Congratulations to Nina Osborne and Isaac Young for winning the Nicholas L. Paape Memorial Scholarship. This award is for meritorious students pursuing a degree in Geographic Information Sciences.

Congratulations to Sam Taylor, Riley Pacer, and Jalissa Pirro for receiving Graduate Student Research Awards to fund their summer research. Sam's proposal titled "Improving the Spatiotemporal Capacity of HAB Monitoring in Small, Freshwater Lakes by Fusing Daily NASA Satellite and Weather Products" is supported by the Professor Gerry Rushton Academic Excellence Fund. Riley's proposal titled “Assessing the Biogeophysical Cooling Potential of Restored Prairie with Eddy Covariance & UAV Remote Sensing,” is supported by the Andrea Hauer and David Perret Student Success Fund. Jalissa's proposal titled “Assessing the Long-Term Productivity of Miscanthus x giganteus Using UAS-based LiDAR and Multispectral Remote Sensing,” is supported by the Harold H. McCarty Memorial Fund.

Isaac Young finished his senior year at UIowa with a successful defense of his senior thesis titled, "Identifying Bur Oak Blight from Space using PlanetScope Satellite Imagery and Assessing the Role of Landscape Characteristics in Blight Severity". He also showcased this work at the 2025 Spring Undergraduate Research Festival.

Jalissa Pirro and Dr. Meerdink headed over to Iowa State's Sustainable Advanced Bioeconomy Research (SABR) farm to collect the first drone imagery of the 2025 season. Jalissa will use this data in her thesis research.

Jalissa Pirro and Riley Pacer attended the 2025 Association of American Geographers (AAG) Conference in Detroit to present their thesis research.

Isaac Young presented at the 2025 Research at the Capital event on his Bur Oak Blight research.

For this Women’s History Month, we would like to recognize the work that women are doing across the University of Iowa’s campus in fields of sustainability, technology, and science. Dr. Meerdink works in the field of Geographic Information Systems/Science (GIS) and remote sensing technology, combining the branches of ecology and machine-based studies to better understand and visualize the world around her.

The fellowship will help position graduate students to pursue innovative ways of thinking about publishing and sharing their creative endeavors working closely with the University of Iowa's Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio.

The Dare to Discover campaign showcases researchers, scholars, and creators from across the University of Iowa. Isaac Young was selected for the 2024 Downtown Banner campaign featuring his research using remote sensing for detecting bur oak blight.