Recent Grants/Awards

• Population and Environment in the Great Plains (1995-2012), Myron Gutmann, Principal Investigator, University of Michigan. Funded by the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Geoff Cunfer, Principal Investigator for University of Saskatchewan Subcontract. See www.icpsr.umich.edu/plains
• Historical Geographic Information Systems Laboratory (2007-2008), Geoff Cunfer, Principal Investigator. Funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation Leaders Opportunity Fund and the University of Saskatchewan College of Arts and Science.
• Rethinking the Dust Bowl (2006-2009), Geoff Cunfer, Principal Investigator. Funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Standard Research Grant.
• Demography and Environment in Grassland Settlement (2003-2007), Ken Sylvester, Principal Investigator, University of Michigan. Funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Geoff Cunfer, Principal Investigator for Southwest Minnesota State University Subcontract.

Select Publications

• Geoff Cunfer and Fridolin Krausmann.  2009.  Sustaining soil fertility:  agricultural practice in the Old and New Worlds.  Global Environment 4.
• Geoff Cunfer, ed., As a Farm Woman Thinks: Life and Land on the Texas High Plains, 1890-1960. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, forthcoming).
• Geoff Cunfer. 2008. "Scaling the Dust Bowl," in Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship, Anne Kelly Knowles, ed. (Redlands, Calif.: ESRI Press), 95-121.
• Geoff Cunfer. 2008. “Creating the Dust Bowl: Making History, Making Art,” a digital supplement to Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship, Anne Kelly Knowles, ed. (Redlands, Calif.: ESRI Press). A 27-slide presentation on CD-ROM, including images, film clips and extensive interpretive notes, plus GIS datasets and 5 animated map sequences.
• H. Haberl, V. Winiwarter, K. Andersson, R. Ayres, C. Boone, A. Castillo, G. Cunfer, M. Fischer-Kowalski, W. Freudenburg, E. Furman, R. Kaufmann, F. Krausmann, E. Langthaler, H. Lotze-Campen, M. Mirtl, C. Redman, A. Reenberg, A. Wardell, B. Warr, H. Zechmeister. 2006. From LTER to LTSER: Conceptualizing the socio-economic dimension of long-term socio-ecological research. Ecology and Society 11(2): 13.
• Kenneth M. Sylvester, Susan Hautaniemi Leonard, Myron P. Gutmann, and Geoff Cunfer. 2002. Demography and environment in grassland settlement: using linked longitudinal and cross-sectional data to explore household and agricultural systems. History and Computing 14(1/2):31-60.
• Geoff Cunfer. 2005. On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.
• Myron P. Gutmann, William J. Parton, Geoff Cunfer, and Ingrid C. Burke. 2005. “Population and Environment in the U.S. Great Plains,” in Population, Land Use, and Environment: Research Directions, ed. Barbara Entwisle and Paul C. Stern, National Research Council. Washington: National Academy Press.
• Geoff Cunfer. 2004. Manure matters on the great plains frontier. Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 34:539-567.
• Ingrid C. Burke, William K. Lauenroth, Geoff Cunfer, John E. Barrett, Arvin Mosier, and Petra Lowe. 2002. Nitrogen in the central grasslands region of the United States. BioScience 52:813-823.
• Geoff Cunfer. 2002. “Causes of the Dust Bowl,” in Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History, Anne Kelly Knowles, ed. (Redlands, Calif.: ESRI Press), 93-104.
• Douglas J. Spieles and Geoff Cunfer. 2002. Collaborative integration of geographic information systems (GIS) in co-curricular undergraduate research.Council for Undergraduate Research Quarterly. Fall 2002:41-44.
• Geoff Cunfer. 2001. The New Deal’s Land Utilization Program in the Great Plains. Great Plains Quarterly 21:193-210.
• Geoff Cunfer, author of three chapters in Draining the Great Oasis: An Environmental History of Murray County, Minnesota, Anthony J. Amato, Janet Timmerman, and Joseph A. Amato, eds. (Marshall, Minn: Crossings Press, 2001). Authored “Crops and Land Use,” “Horse Ecology,” and “Ditches” (with Dennis Guse).
• Myron P. Gutmann and Geoff Cunfer. 1999. “A New Look at the Causes of the Dust Bowl,” International Center for Arid and Semi-arid Land Studies Publication Series, Texas Tech University.
• Myron P. Gutmann, Sara Pullum, Geoff Cunfer, and Delia Hagen. 1998. “The Great Plains Population and Environment Data Base: Sources and User’s Guide, Version 1.0,” Population Research Center Papers, University of Texas-Austin.

Current Courses

• ENVS 802.3 - Human Dimensions of Environmental Change

Current Research

• See grants section above.