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Spotlight
A love of the land - as well as travel - brought a native of Germany to the southwest region of the United States to study environmental issues and teach courses in the Department of Geography at New Mexico State University.
Michaela Buenemann has been with the university since the start of the fall semester 2008. She teaches courses in geospatial techniques, field methods and physical geography.
"I really like it here at NMSU," Buenemann said. "I really like my colleagues and I think the students are pretty great too."
"I really like it here at NMSU," Buenemann said. "I really like my colleagues and I think the students are pretty great too."
Buenemann said her interest in geography started in high school and grew into a desire to work in a career that could help her integrate fieldwork and computing to assess human-environment relationships. When her parents took her and her sister on a trip to the western part of the United States in 1994, she fell in love with the region.
"I just loved the physical landscape," she said. "I just loved it."
Buenemann always wanted to be a part of a U.S. student exchange, and that opportunity presented itself when she was attending a university in Germany and participated in a field trip to northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, led by a professor from the University of Oklahoma. After the excursion, she was invited to travel to the states and study geospatial techniques at the Oklahoma university.
Buenemann earned her bachelor's degree in geography in 1999 at the Universität - Gesamthochschule Paderborn in Germany. In 2007, she earned her doctorate degree in the same field from the University of Oklahoma.
Her local research interests include integrating GIS, remote sensing, spatial modeling and field research to look at land degradation in arid and semi-arid environments due to ranching, farming and other human activities. She completed a study that documented the encroachment of woody plants in former grasslands in southwestern Oklahoma as well as the risk of encroachment given a series of human and physical conditions. She hopes to extend this work at the Jornada Experimental Range. She is currently working on quantifying drought- and bark beetle-induced vegetation die-off in the pinyon-juniper woodlands of northern New Mexico using satellite imagery.
Along with her research interests, Buenemann also loves to travel and has been to such places as Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Tunisia, Egypt, Canada and all over Europe. She has also been to all the states except for Alaska and Hawaii; she is working on getting to those last two states.
Buenemann said she loves being in the southwest and working at the university.
"I've really enjoyed my time here and I hope I'll be here for awhile," she said.
Written by Audry Olmsted.