MAGIP Scholarship and Grants Committee 2026 Annual Report

Please allow me to update you on the success of the Scholarship and Grants Committee and congratulate our current award winners. At the 2026 Big Sky GeoCon we were delighted to see some of our past awardees thriving as professionals in our community, and saw excellent presentations from Sara Tabor, of Belgrade High School, at Big Sky GeoCon, and Eqi Luo, PhD Student from Montana State University, who received a grant and a scholarship, respectively, from us last year.

Sarah Tabor is noteworthy among educators in the way she brings GIS into her classrooms to encourage STEM skills. She does this with grace and honesty and has been sharing her experience with us over the past several years. She has helped us get a better understanding of how to deliver and work with GIS-based material in high school education, and we look to her for guidance in the future.

It was also a powerful dynamic to witness Eqi Luo present his research on temperature changes in urban environments of the developing world, as his presentation was followed by Daniel Bose, who is another PhD student in the same program. As I will describe, Daniel received a scholarship from us this year, and he was already at the conference presenting the work he has done so far. It was truly a delight to see how Eqi and Daniel are collaborating on the complex challenges associated with processing and analyzing volumes of global climate data.

2026 Awards

The awards we made in 2026 included a K-12 Education Grant to the Yaak Valley Forest Council, and three Higher Education Scholarships to two PhD students at MSU, and one highly motivated undergraduate student at the University of Montana.

Establishing a relationship with the Yaak Valley Forest Council is exciting because they are offering a GIS summer camp to local students, which is also supported by the US Air Force and MSU. With that foundation, students will get a better understanding of how conservation is being planned and conducted in the Yaak Valley. We like this idea of a GIS summer camp and are pleased to support it.

Our Higher Education Scholarship recipients are all doing interesting and valuable work to support a resilient future backed by geographic analysis. Caroline Cane, out of the MSU Department of Ecology, is evaluating the difference between fuel treatments and catastrophic fires on wildlife movements, Daniel Bose from the MSU Department of Earth Sciences, is developing techniques for processing large data cubes that are used to interpret the complex relationships between sea surface temperature and precipitation is arid environments, and Beau Milton of UM’s Geoscience Department is accounting for the spatial variability of precipitation to help design an updated hydrologic monitoring system in the Blackfoot River watershed.

For more information about the people and projects involved in these awards, please visit our website:

Best wishes,

Robert Ahl, PhD, GISP
MAGIP Scholarship and Grants Committee Chair