Mary C. Henry

We have just over four weeks until classes start, so I am trying to get things organized and finish a few things before the students get back into town. I am teaching three classes this semester and need to write the syllabi and plan those for the semester. This means I have to make my final decisions about attendance monitoring in GEO 121 , update reading packets for GEO 333 and GEO 444/544 and plan out the sixteen weeks that start on August 24th. It will be hectic when classes start, so the better I plan things now, the easier things will go then. I also need to think about how to revise assignments I've used in the past. For instance, I always have some kind of journal assignment in my hazards class, but usually tweak it a bit each year. I'm still not 100% satisfied with it, so I need to think about how I can modify the assignment. I also need to decide on some things for GEO 121: whether to keep the paper assignment this time (or put more weight on exams), decide about usin

We've reached the halfway point of the summer here at Miami (we start classes on August 24th), so it seems like a good time to take stock of what I've accomplished and what I still plan to do this summer. Progress Most of my work this summer has focused on REU and with the help of my student, we have made some good progress on a project. After some debate, I decided to stick with using some methodology that we've already used in this research, but apply it to different data. Most of the work done so far on this project (and the pilot study before the grant) focused on using fall imagery to detect Amur honeysuckle in forested areas. This shrub expands its leaves earlier in spring and retains them later in fall than the overstory tree species, and thus far, we have used fall imagery in our analysis (we felt that too many other plants were also green in spring). Recently, I started to reconsider this approach and tested some spring images for a conference presentation this spr