Report of the Seventy-Ninth Annual Meeting: Portland, Oregon October 5–8, 2016

The Association of Pacific Coast Geographers held its seventy-ninth annual meeting on October 5–8, 2016, at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. More than 250 academic, professional, and student members of the APCG came together for paper and poster sessions, the welcoming keynote session and reception, the presidential plenary, field trips, and the student awards banquet. Presenters came from more than forty-two different APCG universities. The collegial and supportive atmosphere at the APCG meetings makes it a great forum for exchanging ideas and we were pleased to host this year’s meeting at PSU.

The Portland State University Department of Geography faculty hosted the meeting on their campus, and most of the events took place in the Smith Memorial Student Union. The opening session began on (a rainy) Wednesday evening. PSU Provost Sona Andrews; APCG President Stephen Cunha; Director of PSU’s Institute for Sustainable Solutions, Robert Liberty; and PSU Geography Department Chair Heejun Chang each greeted the gathering before the opening plenary. Philip Mote, Director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Center and Oregon Climate Services, and Professor at the College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University, delivered the opening plenary, “Planning in the face of uncertainty: what we don’t know about our changing climate.” A reception with Oregon beers and wines followed in the browsing room overlooking the South Park Blocks.

For the 2016 meeting, all poster and paper sessions met on Thursday and Friday, and the field trips took place on Saturday. APCG members presented more than 140 papers and posters in four (and at times five) concurrent sessions. Session topics spanned the range of interests held by the members of our organization; the program is available online at the APCG and PSU Department of Geography websites.

A number of organized events and sessions took place on (an also rainy) Friday. In the morning, the APCG Women’s Network sponsored a panel discussion focused on mentorship and action strategies related to gender equity and diversity in higher education. Organized and chaired by Katie Meehan of the University of Oregon and Jessie Clark of the University of Nevada, Reno, the session panelists were Kate Berry, University of Nevada, Reno, Harriet Hawkins, University of London, and Amy Lobben, the University of Oregon.

Late Friday morning, Stephen Cunha delivered his Presidential Address, discussing his research on evolving land protection in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan. The environmental and political context provided by Stephen was supported and illustrated by an extraordinary collection of his photographs from the region.

The Student Awards Banquet took place in the Smith Memorial Student Union ballroom on Friday evening at this year’s meeting. Excellent student presentations were plentiful, and the great turnout made decisions about choosing award winners particularly difficult this year. APCG vice-president Dennis Dingemans, of UC Davis, emceed the event.

On Saturday (the day it did not rain much and when the weather was actually quite nice), four field trips coordinated by Barbara Brower offered a number of different looks at the Portland area. Martha Works led a group on a “Landscapes of Wine in Oregon” tour. Andrés Holz and Martin Lafrenz led an excursion on the biogeography and geo-morphology of Mount Hood. Barbara Brower and Robert Voeks took a group to the Columbia River Gorge and the Hood River Valley. David Banis and Hunter Shobe led a crew of participants on a meandering walking and public-transportation tour of Portland, connected to their book Portlandness: A Cultural Atlas.

The event came together thanks to the efforts of many APCG members and people at Portland State University. Steve Graves, of California State Northridge, single-handedly put the registration site together. David Deis and James Craine, also of California State North-ridge, designed the clean and sharp look of the meeting program. The PSU Department of Geography staff, especially Seyrra Croy, Iliana Torres, and Andrea Celentano, were instrumental in helping pull everything together before, during, and after the meeting. The success of the meeting...