Brent Yarnal
Biographical Sketch

Brent Yarnal is Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for Integrated Regional Assessment at Penn State. His research interests bridge the physical and social sciences and include climate variation and change, natural hazards, land-use/land-cover change, water resources, and the use of environmental information in decision making.  Current research involves developing infrastructure to promote research on global change in local places, investigating vulnerability to hurricane storm surge in coastal Florida and to tsunami along the West Coast, helping local government develop greenhouse gas mitigation plans, and evaluating the state of mobile homes in rural Pennsylvania.  NSF, NOAA, USGS, and the Center for Rural Pennsylvania fund his current research.  His degrees include an AB in History (major) and Anthropology (minor) from the University of California at Davis, an MSc in Geography (paleoclimatology and geomorphology emphases) from the University of Calgary, and a PhD in Geography (contemporary climatology and glaciology emphases) from Simon Fraser University.

Title of talk: “GIScience and the Local Dimensions of Global Change”