Environmental Studies and Geography

At Augustana, your fascination with landscapes and human-environment interactions can take you down many career paths: environmental management and protection, urban planning, community development, environmental consulting, policy and law, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), cartography, teaching, and more.

Augustana's major and minor in environmental studies and geography helps students understand environmental and geographic problems so they can navigate complex issues at multiple scales and begin to influence change. In the program, students use social and natural science techniques and geospatial technologies to understand key global and local issues, including climate change, sustainability, urbanization, resource management and environmental justice.

You'll take courses in biology, geology, political science, economics and sociology and anthropology. You’ll make connections between related fields throughout the liberal arts. And through your professors’ connections to community partners and resources, you’ll find career-boosting opportunities such as internships, work and field experience in the Quad-Cities metro area along the Mississippi River.

Many students complete internships with local agencies, such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers or U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, or non-profit groups, such as River Action. During your senior year you'll complete a research project, choosing from three different options that fit your interests and career plans.

You’ll also embark on field trips with class groups or the whole department, investigating site-specific issues and exploring the geography of more distant places. Recent destinations include the Louisiana Gulf Coast and northern Sweden. 

Augustana also offers a minor in geographic information science and technology (GIS), which focuses on skills in geospatial analysis. Students can also enroll in a 3+3 Master of Landscape Architecture coordinated degree program with University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Humans live at the intersection of the natural and the built environments, and that’s why environmental studies and geography is a necessary and fast-growing field. Your passion for the environment can turn into working on solutions for the environmental challenges of the 21st century.

Distinctions

• The Quad Cities (pop. 450,000) along the Mississippi River is an excellent learning laboratory for environmental studies and geography. Our large network of regional partnerships provides research and field trip opportunities, internships, employment and other connections. A few examples include offices for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services, U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service, Illinois Department of Natural Resources and River Action, Inc.
• Through Augustana’s own Upper Mississippi Center on campus, students and faculty collaborate on projects to address sustainability challenges for local communities. Recently, students have partnered with the City of Rock Island, to identify neighborhoods at high risk for lead poisoning and find innovative strategies to help solve the problem; helped develop a Sustainable Urban Forest Management Plan for the city of Clinton, Iowa; designed a water quality monitoring plan for a soil conservation district and assessed the health of urban watersheds of Rock Island and Moline.
• The college’s three field stations — Green Wing Environmental Laboratory, Collinson Ecological Preserve and Beling Ecological Preserve — together provide access to the rich learning environments of open fields, upland hardwood forest, native loess hill prairies, a limestone cliff, streams and wetlands, and a flood plain forest along the Rock River.
• Many Augustana graduates continue their education with graduate programs in geography, urban planning, forest and wildlife ecology, landscape architecture, natural resource management, and environmental studies.
• The Department of Environment, Geography and Geoscience is housed in Swenson Hall of Geosciences and Hanson Hall of Science. Swenson Hall also houses the Fryxell Geology Museum and the bulk of the David M. Loring Map Library, which holds more than 100,000 climatic, geologic, hydrologic, topographic and transportation maps and 6,000 aerial photographs. The recently expanded Hanson Hall of Science includes flexible teaching and learning labs, studios and faculty offices dedicated to environmental studies and geography.

Recent grads

• Sophie Arceneaux ’25 is an environmental compliance specialist with Environmental Operations, Inc., in Clayton, Mo.
• Dakota Serra ’25 is pursuing a master’s in entomology and plant pathology at Oklahoma State University and is a research assistant at Oklahoma State University.
• Lazlow Ziebel ’25 is pursuing a master’s in urban and regional planning and is a teaching assistant at the University of Iowa.
• Abby Campisi ’24 is a research technician at Valent BioSciences in Libertyville, Ill.
• Amanda Gravelle ’24 is a design engineer at Veenstra and Kimm in Rock Island, Ill.
• Peyton Heisch ’23 is pursuing a master’s in natural resource – environmental thought and culture at the University of Vermont, where she is also a teaching and research assistant.
• Abdul Kamara ’23 is a GIS analyst at WSP USA in Topeka, Kan.
• Amy Nicholson ’22 is a science educator at Mariners’ Museum and Park in Newport News, Va.
• Benjamin Castro ’21 is a community development specialist with the City of Davenport, Iowa.
• Troy Faley ’21 is an environmental protection specialist with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency in Springfield, Ill.
• Morgan Anderson ’20 is a geographer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Rock Island District.
• Mia Gerace ’20 is an emergency management specialist – resiliency with the City of Aurora, Ill.
• Josh Malone ’20 is pursuing a Ph.D. in geological and earth sciences at the University of Texas at Austin and is a graduate research assistant at UT Jackson School of Geosciences.