Series

Series 1 · 12 models planned · ~40h

Foundations of Computational Geography

Building mathematical and computational literacy through spatial systems

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A Modelling Change

1. 1
   What Is a Spatial Model? Variables, units, and the discipline of thinking in fields
   1
2. 2
   Linear Change and Rate Slope as the fundamental measure of how things change through space and time
   1
3. 3
   Exponential Growth and Logarithms When the rate of change depends on how much you already have
   2
4. 4
   Logistic Growth and Equilibrium When growth slows as it approaches a limit — feedback, carrying capacity, and stability
   2

B Energy and Attenuation

1. 5
   Light Attenuation in a Canopy Exponential decay through space — modelling vertical gradients in forest light
   3
2. 6
   Solar Geometry and Projection Trigonometry and the dot product — how surface orientation affects energy receipt
   3

C Terrain and Spatial Derivatives

1. 7
   Digital Elevation Models as Functions Representing terrain as a function of two variables — from continuous surfaces to discrete grids
   3
2. 9
   Hydrological Flow as Optimization From local slopes to global watersheds — routing water across a DEM
   4

D Human Systems as Mathematical Systems

1. 10
   Gravity Models of Trade and Migration Distance decay and inverse power laws in human geography
   3
2. 11
   Spatial Diffusion of Innovation How ideas, diseases, and technologies spread across networks over time
   4

E Observing the Earth

1. 12
   Earth as a Rotating Sphere Spherical coordinates, angular velocity, and the geometry of our rotating planet
   3

Series 2 · 16 models planned · ~55h

Environmental Systems modelling

Energy balance, hydrology, and ecosystem processes

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F Orbital Mechanics

1. 1
   Circular Orbits and Kepler's Third Law Deriving orbital mechanics from Newton's laws — why satellites stay up
   4
2. 2
   Ground Tracks and Orbital Geometry Mapping satellite paths on Earth's surface as the planet rotates beneath
   4
3. 3
   Satellite Overpasses and Visibility Predicting when and where satellites are visible from the ground
   4
4. 4
   How GPS Works Trilateration, clock bias, and the geometry of space-based positioning
   4

G Surface Energy Balance

1. 5
   Net Radiation and Albedo Surface energy balance — how much solar energy stays at the ground?
   3
2. 6
   Sensible and Latent Heat Fluxes How net radiation is partitioned between heating air and evaporating water
   3
3. 7
   Soil Heat Diffusion Temperature waves propagating into the ground — diurnal and seasonal cycles
   4

H Ecosystem Processes

1. 8
   Photosynthesis and Light Response Converting solar energy to chemical energy — the light response curve
   3
2. 9
   Soil Moisture Dynamics Water balance, infiltration, and plant-available water in the root zone
   3
3. 10
   Carbon Allocation and Net Primary Productivity From photosynthesis to biomass — how ecosystems build and burn carbon
   3

I Atmospheric Interactions

1. 11
   Wind Profiles and Atmospheric Turbulence The logarithmic law and how roughness controls momentum transfer
   3
2. 12
   Temperature and Moisture Gradients Atmospheric stability, inversions, and the vertical structure of humidity
   3
3. 13
   Vegetation Indices and Remote Sensing NDVI, EVI, and monitoring photosynthesis from space
   3

J Biogeochemical Cycles

1. 14
   Decomposition and Soil Carbon Turnover From litterfall to soil organic matter — the slow carbon cycle
   3
2. 15
   Nitrogen Cycling and Limitation How nitrogen availability controls productivity and ecosystem function
   3
3. 16
   Phenology and Growing Season Dynamics Temperature, photoperiod, and the timing of leaf emergence and senescence
   3

Series 3 · 14 models planned · ~50h

Computational Spatial Analysis

Quantitative methods for raster and vector geographic data

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K Raster Foundations

1. 1
   Point-in-Polygon Testing The ray casting algorithm and spatial membership queries
   3

L Vector Operations

1. 2
   Buffer Operations and Distance Fields Creating proximity zones around geographic features
   3
2. 3
   Polygon Overlay and Clipping Intersection, union, and difference—the foundation of spatial analysis
   4
3. 4
   Spatial Joins and Proximity Queries Linking datasets by location — the foundation of spatial analysis
   3

K Raster Foundations

1. 5
   Raster Resampling and Interpolation Changing grid resolution and filling missing values
   3
2. 6
   Map Algebra and Focal Operations Cell-by-cell calculations and neighborhood analysis on rasters
   3
3. 7
   Raster Classification and Reclassification Converting continuous values to discrete categories
   3

M Terrain Analysis

1. 8
   Viewshed and Line-of-Sight Analysis What can you see from this location? Visibility analysis on terrain
   4
2. 9
   Cost-Distance and Least-Cost Paths Finding optimal routes across variable terrain
   4
3. 10
   Watershed Delineation and Flow Networks Extracting drainage basins from digital elevation models
   4

N Remote Sensing Applications

1. 11
   Supervised Image Classification From satellite pixels to land cover maps using training data
   4
2. 12
   Change Detection in Satellite Imagery Finding what changed between two dates using multi-temporal analysis
   3
3. 13
   Time Series Analysis of Satellite Data Extracting trends, seasonality, and phenology from multi-temporal imagery
   4

Series 4 · 10 models planned · ~38h

Cryosphere and Mountain Systems

Snow physics, glaciers, permafrost, and high-elevation hazards

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P Snow Physics & modelling

1. 1
   Snowpack Energy Balance How snow gains and loses energy—the foundation of melt modelling
   4
2. 2
   Snow Accumulation and Melt modelling Tracking snowpack evolution through the winter season
   3
3. 3
   Snow Water Equivalent Estimation Measuring snowpack from the ground and from space
   3
4. 4
   Avalanche Terrain Analysis Identifying where and when avalanches are likely
   4

Q Glacial Systems

1. 5
   Glacier Mass Balance How glaciers gain and lose mass—the foundation of glacier dynamics
   4
2. 6
   Glacial Meltwater Chemistry Chemical signatures of ice, rock, and time in glacier-fed streams
   3
3. 7
   Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs) When ice dams fail—catastrophic flooding from glacial lakes
   4

R Mountain Hazards

1. 8
   Slope Stability Analysis When will this hillslope fail? Forces, failure planes, and landslide prediction
   4
2. 9
   Debris Flow modelling Fast-moving mixtures of water, sediment, and rock—predicting runout and impact
   4
3. 10
   Permafrost Thaw and Geohazards Ground ice melt and its consequences for infrastructure and slope stability
   4

Series 5 · 8 models planned · ~35h

Advanced Remote Sensing

Across the electromagnetic spectrum and beyond

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S Advanced Optical & Thermal

1. 1
   Hyperspectral Imaging Hundreds of spectral bands reveal material composition and biochemical properties
   4
2. 2
   Thermal Infrared Remote Sensing Measuring temperature and heat flux from emitted radiation
   3

T Active Ranging Systems

1. 3
   Terrestrial LiDAR Point Clouds 3D structure from laser ranging—measuring topography and vegetation
   4
2. 3
   Terrestrial LiDAR Point Clouds Laser ranging for precise 3D topography and vegetation structure
   4
3. 4
   Bathymetric LiDAR and Sonar Mapping Measuring underwater topography with light and sound
   4
4. 5
   SAR Fundamentals and Applications Synthetic aperture radar for all-weather Earth observation
   5

U Geophysical Remote Sensing

1. 7
   Gravity Remote Sensing (GRACE) Measuring mass redistribution from satellite gravity measurements
   4

Series 6 · 11 models planned · ~45h

Atmospheric Hazards and Dynamics

Fire, severe weather, wind, and flood modelling

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V Fire Science

1. 1
   Fire Weather and Ignition Potential Meteorological conditions that drive wildfire ignition and spread
   3
2. 2
   Fire Spread modelling Predicting wildfire propagation across landscapes
   4
3. 3
   Fire Emissions and Smoke Dispersion Quantifying pollutant release and atmospheric transport from wildfires
   4

W Severe Weather

1. 4
   Thunderstorm Dynamics and Severe Weather Convective processes driving lightning, hail, and tornadoes
   4
2. 5
   Tornado Formation and Intensity Vortex dynamics and damage assessment from rotating thunderstorms
   5
3. 6
   Hail Formation and Forecasting Growth processes and prediction of damaging ice precipitation
   4

X Wind & Turbulence

1. 7
   Boundary Layer Turbulence and Wind Profiles Near-surface atmospheric dynamics and turbulent transport
   4
2. 8
   Extreme Wind Events and Downbursts Damaging straight-line winds from thunderstorm outflows
   4

Y Flood Hydrology

1. 9
   Rainfall Intensity-Duration-Frequency Statistical analysis of extreme precipitation for hydrologic design
   4
2. 10
   Flood Frequency Analysis Estimating flood magnitudes for design and risk assessment
   4
3. 11
   Urban Flood modelling and Green Infrastructure Runoff generation and mitigation in developed watersheds
   3

Series 7 · 25 models planned · ~100h

Economic Systems

Reading industries as spatial systems — infrastructure, flows, markets, and the mathematics that connects them

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EP — Pipeline Connectivity

1. 1
   Alberta's Crude Oil Pipeline Network A Continental System Built Over Seven Decades
   3
2. 2
   NGL and Condensate Pipeline Systems The Fractionation Cascade and the Diluent Supply Chain
   3
3. 3
   Natural Gas Transmission from Alberta The NOVA System, AECO Pricing, and Alberta's Gas Export Geography
   3
4. 4
   Refined Products Distribution Gasoline, Diesel, and Jet Fuel Across the Western Canadian Supply Chain
   3
5. 5
   The Integrated Network Graph Theory, Network Flow, and the Netback Price Surface Across Alberta's Pipeline System
   4

TR — Trade and Transport

1. 6
   The Gravity Model of Trade Distance, Mass, and the Economic Geography of Canada's Bilateral Trade
   3
2. 7
   Canadian Trade Corridors How Canada's Goods Actually Move: Rail, Road, and the Dominance of Windsor-Detroit
   3
3. 8
   Port Economics Throughput, Hinterland, and the Geography of Canada's Gateway Competition
   3
4. 9
   Modal Split and Freight Economics Why Freight Moves by Truck, Rail, or Ship — and What Changes When It Doesn't
   3
5. 10
   The Integrated Trade Network Canada's Goods System as a Directed Graph — Flow, Centrality, and the Windsor Problem
   4

UE — Urban Economic Systems

1. 11
   The Bid-Rent Model Land, Distance, and the Price of Urban Access
   3
2. 12
   Agglomeration Economies Why Firms Cluster and What It Costs When They Don't
   3
3. 13
   Zipf's Law and the City Size Distribution Why the Largest City Is Twice the Second-Largest — and the Mathematics Behind It
   3
4. 14
   The Urban Economic Base Export Employment, Multipliers, and What Actually Drives a City's Economy
   3
5. 15
   The Integrated Urban System Land Rent, Agglomeration, City Size, and the Economic Base as One System
   4

RE — Resource Economics

1. 16
   The Hotelling Rule Why the Price of a Finite Resource Must Rise at the Rate of Interest
   3
2. 17
   Supply Cost Curves and Break-Even Prices What It Actually Costs to Produce Oil — and Who Survives a Price Crash
   3
3. 18
   Royalty Regimes and Resource Rents How Governments Capture — and Sometimes Squander — Resource Wealth
   3
4. 19
   The Resource Curse Booms, Busts, and the Staples Trap
   4
5. 20
   The Integrated Resource System Alberta as a Case Study in Resource Extraction, Rent, and Regional Dependency
   4

MK — Markets and Price Formation

1. 21
   Commodity Price Formation How Global Markets Set the Price a Producer Actually Receives
   3
2. 22
   Spatial Arbitrage and the Law of One Price When Prices Converge, When They Don't, and What Infrastructure Has to Do With It
   3
3. 23
   Futures Markets as Geographic Instruments How Forward Prices Encode Infrastructure Risk, Storage Scarcity, and Time
   4
4. 24
   Price Volatility and Its Geographic Consequences Why Resource Price Swings Hit Some Places Harder Than Others
   3
5. 25
   The Integrated Price System Benchmarks, Basis, Futures, and Volatility as One Connected Geography of Price
   4

Series 15 · 114 models planned · ~200h

Computational Geography Laboratory

Advanced applied models across environmental, urban, and geographic systems

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E

1. 17
   What Light Reveals How a team of University of Alberta graduates put hyperspectral eyes in orbit — and made them free to use
   3

T — Radar Remote Sensing

1. 56
   SAR Fundamentals and Applications Synthetic aperture, backscatter physics, and the radar eye that sees through clouds
   4
2. 57
   InSAR Deformation Monitoring Interferometric phase, unwrapping, and millimetre-scale surface displacement from orbit
   5

U — Geophysical Remote Sensing

1. 58
   Gravity Remote Sensing (GRACE) Weighing the water cycle from orbit: groundwater, ice sheets, and the changing geoid
   4
2. 59
   Passive Microwave Radiometry Brightness temperature, emissivity, and the all-weather eye on soil moisture and sea ice
   4

AA — Weathering and Hillslope Processes

1. 71
   Rock Weathering and Soil Formation Chemical kinetics, temperature dependence, and the slow arithmetic of landscape lowering
   4
2. 72
   Soil Erosion and the RUSLE Decomposing a landscape's vulnerability into factors you can measure, map, and modify
   3
3. 73
   Shallow Landslides and Slope Stability The infinite slope model, pore pressure, and the arithmetic of failure
   4

AB — Fluvial Geomorphology

1. 74
   Sediment Transport in Rivers Shields, Meyer-Peter, and the hydraulic threshold between a sleeping and a moving riverbed
   4
2. 75
   Channel Morphology and Hydraulic Geometry Power laws, regime theory, and the self-organised geometry of rivers
   3

AC — Coastal Processes

1. 76
   Wave Dynamics and Nearshore Transformation From deep water to the surf zone: dispersion, shoaling, and the physics of breaking waves
   4
2. 77
   Longshore Sediment Transport and Coastal Budgets The CERC formula, littoral drift, and the arithmetic of beaches gained and lost
   4
3. 78
   Sea Level, Storm Surge, and Coastal Morphodynamics The Bruun Rule, barrier rollover, and a quantitative framework for coastal vulnerability
   4

AJ — Urban Climate and Air Quality

1. 95
   Urban Heat Island Dynamics Surface energy balance, anthropogenic heat, and the thermal penalty of the built environment
   3
2. 96
   Urban Ventilation and Pollutant Dispersion Street canyon flow regimes, Gaussian plumes, and the geometry of urban air quality
   4

AK — Transportation and Accessibility

1. 97
   Transportation Network Analysis Graph theory, shortest paths, and the mathematics of how cities move
   3
2. 98
   Accessibility and Travel Demand modelling Gravity models, floating catchment areas, and the paradox of induced demand
   4

AL — Land Use and Demographic Dynamics

1. 99
   Land Use Change modelling Cellular automata, logistic regression, and the simulation of urban growth
   4
2. 100
   Urban Scaling Laws and City Structure Zipf's law, power laws for infrastructure, superlinear creativity, and the von Thünen rent gradient
   3
3. 101
   Demographic Spatial Dynamics Cohort-component projection, migration flows, and the geography of ageing
   4

AR — Reservoir Operations and Water Supply

1. 102
   Reservoir Operations and Mass Balance Storage-yield analysis, sequent peak algorithm, and multi-purpose operating rules
   3
2. 103
   Stochastic Streamflow and Drought Risk Flow duration curves, return periods, synthetic hydrology, and reliability metrics
   4

AS — Water Quality and Eutrophication

1. 104
   Dissolved Oxygen Dynamics and the Streeter-Phelps Model BOD exertion, reaeration, and the DO sag curve downstream of a wastewater discharge
   4
2. 105
   Nutrient Dynamics and Lake Eutrophication Phosphorus loading, Vollenweider model, stratification, and TMDL frameworks
   3
3. 106
   Sediment and Contaminant Transport in Rivers Advection-dispersion equation, longitudinal dispersion, and reactive transport
   4

AT — Groundwater Contamination and Remediation

1. 107
   Groundwater Contaminant Plumes Advection-dispersion in porous media, retardation, NAPL source zones, and plume geometry
   4
2. 108
   Pump-and-Treat and In-Situ Remediation Capture zone analysis, Theis equation, and cost-benefit comparison of remediation approaches
   4

Z — Foundations of Geographic Machine Learning

1. 109
   Bayesian Inference for Environmental Models Prior beliefs, likelihood, posterior updating, and MCMC sampling
   4
2. 110
   Regression for Continuous Spatial Variables Regularisation, bias-variance tradeoff, spatial cross-validation, and random forest regression
   4
3. 111
   Dimensionality Reduction for High-Dimensional Geographic Data PCA, t-SNE, UMAP, and hyperspectral data compression
   4

AU — Ensemble Methods and Data Assimilation

1. 112
   Ensemble Forecasting and Uncertainty Quantification Monte Carlo ensembles, spread-skill relationships, and probabilistic forecast verification
   4
2. 113
   The Kalman Filter and Sequential Data Assimilation State-space models, optimal Kalman gain, and the ensemble Kalman filter
   5
3. 114
   Satellite Data Assimilation in Environmental Models Observation operators, variational assimilation, and land surface data assimilation
   5

AM — Carbon Sources

1. 115
   Fossil Fuel Combustion Chemistry Stoichiometry, carbon content, emission factors, and incomplete combustion
   2
2. 116
   Biomass Burning and Pyrogenic Carbon Combustion completeness, pyrogenic carbon partition, and fire carbon neutrality
   3
3. 117
   Land Use Change and Deforestation Carbon stocks, the stock-change method, and IPCC tier approaches
   3

AN — Carbon Sinks

1. 118
   Photosynthesis and Gross Primary Production Light-use efficiency, GPP, NPP, NEP, and carbon use efficiency
   2
2. 119
   Ocean Carbon Uptake and Air-Sea Exchange Henry's Law, solubility pump, biological pump, and gas exchange velocity
   3
3. 120
   Soil Carbon Storage and Decomposition Residence time, Q₁₀ temperature sensitivity, moisture effects, and steady-state analysis
   3

AO — Methane Processes

1. 121
   Methanogenesis in Anaerobic Environments Anaerobic decomposition, CH₄:CO₂ ratio, wetland and rice paddy emissions
   3