Barbara P. Buttenfield

Department of Geography, University of Colorado - Boulder

Flyfishing adventures on Michigan Lake

I came to CU-Boulder in January 1996 to catalyze the GIScience curriculum. I direct the Meridian Lab, a small research lab in the Geography Department where three faculty and roughly a dozen graduate students work on research using GIScience, as well as on research to advance knowledge about GIScience. I am also a Research Faculty Affiliate at USGS Center for Excellence in GIScience (CEGIS).

My specific interests are in cartographic generalization, multi-scale databases, representations of uncertainty, and cartographic information design. I'm working with USGS to generalize the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) for scales ranging from 1:2,400 (civil engineering mapping scale) and 1:24,000 (topographic mapping scale) to 1:1 million (thematic mapping scale).

I am also interested in data integration. I direct an NSF project on census demography which uses PUMS microdata to refine tract-level summary attributes. Dasymetric modeling helps us to improve the small-area estimation, and Monte Carlo simulation establishes statistical confidence in the results.

I served as President of the American Cartographic Association (now the Cartography and Geographic Information Society, CaGIS) from 1995 - 1996, and was a member of the National Research Council's Mapping Science Committee from 1992-1998. I am a Lifetime Fellow of the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM) as well as of CaGIS. In 2001, I was the inaugural recipient of the UCGIS National GIScience Educator of the Year Award.

Buffalo Bicycle Classic 2009, with Ralphie the CU mascot and with my biking buddy Susan Beatty.