ways? Is it pride, civic duty, or something else? In this article Maria Lane takes a brief and inquisitive look at the motivating factors and opens up discussion on what the real questions might be for the future.