GDEP is a three year program, which began in the fall of 2001, with funding from the National Science Foundation's Opportunities to Enhance Diversity in Geosciences program. The purpose of this $852,000 project is to attract NSF- defined Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math minorities in local community colleges and high schools into the geosciences through an intensive summer research experience at California State University, Long Beach. The geosciences are defined as physical geography, geology, archaeology, and environmental science.

The GDEP team includes six geologists (Elizabeth L. Ambos, Richard Behl, Robert D. Francis, Greg Holk, James Sample, and María Teresa Ramírez-Herrera), three geographers (Christopher T. Lee, Christine M. Rodrigue, and Suzanne P. Wechsler), an archaeologist (Daniel O. Larson), a psychologist and assessment specialist (David J. Whitney), and a staff member from the CSULB Student Access to Science and Math program (Crisanne Hazen). This large interdisciplinary team designs summer research projects that can incorporate partners from five local community colleges and the Long Beach Unified School District and roughly ten students from underrepresented groups, whom partner faculty nominate. This research immersion experience is designed to give students enough outdoors field work and high technology laboratory work to influence their choice of majors towards the field and lab sciences of geology, geography, and geoarchaeology and the interdisciplinary environmental science and policy major. An additional goal is to increase CSULB GDEP faculty research output and involve community college and high school faculty in this research. This is meant to improve the level of geoscience education in all our classes and thereby increase the attractiveness of the geoscience majors to non-GDEP students in our courses.

All faculty commit five weeks of full-time work with GDEP, distributed over the eight weeks of full-time work for which the students are paid and held responsible. All student participants must prepare poster presentations of their research and give them at a culminating on-campus student research symposium (the campus holds a symposium for a number of somewhat similar research immersion programs in various science disciplines). They are encouraged to give posters at regional science conferences as well, for which travel and registration moneys are provided from GDEP.

Three of the projects this summer and last have dealt with hazards topics. Chris Lee and Chrys Rodrigue have projects working on specifying changes in live fuel moisture in the chaparral-covered suburban-wildland interface around Los Angeles. It is hoped that field collection of vegetation samples will enable these changes to be detectable through the use of AVIRIS imagery, with an eye toward improving rapid detection of increases in fire hazard conditions for firefighting agencies. For more information, please visit http://wildfire.geog.csulb.edu/ or contact clee@csulb.edu or rodrigue@csulb.edu.

Tere Ramírez's project entails analysis of sudden coseismic deformation related to subduction earthquakes; and long-term coastal tectonics and paleoseismology, with field areas in Jalisco, Mexico. Her team's work will help establish the history of great earthquakes in Mexico and refine probabilistic risk estimates for such quakes in the next several decades. For more information, please visit https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/geography/gdep/ramirezconvergent.html or contact ramirezt@csulb.edu.

Dan Francis' team is mapping the Palos Verdes Fault off the coast of Southern California, using shipboard seismic reflection. This is an active fault capable of generating Mm 7 earthquakes that would devastate the Los Angeles- Long Beach port and strongly affect much of Southern California. For more information, please visit http://seis.natsci.csulb.edu/dfrancis/pvgdep.htm or contact rfrancis@csulb.edu.

The Geoscience Diversity Enhancement Project began in the fall of 2001, with $852,000 of funding from the National Science Foundation's Opportunities to Enhance Diversity in Geosciences (OEDG) program.

The purpose of this 3-year project is to attract NSF-defined Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) minorities in local community colleges and high schools into the geosciences through an intensive summer research experience at California State University, Long Beach.

The geosciences are defined as physical geography, geology, archaeology, and environmental science.

The GDEP team includes six geologists (Elizabeth L. Ambos, Richard Behl, Robert D. Francis, Greg Holk, James Sample, and Maria Teresa Ramirez-Herrera), three geographers (Christopher T. Lee, Christine M. Rodrigue, and Suzanne P. Wechsler), an archaeologist (Daniel O. Larson), a psychologist and assessment specialist (David J. Whitney), and a staff member from the CSULB Student Access to Science and Math program (Crisanne Hazen).

This large interdisciplinary team designs summer research projects that can incorporate partners from five local community colleges and the Long Beach Unified School District and roughly ten students from underrepresented groups, whom partner faculty nominate.

This research immersion experience is designed to give students enough outdoors field work and high technology laboratory work to influence their choice of majors towards the field and lab sciences of geology, geography, and geoarchaeology and the interdisciplinary environmental science and policy major.

An additional goal is to increase CSULB GDEP faculty research output and involve community college and high school faculty in this research. This is meant to improve the level of geoscience education in all our classes and thereby increase the attractiveness of the geoscience majors to non-GDEP students in our courses.

All faculty commit five weeks of full-time work with GDEP, distributed over the eight weeks of full-time work for which the students are paid and held responsible. All student participants must prepare poster presentations of their research and give them at a culminating on-campus student research symposium (the campus holds a symposium for a number of somewhat similar research immersion programs in various science disciplines). They are encouraged to give posters at regional science conferences as well, for which travel and registration moneys are provided from GDEP.

Three of this summer's seven projects focus explicitly on hazards. One of these relates to wildfire along the montane-suburban interface in Southern California and another two deal with earthquake hazard, one in southern Mexico and the other in Southern California.

[ Slide 1 ] Wildfire is a significant hazard in Southern California. The steeper mountainsides in the region are covered with chaparral, a shrub-dominated vegetation that is highly dependent on wildfire for its reproduction and renewal. American culture puts a high value on having a home with a view and, in Southern California, the view sites are in this very pyrogenic vegetation.

In most societies, the people who are most at risk to a given hazard tend to be those who are the poorest or otherwise disadvantaged. With chaparral fire hazard, ironically, the people who are most at risk are the wealthiest people, the people who can afford homes with a view, homes at risk to wildfire hazard. Their risk is turned into a society-wide vulnerability, however, because fighting wildfires is the responsibility of government at the local, county, state, and federal level. No matter the fairness issue, the fact remains that predicting fire hazard can help fire agencies plan where to target their resources and where it might be useful to reduce fuel loads other ways than a wildfire.

This, in fact, is the goal of the Southern California Wildfire Hazard Center in the Department of Geography at California State University, Long Beach, which is the host for this GDEP summer project. The Center recently received two IKONOS satellite image data sets from NASA. One set is a panchromatic one- meter resolution digital image with a companion four-meter, four-band multispectral image of the majority of the Santa Monica Mountains. The other set is a digital elevation model (DEM) of the Topanga Creek watershed derived from an IKONOS stereo image pair.

This summer, GDEP is working on georectification of the data sets so that such hazard-related elements as vegetation subtypes, building types, and road networks can be extracted onto a consistent map base and entered as layers into a GIS for further analysis. This lab work is complemented by several field days, in which digital orthophoto quad points and training points are collected for the rectification and classification of the remote sensing imagery using differentially corrected GPS. The IKONOS imagery is then integrated with the Center's existing Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) and Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data sets, both of which contribute important information primarily on fuels (vegetation and roof tops). The IKONOS imagery has the potential to help map all of the structures and all of the roads at a level never before attained.

This information is critical for CSULB's collaborators at UC Santa Barbara who are modeling the evacuation hazard associated with wildfires. The GDEP team is taking a field trip out to Santa Barbara to meet the geography team there (Dar Roberts, Charles Jones, Richard Church, Max Moritz, Phaedon Kiriakidis, and Phil Dennison) and see how the data they are collecting and processing will be utilized by them to help regional fire-fighting agencies better manage their resources.

[ Slide 2 ] In order to assess earthquake hazard, it is essential to reconstruct the recurrence patterns of large magnitude earthquakes during prehistoric time. Earthquake activity along coastlines has unique effects. Such coasts may rise or fall instantaneously during earthquakes (coseismic uplift or subsidence). Historic accounts of sudden uplift of coastlines during large earthquakes suggest that higher, older shorelines were also raised coseismically during recurrent earthquakes. If so, abandoned or relict shorelines record past earthquakes and, where two or more successive abandoned shorelines can be dated, the periodicity (earthquake recurrence) and relative magnitude of great earthquakes can be estimated.

This GDEP project entails analysis of sudden coseismic deformation related to subduction earthquakes, as well as long-term coastal tectonics and palæoseismology, with field work in Jalisco, Mexico, undertaken during Summer 2002. The goal of this team is to help establish the history of great earthquakes in Mexico and refine probabilistic risk estimates for such quakes in the next several decades.

This project involves a detailed study of evidence for sudden coseismic uplift of shorelines. This summer's work is based on working with data obtained from field-intensive research last summer on the marine terrace morphology of the southern Mexican coast and the mortality of intertidal organisms produced by large magnitude earthquakes. Last summer, Tere Ramírez and Martin Matthews surveyed marine terraces and searched for samples suitable for radiocarbon and/or Uranium-Thorium series dating.

This summer is a lab-intensive summer, the GDEP team working on preparing the samples for radiocarbon and Uranium-Thorium dating. In order to preserve a balance between lab and field, this team is also collaborating with another, non hazard-related GDEP project, a service-learning project to map the geology and vegetation of a local wilderness park.

[ Slide 3 ] CSULB is located in one of the most exciting geological research areas in the world. The coastal and offshore areas, including the Channel Islands, are known to geologists as the California Continental Borderland. This is the place to go to study the interactions of two great plates, the Pacific Plate and the North America Plate, and all that implies, particularly earthquakes.

One episode that had a stong effect on the shape of Southern California was the rotation, since about 22 million years ago, of the Western Transverse Ranges. These include the San Gabriel and Santa Monica Mountains, east-west ranges that once ran north-south.

Of the many faults in the area, one in particular can tell us about this and other critical events in coastal history: the Palos Verdes Fault. This fault runs through the Palos Verdes Peninsula, into Santa Monica Bay to the north, and through Los Angeles Harbor (and under the very heavily-traveled Vincent Thomas Bridge) to San Pedro Bay to the south.

This is an active fault, and is thought to be capable of generating magnitude 7 earthquakes, which could be devastating for the port, and much of the Los Angeles area.

This project uses state-of-the-art seismic and acoustical techniques to map and analyze the Palos Verdes Fault at sea, specifically in the Santa Monica Bay. Data analysis utilizes advanced computer programs, such as those that visualize the earth in three dimensions, allowing a volume to be viewed from any direction at any scale. Data collection consists of shipboard seismic reflection, in which a sound source and hydrophone receivers are towed behind a vessel. Navigation is done using differential GPS; GPS data are later imported into a GIS program for mapping. Seismic data are processed and subsequently imported into a program on a PC that allows the seismic records to be viewed and compared in three dimensions.

Faculty and students who work on this project receive experience at sea and on land, using such methods as multichannel processing, GPS and GIS, computerized data interpretation, and correlation of seismic data with well data. Data will be collected in Santa Monica Bay where the fault is believed to intersect submarine canyons. Much of the work will be highly computer- oriented, and participants gain valuable experience in all facets of seismic work, including data collection at sea, as well as lab-based data processing and interpretation. Experience in GPS and GIS is also gained by participants in this project.

The Geoscience Diversity Enhancement Project has as its major goals the recruitment of hitherto underrepresented groups of students into geoscience majors and the improvement of geoscience education through greater involvement of geoscience educators in geoscience research.

GDEP partners with local community colleges and high schools, both to expose students to the geosciences at an earlier stage in their careers and because community colleges are disproportionately the gateway into higher education for Latino, African-American, Native American, and Pacific Islander students.

GDEP summer projects work toward both goals through a summer research immersion experience that blends both field and lab components. Students become proficient in the use of a variety of research techniques in the lab and field.

GDEP avoids the trap of being a "boutique" program for just a few interns by targeting the instructional effectiveness of CSULB, community college, and high school faculty. GDEP is designed to alter our pædagogies, monitor resulting changes, and assess changes in the representativeness of the students majoring in the three collaborating departments.

GDEP tackles the discrepancy between the demographics of the diverse metropolitan area surrounding CSULB and the collaborating departments by involving community college and high school faculty as intern recruiters. The GDEP model may work in other large urban areas with diverse populations.

Nearly half the GDEP projects focus on hazards-related topics: wildfires and earthquakes. GDEP might, therefore, not only increase the diversity of students drawn into the geosciences but it might well increase and diversify the pool of students who join the hazards research and applications community.

Summer research immersion programs like GDEP might work for other hazards researchers and educators to recruit students into the hazards community and diversify the backgrounds of students choosing a hazards-related field for their educations and careers.

Some possible sources of funding to explore include:

National Science Foundation

Research Experiences for Undergraduates programs: http://www.nsf.gov/home/crssprgm/reu/start.htm
Transitions from Childhood to the Workforce programs: http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/tcw/
Environmental Research and Education: http://www.nsf.gov/geo/ere/ereweb/index.cfm
Research in Undergraduate Institutions and Research Opportunity Awards:      http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/crssprgm/rui/start.shtm

The AT&T Foundation: http://www.att.com/foundation/guidelines.html