2010 Intermountain GIS Conference ~ April 19-23 ~ Bozeman, MT
~ Challenges for a Changing World ~

Featured Speaker

William Wyckoff ~ Biographical Sketch

A native Californian, William Wyckoff received his masters (1979) and doctoral (1982) degrees in geography from Syracuse University. With research interests in the cultural and historical geography of North America, Wyckoff has published The Developer's Frontier: The Making of the Western New York Landscape (Yale, 1988), The Mountainous West: Explorations in Historical Geography (coedited with Lary M. Dilsaver) (Nebraska, 1995), Creating Colorado: The Making of a Western American Landscape, 1860-1940 (Yale, 1999), and On the Road Again: Montana's Changing Landscape (University of Washington Press, 2006). In addition, he has authored more than 35 peer-reviewed book chapters and journal articles, many of them dealing with the historical and cultural geography of the American West. Recently, he has also coathered (with Rowntree, Lewis, and Price) Diversity Amid Globalization: World Regions, Environment, Development (Prentice Hall, 2006), an award-winning world regional geography textbook. Wyckoff has taught in the Department of Earth Sciences at Montana State University - Bozeman since 1986, and his research interests continue to be in the historical and cultural geography of the American West.

On the Road Again: Montana's Changing Landscape

In his book On the Road Again, Wyckoff explores Montana's changing physical and cultural landscape by pairing photographs taken by land surveyors and state highway engineers in the 1920s and 1930s with photographs taken at the same sites today. The older photographs, preserved in the archives of the Montana Historical Society, contain a wealth of information about the state's environment during the early decades of the twentieth century. To highlight landscape changes - and continuities - over more than eighty years, Wyckoff chose fifty-eight documented locations and traveled to each to photograph the exact same view. A close, thoughtful look at these photographs reveals how crops, fences, trees, and houses shape the everyday landscape, both in the first quarter of the twentieth century and in the present. The photographs offer an intimate view into Montana, into how Montana has changed in the past eighty years and how it may continue to change in the twenty-first century.

Keynote Address