GEMS

Graduate Explorations in Mapping & Spatial Analysis

GEMS is a low-stakes presentation series to spotlight graduate research, bringing together students from across campus to share how they use GIS to shape their research. The Libraries piloted the series in Spring 2026. Check back for updates about future series!

Spring 2026

February 2

Sara Nusair
Approximate Distances from Hopewell Earthwork Mounds to River Networks with Slope as a Contributing Factor

Sara is a Ph.D. student in Regional Planning at UMass. Her research focuses on extreme heat adaptation strategies and their cooling capacity across different climate zones. She serves as the GIS Library TA at UMass Libraries and is part of the Cultural Landscapes of the Hopewell Earthworks Research group. She previously coordinated the 8th Fábos Conference on Landscape and Greenway Planning, serving as a committee member and editor of its Book of Abstracts. Sara holds an MS in Urban Studies from Jordan. Her professional experience includes working as an urban designer and lecturer, teaching freshman studios. She also contributed to the JUST-Able Project, funded by the Canadian Embassy, as a technical advisor and workshop facilitator.

March 2

Stefanie Farrington
Mapping and characterizing aquatic habitat for wildlife conservation

Stefanie studies the habitat, host fishes, and range-wide conservation of a rare freshwater mussel. She received her M.S. and B.A. from Clark University, where she studied the population genetics of freshwater pearl mussels in central and western Massachusetts. She is passionate about environmental conservation and endangered species protection, with emphasis on aquatic ecosystems and freshwater mussel ecology. When not in the lab or the river, Stefanie enjoys playing board games, doing all kinds of crafts, and spending time outdoors with her family.

April 6

Ava Healy
Holistic Geography in Environmental Planning: Multidisciplinary Geography of the Eel River’s Cattails

From a young age, Ava has always been a geographer, even before they knew what the word meant. In 2024, Ava completed their bachelors in geography and anthropology from Mount Holyoke College. Currently, they are a second year graduate student at UMass Amherst advocating the importance of holistic geography. Over their graduate career, Ava has worked as a geography teaching assistant and as a NASA intern in the Life Science Data Archives in Houston, Texas. Their thesis, “Holistic Geography in Environmental Planning: A Case Study of the Multidisciplinary Geography of the Eel River’s Cattails”, encourages centering indigenous perspectives and interdisciplinary dialogue to address environmental concerns. Ava is passionate about the universal learning of geography – their research encompasses public access to educational materials through museums, libraries, and archives. In their free time, Ava enjoys visiting museums, collecting maps, tossing a rugby ball around, and playing various TTRPGs.

Dylan Roy
Automating the extraction and classification of coastal landform morphologies with custom GIS tools

Dylan is pursuing a MS in Geography in the department of Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences (EGCS) at UMass. He is interested in coastal processes and landform evolution, and his research focuses on the erosion of coastal bluffs. He is also an active research fellow at the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center (NE CASC) and has done TA work for multiple geography courses in EGCS including Remote Sensing and Image Processing. Being an avid user of GIS and Remote Sensing methods, Dylan enjoys pushing the boundaries of traditional GIS workflows and finding ways to incorporate geospatial analysis into other realms of study.

May 4

James Higby

Mapping the lost Chester Emery Mines

James enjoys collecting and creating maps. Focused on Gobble Mountain in Chester Massachusetts (a land preserve of geologic and historic interest), he has been exploring and documenting the place for nearly a decade. The 2016 publication of 1-meter LiDAR DEM for Massachusetts tempted James to get good at using QGIS. His mapping has evolved from screenshots notated in MS-Paint to enticing three-dimensional vistas displayed as printed maps (and also animations) made with ArcGIS Pro. This GEMS presentation will summarize the work and demonstrate some useful cartographic techniques. Featured Research includes the Chester Emery Mines and the glacial potholes in East Becket. Featured Cartography:

includes blended base layers, intuitive contours, accurate water, and 3D scenes. A Clark University graduate and current UMass Amherst student, James has lived in Chester since 2015. He is a field guide for mineral collecting at the Emery Mines and the Clerk of the Chester Historical Society.

Phoenix Susak

Insights from the Temporal and Spatial Distribution of Salt Marsh Sediments

Phoenix is an MS/PhD student in the Coastal and Sediment Dynamics Laboratory in the Department of Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences. He received his BSc from Northeastern University, where he studied environmental and conservation science, and he earned a Master Beekeeping Certificate from Cornell University. At UMass, Phoenix has contributed to the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center, the NSF Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science, and the Northeast Regional Invasive Species and Climate Change Network. Phoenix’s research investigates the spatial and temporal distribution of physical, geochemical, and microfossil characteristics within salt marsh sediments.

Last Updated on May 6, 2026