OUTSTEPS Lower Great Lakes - A Regional Systems Approach that Expands the Reach of Geography to Collaborate with Stakeholders

Type: Virtual Panel
Theme: Expanding the Community of Geography
Sponsor Groups: Human Dimensions of Global Change Specialty Group, Hazards, Risks, and Disasters Specialty Group, Regional Development and Planning Specialty Group
Organizers: Chris Renschler, Sharon Moran
Chairs: Chris Renschler

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Call for Submissions

If you are interested in joining outsteps.org in the Lower Great Lakes, the organizers and panelists would be interested to hear more about you and potentially join us as a panel member on stage. In any case the panel plans to actively engage with the audience in a question and answer after the midpoint of the session.

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Description

Urban and suburban areas and their often larger rural and wildland watersheds in the Lower Great Lakes (LGL) Region - this includes Lake Erie and Lake Ontario - face present and future region-wide sustainability and resilience challenges. In the summer 2019, a diverse group of eight universities - public and private, small and large, urban and rural - utilized the funds to organize a National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored conference on "Organizing Urban Transects for a Sustainable Transformation of Economic Partnerships across the Lower Great Lakes (OUTSTEP-LGL)" to establish the inclusive OUTSTEPS.org research network to more effectively and efficiently reach out and engage holistically with stakeholders and practitioners using citizen science to identify and fill data gaps, to develop data tools necessary, and to create a theory of change upon which to ground generalizable coastline sustainability and resilience strategies. After a second workshop series and international presentation of the OUTSTEPS.org research network to a global audience in 2020, a panel of participating geographers that helped to establish the research network, discuss the regionally motivated approaches that lead to a interdisciplinary effort to include local community efforts in discovery, learning and outreach resulting in an inclusive, transformative research coordination approach to address sustainability and resilience challenges at a regional scale that are solidly founded in geography. Please join us to learn about the ongoing efforts to include local, state, indigenous and international stakeholders, discuss these approaches and maybe also become members in this regional network or discuss how you could establish a similar network in your region of interest. To learn more about OUTSTEPS, go to OUTSTEPS.org.

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Agenda

Type	Details	Minutes
Panelist	Chris Renschler University At Buffalo	10
Panelist	Sharon Moran State Univeristy of New York - Env. Science and Forestry, Syracuse, NY	10
Panelist	Richard Shaker Ryerson University	10
Panelist	Patrick Lawrence University of Toledo	10
Discussant	Marissa Bell University At Buffalo	5
Discussant	Jessica Gilbert SUNY - Buffalo	5