Mary Ann Cunningham

Associate Professor of Geography

office: Ely Hall 111
box: 261
phone: 845-437-5547

B.A. Geology, Carleton College, 1986
M.A. Geography, University of Oregon, 1992
Ph.D., Geography, University of Minnesota, 2001

Mary Ann Cunningham is interested in landscapes—both aesthetic ones and those that you can quantify using GIS. Most of her research focuses on questions about how landscape change and landscape composition affect the quality and availability of habitat, mainly for birds. Recently she has been studying interspersed grassland and woodland habitats in the Sheyenne National Grassland, in southeastern North Dakota. Our results there suggest that even small birds respond to tree cover in the landscape at scales well beyond the territory they actually use. Grasshopper sparrows, for example, show reduced frequency with increasing tree cover in landscapes 1000 m or more around a sample site, and Wilson’s phalaropes show stronger responses to large (1000-m) landscapes than to smaller (200-m) ones. In addition to providing some interesting food for thought, the Sheyenne grassland is a really beautiful area with a great bird community—and an interesting human community as well.

Since moving to New York, Mary Ann is increasing her attention to forested environments. She is currently investigating issues around green space preservation and habitat quality in and around a small but growing city—that is, Poughkeepsie and Dutchess County. Through this project she hopes to work on the problem of translating ideas of landscape change between landscape scales and larger biogeographic scales. She is also beginning to explore habitat and landscape change issues in the Adirondacks, an endlessly fascinating area for those interested in birds, habitat, cultural landscapes, and conservation history.

In addition to these research interests, Mary Ann is coauthor, with her father William P. Cunningham, on two environmental science text books: Environmental Science: a Global Concern, and Principles of Environmental Science. Their missions with these books are to give students access to information about how science is used to examine and ideally to resolve environmental problems, as well as how human, cultural, and political factors give nuance to environmental issues and solutions. While these projects keep them busy, they are a great way to keep up to date on both research and current events in environmental science.

Before doing her PhD in Minnesota, Mary Ann spent several formative summers in Alaska and northern Canada and 3 winters earning an MA in Eugene, Oregon. These experiences are surprisingly useful as she starts to teach glacial geomorphology of the Adirondacks!

Courses

Geography 115: Reading the Landscape: Exploration, Travel, and Sense of Place
Geography 220: Cartography: Making Maps with GIS
Geography/Earth Science 225: GIS: Spatial Analysis
Geography/Earth Science 226: Remote Sensing
Geography/Earth Science 260: Conservation of Natural Resources
Geography/Earth Science/Environmental Studies 355: Environment and Land Use Planning

Selected Publications

Cunningham, M.A. 2005 A comparison of public and private lands for habitat conservation Professional Geographer. (forthcoming Feb. 2005).
Cunningham, W.P. Saigo, B.W., and Cunningham, M.A. 2004 Environmental Science: A Global Concern, 8e. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
M. Stewart, M.A. Cunningham, J. Schneiderman, and L.Gold. 2004. Exploring Environmental Science with GIS (lab manual). with. Mcgraw-Hill.
Cunningham, W.P. and Cunningham, M.A. 2003. Principles of Environmental Science, 2e. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

Papers In Progress

Cunningham, M.A. and Johnson, D.H. Influences of proximate and landscape features on the occurrence of grassland birds in a prairie-dominated landscape. In review, Ecological Applications (submitted October 2004).
Cunningham, M.A. Is remotely sensed data suitable for habitat assessment? In review, Landscape and Urban Planning (submitted July 2004).
Cunningham, M.A. Back to the future: A new mission for manual cartography. In review Journal of Geography (submitted May 2004).

Recent Conference Papers

Landscape ecological and biogeographical factors in the distribution of wet meadow-breeding birds. Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Philadelphia PA, March 2004
Is GRASS GIS useful in a liberal arts setting? Second Annual Teaching With Technology Forum, Vassar College. with J. Dorin, M. Krohn, K. Bolton, L. Wasowski, March 2004.
Habitat associations at multiple scales: a comparison of grassland and woodland birds. Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, New Orleands LA, February 2003.
Area sensitivity in grassland birds: Influences of environmental context. Middle States Division of the Association of American Geographers, Annual Meeting, Brookville, NY October 2001.
Assessment of USGS NLCC Land Use/Land Cover data for landscape-scale applications. Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, New York, NY, February 2001.
Do landscapes really matter? A multiple-scale evaluation of fragmentation for grassland birds. Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh PA, April 2000.

Earth Science

Geography

Staff

Earth Science & Geography

Vassar College