Browse the results from the study

The Role of Geoscience in Society

This rapid response survey was an anonymous survey that gauged the geoscience community’s perspectives about the current state and future of the geosciences related to impacts from natural disruptive events, changes in higher education and careers, and the relevance of the geosciences to societal issues. The survey collected responses between December 2023 and August 2024.

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This analysis is part of Work Package 1 in which we assessed the impacts on geoscience education, specifically through the examination of federal funding databases for historical occurrence and scope of funding opportunities in response to notable events.  

Questions we sought to understand with this analysis included:

  • Given the increasing frequency of hazards, was there an increase over the 2000-2019 period in funding for hazard-related research?
  • Were there trends in funding by directorate? For example, did GEO fund some types of hazard-related research, while other directorates fund different types of hazard-related research? For example, a focus on community resilience vs. facility and instrumentation awards for earthquake research, vs. specific hazard types (i.e. floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, etc.)?
  • Which types of hazards received funding? Did hurricanes or earthquakes receive more funding than other types of hazards? Were there inflection points in funding for large natural disaster events?
  • Was there a connection between the production of literature and curricular materials and funding for hazard-related research? For example, was there a large amount of funding for research, but a low amount of production of literature and curricular resources, or were the trends in both similar?

Mapping of geoscience departments to federally declared disasters since 2000

We integrated data from FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS), the OpenFEMA Disaster Declarations dataset, the National Weather Service’s weather warnings archive, and the USGS ShakeMap archive into a single events database covering the time period from January 1, 2000 to December 31, 2019. The density of archived data from the federal sources was uneven between 2000 and 2011, but is complete and highly dense from 2011 to 2020. Much of the unevenness was the eventual integration of disparate public safety warning systems into the IPAWS structure.

This integrated database, which also includes spatial extents, metrics of severity and risk, as well as temporal data, was established as the baseline against which to map all geoscience departments listed in the AGI Directory of Geoscience Departments at any point between 2000 and 2020. Departments were geocoded based on their full addresses and mapped against the baseline event data to generate their event histories.

Each departmental webpage provides heatmaps of the frequency natural disturbance event notifications for the county and geographic footprint of the department’s institution. Each page also contains charts showing the number of natural disturbance notifications per year, both in total and disaggregated by type of natural disturbance event. In addition, the text of all the notification alerts is provided to serve as a memory aid for participants in the study as well as to provide transparency on the data used to create the charts.

Through this process, the results indicate that nearly all departments have experienced potentially disruptive events and many have experienced dozens of such events over the project time frame.

Browse the list of U.S. geoscience departments