Each year, University of Minnesota graduate and undergraduate students compete in the U-Spatial Mapping Prize, a contest that celebrates design, data, storytelling and cartography through the use of maps.
“Part of our mission is to promote spatial thinking across the University and in all disciplines, and the U-Spatial Prize is a way to do that and engage students,” says Sarah Porter, U-Spatial geospatial operations manager.
Eight prizes were recently awarded across a number of categories and a broad range of topics both local and global.
While traditionally housed in geography, the field of geographic information systems (GIS) has evolved to become much more than this, especially with the introduction of ArcGIS StoryMaps, a tool created by Esri (Environmental Systems Research Institute), a company founded by University of Minnesota alum Jack Dangermond that makes GIS software (a gift from Dangermond also supports prize awards for the students). StoryMaps combines maps, 3D scenes, embedded content, multimedia and more into an interactive narrative.
Paulina Vergara Buitrago won the U-Spatial Grand Prize for Best Overall Map for her StoryMap “Roots in the Land…”, which traces the history, challenges and present-day stories of Black farmers across the United States and in Minnesota. The project highlights Minnesota’s Frog Tree Farm as a case study, a Black-owned farm connected to the nonprofit Friends of Frog Tree Farm and among the state’s oldest continuously operated Black-owned family farms.
An international student from Colombia who graduates this month with a dual PhD in Natural Resources, Science and Management and a master’s in Geographic Information Science, Vergara Buitrago applied for the competition because she recognized the power of GIS and StoryMaps in bringing compelling stories to a wider audience.
“The University has all these resources, the software package, StoryMaps, remote sensing tools, all available to any student, so I wanted to take advantage of this to learn more about how to use these tools,” she says.
For her work with Friends of Frog Tree Farm in particular, she says “It's not only to create the map, but the map as described with the voice of the communities. We bring our skills and some specific background in such software to the community to develop their idea.”
This work is part of the Kris Nelson Community-Based Research Program at the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, which connects University of Minnesota graduate students with community-based organizations to carry out community-guided research and applied technical assistance that supports justice-focused initiatives in the Twin Cities region.
With a background in environmental engineering and geography, Vergara Buitrago at first anticipated using GIS in service to her scientific work around land use, but soon she saw its advantages in the communication of her work to audiences outside of academia and the scientific community.
“People are not going to read a 20-page paper or a report, so it's a way to think about what different tools we need to use in order to approach our audience,” she says. “I want to understand how to connect the data we collect with the human.”
University of Minnesota faculty, staff and students have gotten the message, says Porter.
“We are one of the leading universities in the country for geospatial science. With just our ArcGIS online platform alone, we have more users, more accounts, more products than most public universities in the country.”
Sediment and the Mississippi
Spatial research might not seem like a natural fit for first-year student Bennett Lon ’29 (Andover, Minnesota), a College of Science and Engineering biomedical engineering major.
“Biomedical engineering is not what you would expect seeing my project,” says Lon, who won Best Use of Maps by an undergraduate in the U-Spatial competition for his story map exploring sediment transportation and how it affects people, water and land along the Mississippi.
“I was enrolled in an honors seminar with teaching specialist Patrick Nunnally about engineering on the Mississippi River,” he says. “Our final project was to make a story map on any topic relating to the Mississippi.”
While he’s not quite sure yet how spatial research fits into his career plans, creating and presenting his work through StoryMaps has helped him better understand complex information.
“For me, visual learning is nice, because if you just throw a lot of information, it doesn't really stick,” says Lon. “Having this way to incorporate visual data and literature into one site that you can just briefly scroll if you want, or go really in-depth … That's a really good way to explain or demonstrate a point you're trying to make, instead of just a 10-page paper.”
Porter believes that there might even be a place for spatial research in biomedical science.
“Everything is spatial,” says Porter. “You can take anything, any discipline that you're trying to study, and there is a spatial component to it.”
U-Spatial Prize recipients and their maps
Best Overall Map, Paulina Vergara Buitrago
Roots in the Land: The Story of Black Farmers and Frog Tree Farm in Minnesota
Graduate Student – Best Interactive Map, Paulina Vergara Buitrago
Hawaiian Islands - 1954
Graduate Student – Best Use of Maps for Research, Ammar Yasir
Mapping Leptospirosis Vulnerability in Puerto Rico
Graduate Student – Best Cartography, Nicole Schiller
McMurdo Dry Valleys
Graduate Student – Most Provocative, Kara Lamoreux
Nature and Health in the Twin Cities
Undergraduate Student – Best Use of Maps for Research, George Faseemo
Neither Cynical Nor Benevolent: China in Africa
Undergraduate Student – Best Use of Maps, Bennett Lon
The two-sided nature of Sediment
Undergraduate Student – Most Provocative, Leo Huppke
Queering the River
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