Geogr. 4742

Term Paper/Project Guidelines

A significant share of your grade for this class is based on a formal research paper (there is no final exam). Given the paper's importance, we will employ several mechanisms to insure its quality: 1) these guidelines; 2) a verbal proposal process in brief rounds in class followed by a short written proposal; and 3) a final oral presentation to the class. I will also review drafts if submitted by the next to last week of class.

Format

Unless you clear an alternative project with me, the term project should be a formal "research paper," meaning that it includes your original research (library or new data collection) and your conclusions. Take care with the structure, including: an abstract, sub-headings (that is, divide the paper into sections with section headings that you choose (for example: introduction, problem statement, analysis, conclusions), and references. It should be 12-15 pages, double-spaced, not including references, tables, and figures, but length is not as critical as content. It will be graded on quality of research, argument, conclusions, writing. Keep in mind the hour-glass structure: broad statement of the problem/issue with relevant literature review; narrow to a case/analysis; then broaden to conclusions/findings that reflect back on the introductory exposition.

Your paper must have references. Avoid over-reliance on newspaper and popular magazine articles—go after the technical literature and documents. You can use any citation format you wish; I like end-notes. Avoid using footnotes to make side comments---anything worth writing is worth writing in the main text. The key point of references is to give the reader enough information to go find the material themselves.

Objective and Topics

The object is to conduct secondary/archival and/or field analysis of a land use issue of your choice. The most obvious and simplest approach is to focus on one of the topics taken up in class. This ensures there will be sufficient material on which to base a paper, as well as the class lecture/discussion to help you sharpen the paper. Here are some ideas I would love to see expanded in a paper:

1. The status of land use assessments and the problems with knowing to some level of accuracy how much land is actually used in different categories, and the relationship between land use and cover.
2. Any of the many arguments about sprawl, or about the costs and other effects of anti-sprawl or growth management policies.
3. The legal aspects of land ownership, use, and planning and how they result in certain land use patterns.
4. The socio-economic driving forces behind certain land use patterns.
5. Special land uses like noxious facilities, hazard zones, recreation, etc. and the effect on land use and land use policy.
6. an examination of how some over-arching laws and other institutional structures, like NEPA or ESA, or easements, affect land use and planning in a specific case or cases;

The Case of a Consultant’s Report

I have suggested that since some of you may be heading toward a professional career in land and environmental management, that you may wish to pursue a variant of the term paper, something akin to a technical or consultant’s report to an agency. Many of the conventions above apply in this case, such as the need for references and a logical structure of the report. But the general approach and tenor of the paper would be less formally academic and more technical and directed at a very specific reader (e.g., a county commission). If this appeals to you, I suggest that you chose an example and show it to me before you design your report.

Plagiarism vs. Scholarship

Be sure to pay attention to University policies on academic honesty, especially plagiarism (www.colorado.edu/academics/honorcode/). Plagiarism is the use, without attribution to the author, of another person's ideas or verbatim writing (from whole articles to paragraphs down to significant sentence fragments), such that you make an implicit claim that they are your ideas or your words. This is not to scare you away from using other peoples' ideas and words; when properly done, this is scholarship. Quotation marks accompanied by a full citation, and citations to all sources of statistics and any figures you use, will solve this problem.

Some suggested formats for References List

Books:

Anderson, J. R., J. L. Dillon, and J. B. Hardaker (1977) Agricultural Decision Analysis. Iowa State Univ. Press, Ames, Iowa.

Bennett, J. W. (1982) Of Time and the Enterprise: North American Family Farm Management in a Context of Resource Marginality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Chapters in book:

Baum, K. H. and J. W. Richardson (1983) FLIPCOM: Farm-level Continuous Optimization Models for Integrated Policy Analysis. In Kenneth H. Baum and L. P. Schertz (eds.), Modeling Farm Decisions for Policy Analysis, Boulder, Westview Press.

Articles in journals:

Borchert, J. R. (1971) The Dust Bowl in the 1970s. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 61: 1-22.

Schimel, D. S., T. G. F. Kittel, A. K. Knap, R. T. Seastedt, W. J. Parton and V. B. Brown (1991) Physiological interactions along resource gradients in tallgrass prairie. Ecology 72: 672-684.

Government reports (generally treat as books authored by agencies):

USDA Soil Conservation Service (1976) National Range Handbook. NRH-1. Washington, DC.

For unusual items like census data, draft reports, pamphlets, etc., simply be as specific as possible. The goal is to allow your reader to find the document if they wanted.