Christine M. Rodrigue, Ph.D.
Research Interests
Much of my research over the last 25 years has focussed on
hazards.
Dominant themes in this work are projects on how
risk assessment science interacts with risk management policy, the processes
by which media shape public hazards perception, and equity issues in the
social response to disaster. These three
themes are summarized in a paper I gave at the World Association
of Disaster and Emergency Medicine International Education and Training
Working Group
meeting in
Brussels in October 2004,
"
Hazard
Vulnerability,
Media Construction of Disaster, and Risk Management." This hazards work
led me to
an invited NASA teleconference, at which I presented guidelines for risk
communication for the Mars program. This eventually led me into developing a
course on the
geography of Mars, a multivariate
statistical laboratory using Mars geochemical data, a project
on the geography of Mars, and developing a network of Mars geographers. The
Mars activity is currently expressed in a research project collating and
analyzing all APXS data from all four martian rovers and classifying all
targets in a common geochemical format, which in a simpler version was
replicable by students in my Mars class.
I am also engaged
in various hazards projects with Dr. Eugenie Rovai. Situated in an
education-centered institution, assessment and fostering student research have
become significant portions of my research activity. An expanding focus in my
research over the last fifteen years is biogeography, especially concerning
the threatened California sage scrub, formulation of a floristic key for the
Palos Verdes Peninsula, and analyzing Project PigeonWatch data collected by my
students since 2000.
One emphasis in my research is the relationship between risk assessment and risk management and, more broadly,
between science and policy. I am increasingly interested in the
communications within an organization concerning risk, which extends my
earlier interest in communications between the public or activists in the
public with organizations having risk management responsibilities. I have
compared the risk assessment communications within
large Federal agencies and their interactions with the risk perceptions of
managers making risk containment decisions. The specific case studies are
NASA and the Columbia accident, the FBI and 9/11, and now FEMA and
Katrina/Rita. My long-time collaborator, Dr. Eugenie Rovai, and I
have been working to apply the "disaster by management" framework to her
project on the emerging risk of international drug cartels using National
Forest lands to grow marijuana, in order to circumvent heightened border
security.
- E. Rovai and C.M. Rodrigue. 2009.
- Marijuana
cultivation in National Forests and Parks, environmental
impacts, and policy failure: Disaster by management. Paper presented to the
Western Social Science Association, Albuquerque (April).
- C.M. Rodrigue and E. Rovai, with the assistance of J. Waligorski. 2008.
- Disaster by
management: Marijuana cultivation in National Forests
and Parks. Paper presented to the Association of American Geographers,
Boston (April).
- C.M. Rodrigue and E. Rovai, with the assistance of J. Waligorski. 2008.
- Marijuana
cultivation in National Forests and Parks: American
market, post-9/11 border securitization, and global in-sourcing of
production. Panel presentation to the Association of American Geographers,
Boston (April).
- E. Rovai and C.M. Rodrigue. 2007.
- Disaster by
management: International drug cartels and the North State National Forest
lands. Paper presented to the National Social Science Association, Cabo
San Lucas (October).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2006.
-
Katrina/Rita and
risk communication within FEMA. Paper presented to the Association of
American Geographers, Chicago (March).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2004.
-
Disaster by Management: Managerialism and normal accident theory in the
Columbia accident and FBI Headquarters' response to field office concerns
before 9/11. Paper presented to the 29th Annual Hazards Research and
Applications Workshop, Boulder, CO (11 July).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2004.
-
Disaster by Management: The Columbia Accident and September 11th. Paper
presented to the "Hazards and Disasters: Management and Mitigation" special
session sponsored by the Hazards Specialty Group at the Association of
American Geographers, Philadelphia (17 March).
By the late 1990s and early 2000's, I became especially interested in how the
advent of Internet media has altered the communication of hazards
debates. Hazard assessment experts and activists both have trouble
getting their messages to the public through traditional print and broadcast
media, which have very high costs of entry and are dominated by interests with
very different agendas than experts' and activists'. The Internet has a very
low cost of entry and has begun to displace or augment traditional media as a
source of information. All facets of the Internet are not equal, however, in
the efficiency with which they allow experts and, especially, activists to
access the public. The web and now social networking sites are the glamorous
part of the 'Net, but it is limited as a communications channel by its
reliance on an active audience, one
actually searching for information on a given topic. The most effective
dissemination of information through space and time seems to take place
through channels with less need for an actively searching audience: e-mail,
Twitter, listservers, Google Group discussion groups, and chats.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2002.
-
Media and hazards: Different constructions of public perception by
conventional media and the Internet. Panel remarks presented to the "Media
and Hazards" panel, Association of American Geographers, Los Angeles (22
March).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2001.
- Impact of
Internet media in risk debates: The controversies over the
Cassini-Huygens Mission and the Anaheim Hills, California, landslide. The
Australian Journal of Emergency Management 16, 1 (Autumn): 53-61.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2001.
- Construction
of hazard perception and activism on the Internet:: Amplifying trivial
risks and obfuscating serious ones. Natural Hazards Research Working
Paper 106.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2001.
- The
Internet in risk communication and hazards activism. Invited presentation
for a panel on "The Media, The Internet, and Disasters," 26th Hazards Research
and Applications Workshop, Boulder, CO (July).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2001.
- The
Internet in the social amplification and attenuation of risk. Invited
poster, 26th Hazards Research and Applications Workshop, Boulder, CO (July).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2001.
- Construction of
hazard perception and activism on the Internet. Presentation to
the Association of American Geographers, New York (February).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2000.
- The use of the
Internet and web-based technology for space and geoscience (mis)education:
New media in natural and technological hazard debates. Presentation to
the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, San Francisco (December).
A specific project dominating my work in the late 1990s and early 2000s
focussed on the
controversy
over the
plutonium dioxide aboard the Cassini-Huygens
mission to Saturn and Titan. Opponents to the spacecraft's
configuration held that plutonium is the most dangerous substance on Earth and
could be released into Earth's environment during launch or during an Earth
swingby. NASA countered that the risk of a mishap was below 1 in a million and
that the consequences of the worst-case scenario would entail the development
of approximately 120 additional individual cases of cancer worldwide. This
controversy reflects the contentious relationship between risk assessment
science and risk management policy, as well as most of the themes developed in
prior technological hazards perception literature. This relationship has, if
anything, become even more contentious in an era in which the
epistemological validity of science is itself under interrogation. This case
study explores the evolving relationship between risk assessment and risk
management in the Internet era
by bringing media criticism to bear on Internet hazard representation and by
documenting the recruitment of proponent and opponent activists into
this technological risk debate. Parts of these projects are
summarized in papers I presented to the Boulder Hazards Workshop, the AAAS,
and in a grant proposal:
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2001.
- Internet
media in technological risk amplification: Plutonium on board the
Cassini-Huygens spacecraft. Risk: Health, Safety & Environment 12, 3/4
(Fall): 221-254.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2000.
- Public
perception and hazard policy construction when experts and activists clash in
the media. Presentation to the 25th Annual Hazard Research and
Applications Workshop, Boulder, CO (July).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2000.
- Internet
recruitment and activism in constructing technological risk. Presentation
to the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting,
Washington, DC (February).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 1999.
- Public, expert,
and activist perceptions of the plutonium on board the Cassini-Huygens
mission. Presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of
Science meeting, Anaheim, CA (January).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 1999.
- Social
construction of technological hazard: Plutonium on board the
Cassini-Huygens spacecraft. Narrative for a proposal submitted to the
Decision, Risk, and
Management Science Program National Science Foundation (14 January).
In 2001, my work on the controversy over Cassini-Huygens led to a project on
the
controversies beginning to develop over the
Mars Sample
Return mission, which was then being designed and proposed for possible
launch between 2011 and 2014. Because the final design was expected to
incorporate plutonium
dioxide RTGs for power needs on this extended mission,
the same opposition was expected to develop. In addition to the plutonium
issue, another axis of controversy started to develop: concern about "back
contamination," that is, of Martian microbes hitching a ride back to Earth on
board the return craft. A third line of controversy developed within the
scientific community, too: between geoscientists and bioscientists over the
quarantine and distribution of the Mars rock and soil samples. I was invited
to a NASA teleconference to present my work on the Cassini controversy to a
NASA audience for the first time and to discuss risk communication and public
involvement for the Mars Sample Return. At that teleconference, I was invited
to follow the MSRL controversy. While preparing the physical science
background on Mars to follow the controversy, the MSRL was repeatedly delayed
and then moved to indefinite status and finally off the list of planned
missions (though it may be re-authorized). Rather than forget my work on
Mars, I decided to share this
background with my students in the form of a special topics course on "
Areography: A Regional
Geography of Mars," taught in Spring 2007. This work has led to several
geographic education presentations, a lab exercise for my multivariate
statistical methods course, a new research collaboration applying statistics
to terrestrial palæoclimate data, and a book-length characterization of
the geography of Mars, since incorporated as readings for the Mars class. It
also led to the establishment of the
Mars Geography Network, bringing together several dozen geographers who do
Mars-related work. Our first face-to-face panel was held at the AAG in 2009.
The geography of Mars class, meanwhile, has since developed into a regular
catalogue course in the Geography curriculum at CSULB, GEOG 441/541! It was
taught in Spring 2012, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2018,
Fall 2019, and Fall 2022. Development of materials for the class led to a major project
integrating all APXS data from all four martian rovers (through Fall 2016) in
a common database, its standardization, and then use of K-means clustering to
create a fifteen-cluster categorization of all APXS targets, which itself
yielded four or five metaclusters. This was used as the basis for a student
experiment in using K-means clustering to pick out four clusters, which
accorded with the metaclusters I had found. I am now working on collecting the last APXS readings from Opportunity, those from Curiosity to the present, and figuring out how to integrate these with the more full-featured PIXL instrument on Perseverance. I have also developed a set of visualizations of the MOLA digital elevation model, manipulating the illumination source, which has brought out several massive surface features not otherwise detectible on MOLA based maps.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2023.
-
New insights from old software:
Gridview brings out hidden tectonic features of Mars . Presentation to the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers,
Ventura, CA (20 October).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2023.
-
Areography? or the Regional Geography of Mars .. Invited talk to the Mars Society Southern California, Mars Society Ambassador Program, Yucca Valley, CA (14 March)
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2020.
-
K-means
clustering of Mars rovers' APXS data, 1997-2016. Invited presentation to
the OpenPlanetary Virtual Lunches series (12 May).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2020.
-
K-means
clustering and mapping of all four rovers APXS oxide and element relative
abundance data. Presentation to the Lunar and Planetary Science
Conference, The Woodlands, TX. The face-to-face meeting was cancelled due to
COVID-19, but e-posters were made available on the conference web site.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2020.
-
K-means
clustering and mapping of all four rovers APXS oxide and element relative
abundance data. Refereed extended abstract, Lunar and Planetary
Science Conference 51: 1262. The face-to-face meeting was cancelled due to
COVID-19, but extended abstracts are available from the conference
proceedings.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2020.
-
Richness
and equitability measures applied to a K-means classification of all four Mars
rovers' APXS oxides and elements data. Presentation to the Lunar and
Planetary Science Conference, The Woodlands, TX. The face-to-face meeting was
cancelled due to COVID-19, but e-posters were made available on the conference
web site.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2020.
-
Richness and
equitability measures applied to a K-means classification of all four Mars
rovers' APXS oxides and elements data. Refereed extended abstract,
Lunar and Planetary Science Conference 51: 1607. The face-to-face
meeting was cancelled due to COVID-19, but extended abstracts are available
from the conference proceedings.
- A.G. Siwabessy, C.M. Rodrigue, and R.C. Anderson. 2020.
-
Remanent
magnetization signatures in Terra Cimmeria and Terra Sirenum. Refereed
extended abstract, Lunar and Planetary Science Conference 51: 1996. The
face-to-face meeting was cancelled due to COVID-19, but extended abstracts are
available from the conference proceedings.
- A.G. Siwabessy, C.M. Rodrigue, and R.C. Anderson. 2020.
-
Geological
map of Terra Cimmeria, Mars. Refereed extended abstract, Lunar and
Planetary Science Conference 51: 2766. The face-to-face meeting was
cancelled due to COVID-19, but extended abstracts are available from the
conference proceedings.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2018.
-
K-means clustering of Mars rover APXS oxide and element abundance data and
mapping of classified targets in Google Earth. Evolving manuscript available
at https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/mars/apxs/GE/.
- H. Hargitai, E. Cañón, and C.M. Rodrigue. 2015.
-
Landform classification and characterization. In Encyclopedia of Planetary
Landforms. Ed. Henrik Hargitai and Ákos Kereszturi. New York:
Springer-Verlag.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2015.
-
Geography on Mars.
Invited presentation, Los Angeles Geographical Society (March).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2014.
-
Geography of Mars.
Invited presentation, California Map Society, Long Beach, CA (November).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2013.
-
Geographers on Mars.
Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, Lake Tahoe, CA (September).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2011.
- Use of geochemistry data collected by the Mars Exploration Rover
Spirit in Gusev Crater to teach geomorphic zonation through principal
components analysis. Journal of Geoscience
Education 59, 4 (November): 184-193. doi: 10.5408/1.3604826.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2011.
- Nearest neighbor
analysis, regression, and secondary crater
prospecting on Mars". Lunar and
Planetary Science Conference, The Woodlands, TX (March).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2010.
- Detection of secondary
craters to improve martian surface regionalization through the crater
size-frequency distribution. Association of American
Geographers, Washington, D.C. (April).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2009.
- Orders
of relief and the regional geography of Mars. Association of American
Geographers, Las Vegas (March).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2009.
- From a
hazards project to the regional geography of Mars. Mars Geography Network
special session, Association of American Geographers, Las Vegas (March).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2007.
- Mars in the
geography classroom. Association of Pacific Coast
Geographers, Long Beach (October) (also listed in the geoscience education section below)
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2007.
- Boldly going
where no geographer has gone before: The Martian
classroom. Los Angeles Geographic Society, Los Angeles (September) (also
listed in the geoscience education section below)
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2002.
-
Emerging risk
assessment and management controversies in the Mars Sample Return. Poster
presented to the 27th Annual Hazards Research and Applications Workshop,
Boulder, CO (14-17 July).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2001.
- Risk representation in the space program: The Internet and the
social amplification of risk. NASA Teleconference among NASA Headquarters, Jet
Propulsion Lab, Ames Research Center, and Johnson Space Center (27 November,
from JPL).
I incorporated Mars geochemical data in a principal components lab for my GEOG
400 course in multivariate statistics. A Geological Sciences graduate student
in the class, Ms. Carlye Peterson, developed her individual lab project around
the use of PCA to process six different palæoclimate proxies taken from
cores in the Santa Barbara Basin, extending back to about 33,000 years ago.
She, her advisor (Dr. Richard Behl), and I worked further with these data
and Ms. Peterson presented initial results at the 2008 American Geophysical
Union.
- Carlye D. Peterson; Richard J. Behl; Christine M. Rodrigue; Cathleen M.
Zeleski; and Tessa M. Hill. 2008.
- Statistical
relationships among proxies of climate, productivity and the carbon cycle
across climatic regimes, Santa Barbara Basin, California. American Geophysical
Union, San Francisco (December)
Soon after the tragedy of 11 September 2001, the
Natural Hazards Center at the
University of Colorado, Boulder, put out a call to the hazards research
community to submit NSF Quick Response grant proposals to study the event and
make our findings available to the disaster managers and terrorism research
community. I agreed to do a literature content analysis of one newspaper,
selecting the online edition of the Los Angeles Times. A progress
report on the first six weeks of coverage was presented as part of a panel at
an NSF-funded conference in New York, followed by a published abstract. The
Quick Response Report covers the full twelve week period of the grant
project and the Special Publication anthology extends the analysis to
include photographic imagery.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2004.
- El Niño
and 9/11 Quick Response Research Projects. Panel presentation to the Quick
Response Research and Scholarship in Geography panel, sponsored by the
Hazards, Qualitative Methods, and Environmental Perception and Behavior
specialty groups, Association of American Geographers, Philadelphia (17 March)
(also listed below in the 1998 floods section).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2003.
- Representation
of the September 11th terrorist attacks in the online edition of the
Los Angeles Times. In Beyond September 11th: An Account of Post-
Disaster Research, ed. Jacquelyn L. Monday, pp. 521- 588. University of
Colorado Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center
Special Publication 39 (a cooperative project of the Natural Hazards
Research and Applications Information Center, Public Entity Risk Institute,
and the Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2002.
- Media coverage of the
events of 9/11. Poster presented to the 27th Annual Hazards Research and
Applications Workshop, Boulder, CO (14-17 July).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2002.
- Patterns of media
coverage of the terrorist attacks on the United States in September of
2001. Quick Response Report 146.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2002.
- Media
Coverage of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon. Poster presented to the Association of American Geographers,
Los Angeles (20 March).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2002.
-
Media and the Terrorist Attack of 11 September 2001: Los Angeles
Times' coverage for the first twelve weeks. Panel remarks presented to
the "Media and the Terrorist Attack of 11 September 2001" panel, Association
of American Geographers, Los Angeles (21 March).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2001.
- Patterns
of media coverage of the terrorist attacks on the United States in September
of 2001. Abtract of then-ongoing research on NSF-sponsored Disaster Research
Support Site, hosted by
the New York University Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems, New York.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2001.
- Patterns
of media coverage of the terrorist attacks on the United States in September
of 2001. Panel remarks presented to the NSF-sponsored Learning from
Urban Disasters Workshop, hosted by the New York University Institute for
Civil
Infrastructure Systems, New York (12 December).
I first became involved with earthquake hazard through the "Northridge" earthquake, because, while working at CSU
Chico, I maintained another home in Los Angeles and happened to have gotten
caught at ground zero of the 1994 earthquake. I became interested in
media construction of disaster when I noticed that the epicenter was in
Reseda, my rather hardscrabble home town, not in Northridge, the upscale
community for which the quake was named. This bias had earlier turned up
in Dr. Rovai's examination of the so-called Ferndale Quake of
1992. I built a database of place-name mentions in the Los
Angeles Times' coverage of the L.A. quake and compared it
with L.A. City Department of Building and Safety data on the
actual distribution of damaged buildings. With Dr. Place, I
worked on a similar comparison with place-name mentions in La
Opinión, the dominant Spanish-language paper in Los Angeles.
In both cases, the departures between the print media pattern of
attention and the actual pattern of damages showed biases along
racial and income lines. I did a survey of Angelenos' mental
maps of the damage, and their mental maps almost perfectly
correlated with the media pattern rather than the actual damage
patterns. Very unfortunately, the areas seriously undercovered
by the media recovered significantly more slowly than those
heavily overcovered by the media.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2006.
- Review of
After the Earth Shakes: Elastic Rebound on an Urban Planet. Geotimes
51, 11: 50-51.
- E. Rovai and C.M. Rodrigue. 1998.
- The
"Northridge" and "Ferndale" earthquakes: Spatial inequities in
media attention and recovery. National Social Science Journal 11, 2:
109-120.
- C.M. Rodrigue, E.Rovai, and S.E. Place. 1997.
-
Construction of the "Northridge" earthquake in Los Angeles'
English and Spanish print media: Damage, attention, and skewed
recovery. Presentation to the Southern California Environment
and History Conference, Northridge, CA.
- C.M. Rodrigue and E. Rovai. 1995.
- The "Northridge" earthquake: Differential geographies of damage,
media attention, and recovery. National Social Science Perspectives
Journal 7, 3: 97-111.
- S.E. Place and C.M. Rodrigue. 1995.
- Media
construction of the "Northridge" earthquake in English and Spanish print media
in Los Angeles. Proceedings, International Geographical Union, CD-
ROM.
In 1993, I became interested in chaparral fire
hazard in montane
suburban California. When natural hazard is examined from a
structural approach, one would expect the poorest and most
marginalized people to be most at risk to disaster. That is
exactly what one sees in the developing world. In California,
however, it is the most prosperous people who choose to live in
the risky habitat of the very pyrogenic chaparral. In a
situation like this, it is important to distinguish between risk
of exposure to a hazard and vulnerability to it. The montane
suburbanites of California certainly incur greater risk to
chaparral fire in their search for a home with a view, but their
vulnerability is socialized to the rest of society through
insurance and tax mechanisms. Lately, I've become more interested in the
underlying physical/biological factors underlying this hazard and the
divergent views of Mediterranean scrub among European and American authors.
These projects are summarized here:
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2004.
- The construction
of Mediterranean scrub in biogeography and ecology.
Association of American Geographers, Denver.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2004.
- The construction
of scrub in California and the Mediterranean borderlands:
Climatic and edaphic climax mosaic or anthropogenic artifact?
American Geophysical Union, San Francisco (December). (unfortunately, due
to illness, I was unable to drive to San Francisco to deliver the poster [564
K .ppt file])
- C.M. Rodrigue. 1993.
- Home with a
view:
Chaparral fire hazard and the social geographies of risk and vulnerability.
California Geographer 33: 105-118.
Comparisons of our fire-related work led to a collaboration between Dr. Paul
Laris and myself on the disturbance history and prospects for restoration of
California sage scrub or soft chaparral. CSS is common along the coast
and
interior valleys of Southern California and is a more open and lower scrub
vegetation than chaparral. It features unusual drought adaptations, such as
facultative summer deciduousness and an ability to capture fog drip or
monsoonal thunderstorm precipitation. Some
67-90% of it has been destroyed by agriculture and urbanization, which
threatens a number of animal species dependent on it for habitat. Much work
has focussed on identifying factors preventing its re-establishment, such as
too-frequent fire, overgrazing, air pollution, soil conditions favoring exotic
annuals, allelopathy by invaders of the grasslands, plowing, and disruption of
mycorrhizal symbionts in the CSS root zone. Our current focus is on the
differences between long-stable boundaries between CSS and grassland and
self-restoring, expanding CSS boundaries. Our work in this area includes
supervision of graduate student theses, graduate seminars, undergraduate
courses in biogeography, California ecosystems, and field methods, and
mentoring high school and community
college interns in the Geoscience Diversity Enhancement Program Track 2 (2008-
2010). We have
field study sites on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, La Jolla and Serrano valleys
in the westernmost Santa Monicas, Calabasas, Chatsworth, and the Sepulveda Dam
Basin.
- S. Brennan, P. Laris, and C.M. Rodrigue. 2018.
- Coyote brush as facilitator of native California plant recovery in
the Santa Monica Mountains. Madroño 65, 1: 47-59.
- P. Laris, C. Seymour, and C.M. Rodrigue. 2018.
-
Grasses
versus forbs: What a long term, repeat study can tell us about California's
native prairie landscapes. Presentation to the Association of Pacific
Coast Geographers, Reno, NV (26 October).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2015.
- Differences in California sage
scrub composition behind stable and recovering boundaries with annual
grassland. Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, Palm Springs, CA.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2013.
- Constructing
all-year floristic keys for small areas. Fremontia:
Journal of the California Native Plant Society 40, 1-2: 41-46.
- C.M. Rodrigue, P. Laris, L. Avelar Portillo, S. Brennan, J. Diminutto, M.
Mills, P. Nesbit, A. Santana, C. Tabag, C. Vaughan, and S. Winslow. 2013.
- Restoration of
California sage scrub: Reclamation of ground cover from exotic grassland.
Presentation to the Southern California Academy of Sciences, Long Beach
(invited symposium on California sage scrub, which I organized and, with Paul
Laris, co-chaired).
- J. Dean, P. Laris, C.M. Rodrigue, and M. Ferris. 2010.
- An 80 year record of the disturbance regime of California coastal
sage scrub on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Presentation to the Southern
California Academy of Sciences, Los Angeles.
Dr. Laris' and my collaboration on fire and succession in chaparral and CSS was extended into fire management in Mali, West Africa. Dr. Laris had worked there in the Peace Corps and eventually did his dissertation work at Clark University using a triangulated methodology combining remote sensing and ethnographic field work to analyze Malians' use of fire to manage the balance of trees and grasses in savanna landscapes. He has been there many times since and developed ongoing field research collaborations with Dr. Fadiala Dembélé and Dr. Moussa Koné and Mr. Fakuru Camara, sometimes involving CSULB graduate students. I became involved through the statistical analysis of these data.
- P. Laris, M. Koné, F. Dembélé, C.M. Rodrigue, L. Yang, R. Jacobs, Q. Laris, and F. Camara. 2023.
- The pyrogeography of methane emissions from seasonal mosaic burning regimes in a West African landscape Fire 6, 2 (special issue: Fire in Savanna Landscapes): Article 52.
- P. Laris, M. Koné, F. Dembélé, C.M. Rodrigue, L. Yang, R. Jacobs, and Q. Laris. 2021.
- Methane gas emissions from savanna fires: what analysis of local burning regimes in a working West African landscape tell us. Biogeosciences 18, 23: 6229-6244.
- P. Laris, L. Yang, F. Dembélé, and C.M. Rodrigue. 2021.
- Fire and water: The role of grass competition on juvenile tree growth and survival rates in a mesic savanna. Plant Ecology 222, 7: 861-875.
- P. Laris, R. Jacobs, M. Koné, F. Dembélé and C.M. Rodrigue. 2020.
- Determinants of fire intensity in working landscapes of an African savanna.. Fire Ecology 16: Article 27.
Frustration with students who never showed up for the first field trip I led
for a class in biogeography in 2000 led me to impose an alternative field
experience for them: I had them go out on their own and conduct several
observations of street pigeons around Los Angeles, using the data collection
forms and reference materials of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's citizen
science Project PigeonWatch. Attendance on the
planned trip improved in subsequent semesters but there are always students
whose schedules or emergencies can't accommodate it, so I've sent them out on
PigeonWatches ever since, with the eventual accumulation of an enormous
database on the size of pigeon flocks, the frequencies of different morphs,
their courtships, and their precise locations. Cornell was interested in how
feral pigeons' morphic diversity is maintained against balancing
predator-enforced natural selection, and they wanted to explore sexual
selection as a factor. The results of this decade-long citizen science
project were never published. I put all the student reports into a common
spreadsheet, mapped it in Google Earth, and then performed statistical
analyses, which dismissed predator selection for crypticity in their habitats.
A weak signal of assortative mating did come through.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2018.
-
If you blow off the field
trip, you're going to be watching a lot of pigeons! Presentation to the
Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, Reno, NV (27 October).
With a team of graduate students involved in the Chico State
Center for
Hazards Research (James Hotchkiss, Adam Henderson, and Stacy
Potter), Dr. Rovai and I conducted a field investigation of the
impacts on Los Angeles of the
El-Niño-attributed
storms of
late February 1998. We concentrated on actual patterns of damage and
patterns reported in the print media, as they are reflected in
local residents' mental maps of the disaster. We found that
media coverage was actually broader, both within California and
within the Southern California region, than the mental maps
reported by residents. Local residents focused almost exclusively
on Laguna Beach and Malibu. We also found that most people
maintain an emergency kit, a cheap form of non-structural hazard
mitigation. Very few homeowners, however, reported having flood
insurance, despite their awareness of El Niño, generally
believing they lived either too high to be affected (i.e., not in
the floodplain) or too low to be affected (i.e., not in the
mudslide-affected hillsides)! This field expedition was funded
by a Quick Response grant from the University of Colorado,
Boulder, Natural Hazards Center. Our results were summarized in one of their
Quick Response Report series. The way things are shaping up in October
2015 with an even greater magnitude El Niño bearing down on Southern
California, this old project may get new life.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2004.
- El Niño
and 9/11 Quick
Response Research Projects. Panel presentation to the Quick Response
Research and Scholarship in
Geography panel, sponsored by the Hazards, Qualitative Methods, and
Environmental Perception and
Behavior specialty groups, Association of American Geographers, Philadelphia
(17 March) (also listed
above in the 9/11 section).
- C.M. Rodrigue and Eugenie Rovai, with Adam Henderson, James Hotchkiss, and
Stacy Potter. 1998.
- El Niño and
perceptions of the Southern California floods and mudslides of 1998.
Quick Response Report 107.
Dr. Rovai and I have also looked at the legal framework for
water resource allocation in drought. I have been very
concerned about the movement to have the San Fernando Valley
secede
from the City of Los Angeles, to which it had annexed itself to
acquire water. The Valley is legally unable to draw on its own
groundwater, to which Los Angeles has pueblo rights, or to the
Owens River water, on which it currently largely depends. Should
the Valley secede, water arrangements throughout the State of
California will be drastically impacted, with all sorts of third
party impacts on water users in the North State.
- C.M. Rodrigue and E.Rovai. 1997.
- Weaving the
water web: Evolution of the legal framework for water resource
development in California. Presentation to the Southern
California Environment and History Conference, Northridge, CA (21 September).
I have always been
interested in the contexts creating human vulnerability and the
social response to disaster. My dissertation addressed this
general theme in the Neolithic process of the Near
East, examining how the widespread sedentarization of human societies
from about 15,000 years ago to 5,000 years ago increased their
exposure to the dramatic environmental changes possible in one
place. One response to this increased vulnerability was the
domestication of plants and animals and, eventually, the rise of
formal religion and proto-state societies. Another was the
deterioration in women's status seen in virtually all class
societies. This research eventually debunked the argument that
religious sacrificial practices caused the domestication of
animals, a view propounded by such cultural geographers as Eduard
Hahn, Carl Sauer, Frederick and Elizabeth Simoons, and Erich
Isaac. It also undermines rather romantic arguments for a golden
age of matriarchy.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2016.
- Animal domestication. Invited entry. Encyclopædia of the
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, 3rd
ed. Ed. Helaine Selin. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer (in press).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2010.
- Animal
domestication. Invited entry. Encyclopedia of Human
Geography, 2nd ed., ed. Barney Warf, vol. 2, pp. 781-784. Thousand Oaks,
CA: SAGE Publications.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2005.
- James Blaut's
critique of diffusionism through a Neolithic lens: Early animal
domestication in the Near East. Invited paper. Antipode 37, 5:
981-989.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2008.
- Animal domestication. In Helaine Selin
(ed.), Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology,
and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, 2nd ed. Invited. New York:
Springer, 2 vols., 2416 pp.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 1997.
- Animal domestication. In Helaine Selin
(ed.), Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology,
and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, pp. 64-66. Invited. Dordrecht,
Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 1992.
- Can religion account for early animal
domestications? A critical assessment of the cultural geographic
argument, based on Near Eastern archaeological data.
Professional Geographer 44, 4: 417-430.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 1987.
- An Evaluation of Ritual Sacrifice as an Explanation for Early
Animal Domestications in
the Near East. Disseration submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for a Ph.D. in
Geography, Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, Worcester, MA.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 1987.
- The origins
of women's subjugation: A tentative reconstruction.
Presentation to the Association of American Geographers national
meeting, Portland, OR.
As a professor, much of my time is devoted to teaching. This education
activity has
generated research publications and presentations of an explicitly
pædagogical or curricular nature. Generally, these projects have grown
out of the supervision of research immersion projects for undergraduates,
experiments with different teaching assignments, assessment activities, or
from curricular issues facing my department.
- Christine M. Rodrigue. 2012.
- The
AAG's ALIGNED Toolkit: A place-based approach to fostering diversity in
the geosciences. American Geophysical Union, San Francisco.
- Christine M. Rodrigue. 2012.
- Geoscience diversity at California State University, Long Beach:
GDEP and ALIGNED. Invited panel presentation in the "Diverse Experiences in
Diversity at the Geography Department Scale" special session. Association of
American Geographers, New York.
- Christine M. Rodrigue. 2008.
- Geography from the back of the AAG program: Is geography what we
say or what we do? The California Geographer 48.
- Christine M. Rodrigue. 2007.
-
Mars in the geography classroom." Association of Pacific Coast
Geographers,
Long Beach (October) (also listed in the Mars section
above)
- Christine M. Rodrigue. 2007.
- Boldly going
where no geographer has gone before: The Martian
classroom." Los Angeles Geographic Society, Los Angeles (September) (also
listed in the Mars section above).
- Christine M. Rodrigue. 2007.
- "Geography diversity initiatives at California State University,
Long Beach: The Geoscience Diversity Enhancement Program." Yearbook of the
Association of Pacific Coast Geographers 69: 160-167.
- Christine M. Rodrigue. 2006.
- Geography
diversity initiatives at California State University, Long Beach: The
Geoscience Diversity Enhancement Program. Invited panelist for the APCG
Presidential Plenary session, "Geography in a Diverse World," Association of
Pacific Coast Geographers, Eugene, Oregon (September).
- Christine M. Rodrigue. 2006.
- Growing
geography: A view from "The Beach." Invited panelist for the APCG Healthy
Departments Special Session, Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, Eugene,
Oregon (September).
- Christine M. Rodrigue. 2006.
- Geography diversity
initiatives at California State University, Long Beach: Interdisciplinary
and interinstitutional Partnerships. Invited panelist for the AAG Diversity
Task Force session: Collaboration and Outreach. Association of American
Geographers, Chicago (March).
- Christine M. Rodrigue. 2005.
- The State of Geography and its cognate disciplines in the California
State Universities from Fall 1992 through Fall 2004. The California
Geographer 45: 59-85.
- Elizabeth L. Ambos, Christine M. Rodrigue, Richard J. Behl, Christopher
T. Lee, Suzanne P. Wechsler, Gregory Holk, Daniel O. Larson, R. Daniel
Francis, and David Whitney. 2005.
- Geoscience field studies at California State University at Long
Beach: Urban applied research with a community focus. CUR Quarterly
(Council on Undergraduate Research) 26, 2: 56-61 (this is the lead article in
a special issue on "Undergraduate research that serves the community").
- Elizabeth L. Ambos, Richard Behl, David Whitney, Christine M. Rodrigue,
Suzanne P. Wechsler, Gregory Holk, Christopher T. Lee, R. Daniel Francis, and
Daniel O. Larson. 2005.
- Geosciences
student recruitment strategies at California State University, Long Beach
(CSULB): Earth system science/community-research based education
partnerships. American Geophysical Union, San Francisco (5 December).
- Suzanne P. Wechsler, David Whitney, Elizabeth L. Ambos, Christine M.
Rodrigue, Christopher T. Lee, Richard Behl, Daniel O. Larson, R. Daniel
Francis, and Gregory Holk,. 2005.
- Enhancing diversity in the geosciences. Journal of Geography
104, 4 (July/August): 141-149.
- David J. Whitney, Richard J. Behl, Elizabeth L. Ambos, R. Daniel Francis,
Gregory Holk, Daniel O. Larson, Christopher T. Lee, Christine M. Rodrigue, and
Suzanne P. Wechsler. 2005.
- Ethnic differences in geoscience attitudes of college students.
EOS 86, 30 (26 July): 277, 279.
- Christine M. Rodrigue. 2005.
- The state of
geography and its cognate disciplines in the California State
Universities. California Geographical Society, Yosemite (23 April).
- Richard Behl, Elizabeth L. Ambos, R. D. Francis, Gregory Holk, Daniel O.
Larson, Christopher T. Lee, Christine M. Rodrigue, Suzanne P. Wechsler, and
David J. Whitney. 2004.
- Hunting for
students:
Outreach and retention strategies in a competitive urban market.
Geological Society of America,
Denver, CO (9 November).
- Christine M. Rodrigue, Elizabeth L. Ambos, Richard Behl, R. D. Francis,
Daniel O. Larson,
María-Teresa Ramírez-Herrera, Gregory Holk, Suzanne P. Wechsler,
Christopher T. Lee,
David J. Whitney, and Shellinda Barré. 2004.
- GDEP
(Geoscience Diversity
Enhancement Program): An NSF-OEDG program emphasizing interdisciplinary Earth
system science
research. Universities Space Research Association conference, "Earth
System Science Education
for the 21st Century, Monterey, CA (28-30 June).
- Elizabeth L. Ambos, Richard Behl, R. D. Francis, Daniel O. Larson,
María-Teresa Ramírez-Herrera, Christine M. Rodrigue, Gregory
Holk, Suzanne P. Wechsler, Christopher T. Lee,
David J. Whitney, and Shellinda Barré. 2004.
- GDEP (Geoscience
Diversity Enhancement Program): An NSF-OEDG program emphasizing integrated
geoscience research in
urban areas. Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, Tucson, AZ
(June).
- Christine M. Rodrigue, Eugenie Rovai, and Steve Stewart, with Judith A.
Tyner. 2004.
- Web Reports and
Maps: Student
Collaborative Research Online. California Geographical Society, Long Beach
(23-25 April).
- Christine M. Rodrigue, Christopher T. Lee, María-Teresa
Ramírez-Herrera, Robert
D. Francis, Elizabeth L. Ambos (GDEP PI), Richard Behl, Gregory Holk, Daniel
O. Larson, Suzanne P.
Wechsler, James C. Sample, David J. Whitney, and Crisanne Hazen. 2003.
- GDEP (Geoscience
Diversity Enhancement
Program): Hazards-related projects. 28th Annual Hazards Research and
Applications Workshop
Boulder, CO (July).
- Christine M. Rodrigue, Suzanne Wechsler, David Whitney, Elizabeth L.
Ambos, María-Teresa Ramírez-Herrera, Richard Behl, Robert D.
Francis, and Crisanne Hazen. 2003.
- Geoscience Diversity
Enhancement Program: Student responses. The Association of American
Geographers, New Orleans (5 March).
- Elizabeth L. Ambos, James C. Sample, Richard Behl, Robert D. Francis,
Daniel O. Larson, María-Teresa Ramírez-Herrera, Christine M.
Rodrigue, Suzanne Wechsler, David Whitney, and Crisanne Hazen. 2003.
- The Geoscience Diversity Enhancement Program (GDEP): Building an
Earth system science centered research, education, and outreach effort in
urban Long Beach, California. The American Geophysical Union, San Francisco
(December).
- E.L. Ambos, J.C. Sample, R. Behl, R.D. Francis, D.O. Larson, M.T.
Ramírez-Herrera, C. M. Rodrigue, S.P. Wechsler, D.J. Whitney, and C.
Hazen. 2002.
- GDEP (Geoscience Diversity Enhancement Program): Creating a
community-based summer geoscience research program. The Geological Society of
America, Denver (October).
- D.J. Whitney, S.P. Wechsler, C.M. Rodrigue,
M.T. Ramírez-Herrera, R.J. Behl, E.L. Ambos, R.D. Francis, J.C.
Sample, D.O. Larson, and C. Hazen. 2002.
- General
education student perceptions of the geosciences. Association of Pacific
Coast Geographers, San Bernardino, CA (5 October).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2002.
- Hazards and
GIS education at California State University, Long Beach. Invited talk to
the "What's Happening in Higher Education? Student Needs and University
Responses" panel. 27th Annual Hazards Research and Applications Workshop,
Boulder, CO (July).
- S.P. Wechsler and C.M. Rodrigue. 2002.
- GIS articulation: Addressing the issue, sharing experiences
and moving forward.
Twenty-second Annual ESRI International User's Conference (ESRI Education
Users -- HiEd: GIS Articulation), San Diego (June).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 2002.
- Assessment of an
experiment in teaching geography online. California Geographical Society,
Lone Pine (3-5 May).
- C.M. Rodrigue and E.Rovai. 1998.
- Construction of an interactive map for the web by students in paired
classes, National Social Science Association, San Diego (April).
- C.M. Rodrigue. 1996.
- The imaginary migration exercise: An approach to teaching ethnic
issues. Journal of Geography 95, 2: 81-85.
- C.M. Rodrigue. 1994.
- The imaginary migration exercise: An approach to ethnic issues in a
California Geography Course. California Geographic Society, Pomona (April).