The dizzying flood of honors and accolades received by Geography faculty continued under the direction of Oliver Chadwick who became the Department Chair in July 2006. Keith Clarke was appointed to the National Geographic Committee on Research and Exploration later in 2006, Dar Roberts’ research on the use of remote sensing to estimate live fuel moisture in California shrublands was featured by NASA and the BBC, and Ray Smith received the R. J. Russell Award about the same time. In 2007, Chadwick was selected as a Fellow of the Soil Science Society of America, Golledge received the Lifetime Achievement Honors of the Association of American Geographers, David Siegel received the Editor’s Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the American Geophysical Union, Hugo Loaiciga was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and Goodchild received the Geospatial Information and Technology Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as the Vautrin Lud International Geography Prize, considered the Nobel Prize of Geography.
In 2008, David Carr was invited to the ATHGO International 5th Annual Global Forum on Global Warming and Climate Change 2007 as a Nobel Peace Prize VIP honoree member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Michael Goodchild became director of spatial@ucsb, a multimillion dollar, interdisciplinary research center devoted to spatial thinking; and Hugo Loaiciga was selected by the Water Resources Planning and Management Division of the American Society of Civil Engineers as the recipient of the Julian Hinds Award. In the same year, Martin Raubal won the Best Paper of 2007 award for an article written for the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Journal, and, shortly afterwards, he won the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Journal’s U.V. Helava Award for the best paper in 4 years; Dar Roberts received the 2008 UCSB Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award; and Tommy Dickey was selected for the Secretary of the Navy/Chief of Naval Operations Chair of Oceanographic Sciences, one of just 12 ocean scientists to achieve this award since its inception in 1984. To round out the academic accolades of 2008, Oliver Chadwick and David Siegel were elected Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Reg Golledge was selected to receive the 2008 Enhancing Diversity Award of the Association of American Geographers.
Several of our faculty were involved in major publications during this period. For example, Waldo Tobler coauthored a book on map projection transformation in 2000; Clarke co-edited a book on GIS and environmental modeling in 2002; Ray Smith co-edited a book on climate variability and ecosystem response in 2003, Clarke brought out his fourth edition of “Getting Started with Geographic Information Systems” in the same year, and Kyriakidis coauthored “Evaluation of Mineral Reserves: A Simulation Approach” in 2004. Goodchild coauthored the second edition of “Geographic Information Systems and Science,” and Chadwick coauthored an article in Nature dealing with biological control of terrestrial silica cycling and export fluxes to watersheds in 2005; and, in 2006, Hallie Eakin published a book on climatic, institutional, and economic change in rural Mexico and Dan Montello coauthored a book on the conduct and interpretation of scientific research in geography. In 2007 Chris Still coauthored an article on amphibian extinction in Nature, Tommy Dickey coauthored an article about the relation between mesoscale eddies and silica export in Science and coedited a book on exploring the world ocean, and David Siegel coauthored an article about climate warming reducing the ocean food supply in Nature. In 2008, Chris Funk, of our Climate Hazards Group, coauthored an article in Science indicating that food insecurity will increase with climate change unless early warning systems and aid programs are used more effectively, Kostas Goulias became the coeditor of a new journal in the field of Transportation Research, Catherine Gautier co-edited a book on understanding global warming and another on facing climate change (which won the 2008 ASLI Choice’s Honorable Mention), and Golledge coauthored a book on comprehending and conducting person-environment-behavior research.