There are also strong research links between faculty in Physical Geography and faculty in the department doing research on Nature-Society relationships, and GIS, remote sensing, and geographic visualization. We support the university's mission of instruction, research, and service by designing and producing educational software for the earth sciences, World Wide Web-based applications, and custom maps and other information graphics for print media, including Penn State campus maps. Research conducted at the Penn State Tree Ring Lab has shown that episodic fire was a prevalant and dynamic ecological process in northern and east-central California before fire was excluded beginning at the turn of the twentieth century. Fire worked in concert with the regional climate and topography to influence both vertical and horizontal forest structure. Fire frequency and intensity modified species composition as well.
Research is focused on dendroecology, dendroclimatology, and dendroarchaeology.
The Apoala Project has been undertaken to develop an integrated spatio-temporal geographic information, visualization, and analysis system with the goal of supporting complex exploratory analysis of environmental data.