funded graduate study, UMass Amherst: Supporting ecologically restorative flood prevention and remediation in New England

AAG | Communities | View Discussions | Water Resources funded graduate study, UMass Amherst: Supporting ecologically restorative flood prevention and remediation in New England   From: Eve Vogel To: Water Resources Posted: January 12, 2013 10:10 AM Subject: funded graduate study, UMass Amherst: Supporting ecologically restorative flood prevention and remediation in New England Message: View Profile Add Contact Blog This Contact Author This message has been cross posted to the following Discussions: Political Geography and Water Resources . ------------------------------------------- Call for applications for funded graduate study in Geography, UMass Amherst: Supporting ecologically restorative flood prevention and remediation in New England. A two-year research assistantship is available for a USDA-funded interdisciplinary study entitled: RiverSmart Communities: Supporting ecologically restorative flood prevention and remediation in New England. The student will be part of the Geography program at UMass Amherst, earning an MS in Geography or a PhD in Geosciences. This assistantship focuses on the institutional half of the project, which aims to uncover the challenges and constraints to natural flood prevention and remediation caused by jurisdictional and institutional fragmentation in New England, and to highlight strategies to overcome these.  Research will include interviews, participant observation, documentary and web-based research and analysis. By the end of the two year assistantship, the student will be expected to draft a mini-report, "RiverSmart Across New England's Diverse States and Towns," describing and analyzing several model institutional efforts in which town governments, state and federal agencies, NGOs, landowners and others have successfully navigated New England's jurisdictional fragmentations to achieve watershed-wide flood prevention and ecological restoration. Based on these case studies, the mini-report will offer concrete recommendations for others who wish to build similar efforts. The student's research will also contribute to a white paper of recommendations for policy, institutional coordination, and funding changes. Either of these could form the core of a thesis, or a portion of a dissertation. (For possible extensions for PhD students, see below.) Funding is for two years with a 10 hour/week research assistantship, which includes both academic year support and 10 hours/week for both summers (or half summers at 20 hours/week). The assistantship also provides tuition and insurance. Students may apply for teaching support to increase funding to 20 hours/week, or to extend funding to four years. The student will be supervised by Professor Eve Vogel ( http://www.geo.umass.edu/people/eve-vogel). The institutional research team will also include an undergraduate assistant, with whom the graduate assistant will be expected to work closely, and will bear some supervisory responsibility. The institutional research team will also work in close coordination with the scientific research team, led by hydrogeologist and extension Professor Christine Hatch (http://www.geo.umass.edu/people/christine-hatch). The Geography program at UMass is part of the Department of Geosciences. Courses and faculty supervision are offered in a number of disciplinary subfields, including political ecology, political geography, urban geography, GIS and remote sensing, climatology and fluvial geomorphology. The Geosciences department also offers a number of complementary courses and potential secondary supervisors, on topics including hydrogeology, sedimentology, and paleoclimatology. UMass also offers opportunities to take courses from and work with faculty in a variety of complementary fields, including the Center for Public Policy and Administration (http://www.masspolicy.org/), Regional Planning (http://www.umass.edu/larp/mrp/index.html), Environmental Conservation (http://eco.umass.edu/), Environmental and Water Resources Engineering (http://cee.umass.edu/cee/graduate/ewre) and the Political Economy Research Institute (http://www.peri.umass.edu/190). A PhD student could potentially develop a dissertation from one or both of the more theoretical project aims: a) to consider the ways that transboundary watershed issues and management within watersheds fragmented by local jurisdictional lines differ from those that are fragmented only along larger-scale divisions of state or national lines, and b) to analyze and evaluate a range of formal and informal governance arrangements in their ability to improve flood prevention and remediation, in the face of both jurisdictional fragmentation and a funding squeeze from reduced federal and state government budgets. Applications are due February 1. Information on the Geography program, the Department of Geosciences, and the application process are available at the following websites: UMass Geography: http://blogs.umass.edu/umgeog/ Graduate programs in Geography: