My name is Mark Fonstad, and thank you for visiting my faculty web pages. These pages detail my research and scholarly programs, my teaching and advising work, my service activities, and various and other sundry items. I am an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Oregon. I work in the areas of Biophysical Geography and Geographic Information Science and the interfaces between these two topical areas. I am particularly interested in riverscape and mountain environments, and I specialize in the western United States as a region (though I have been to work in several regions). I am interested in how humans interact with their environments through lenses such as theory, management, hazards, sustainability, law, engineering, restoration, and habitat. My PhD work was with Will Graf at Arizona State University, and I have inherited Will’s ideas about rivers science for aiding in people’s interactions with environments.

In one sense, I had a typical GenX upbringing in American suburbia with MTV, fishing, river canoeing during Wisconsin summers and skiing in the winters, and the Green Bay Packers. On the other hand, I had a somewhat strange upbringing in that I had two geographer parents. My father, a professor at the University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh, was a master teacher in regional and physical geography. My mother was (amongst other things) a fantasy cartographer who produces atlases of worlds created by JRR Tolkien, Anne McCaffrey, Stephen Donaldson, and others. I spent so much time and thought around those worlds that they became almost as real as the “real” world. My mother’s main tools were in traditional cartographic techniques, so I have both analog and digital sets of geographic tools wandering around my brain.

Feel free to browse these pages, and don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions or comments. Thanks!