Two Geography Students Win National Research Awards

Two University of North Dakota Geography graduate students recently garnered four awards for their research. Matthew Dinger, a Wisconsin native and a master\u27s of science degree candidate, won first place in the student research poster competition of the North Dakota Geographic Information Systems Users Conference, held in Grand Forks in October. The award was for his poster titled Identifying Locations of Highly Eroded Areas using GIS Terrain Analysis, Devils Lake, ND. For that same research, Dinger also won second place in the student oral presentation competition at the 2011 meeting of the West Lakes Division of the Association of American Geographers, held earlier this month at DePaul University in Chicago. His advisor is Dr. Gregory Vandeberg. Rhonda Fietzek-DeVries, a Jamestown, N.D., native and a master\u27s of science degree candidate, won second place in the student research poster competition at the Great Plains/Rocky Mountains Division of the Association of American Geographers, at the University of Colorado-Denver. The award was for her poster titled Is Theodore Roosevelt National Park At Risk? Analyzing Historical Climate Data, 1895-2010. Fietzek-DeVries also won third place in the Geography Awareness Week student poster competition sponsored by the St. Louis Region of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing and Northwest Missouri State University. That award, also for her research on Theodore Roosevelt National Park, was announced this week. Her advisor is Dr. Paul Todhunter