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Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability

College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences wordmark. Where the land meets the sky. Home to three academic units. Nine career tracks. Rated the number one school of aviation in the country by Flying Magazine. New professional pilot helicopter track options. Number one regionally in sustainability education. The largest meteorology program in the country. Number one nationally in severe storm research. Geography and environmental sustainability, aviation, and meteorology. There’s only one College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences. The University of Oklahoma wordmark.

The Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability

Our mission is to conduct innovative and socially relevant research; to expand students’ intellectual vistas via critical perspectives and valuable tools and skills; and to catalyze sustainable human-natural systems.

We seek to shape a sustainable future for Oklahoma and beyond by creating a community of interdisciplinary scholars and leaders who aim to comprehend the Earth’s human-natural systems.

 

Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability logo.
 

#1

Regionally in
Sustainability
Education

 

3

Specialized
research
clusters

 

9:1

Focused
Student-to-faculty
ratio

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Degree Options

Environmental sustainability with a landscape with windmills in a field.

Environmental Sustainability addresses how societies can meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. The degree offers three different areas of concentration: culture and society, planning and management, and science and natural resources.

Geography with a landscape of a rocky coastline along the ocean.

Geography is an integrative field that studies people and the world in which they live and the discipline consists of two primary fields: human geography and physical geography. Both of these disciplines use GIS technologies and other analytical tools such as statistics, modeling and qualitative approaches.

Geographic Information Sciences with a map of Oklahoma in the backround.

Geographic Information Science is one of the most rapidly expanding areas of study and employment in the U.S. addresses how geographic information systems and remote sensing (aerial photography and satellite imagery) are used for gathering, analyzing and visualizing all forms of geographically referenced information.

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Launch your career by studying Geography at The University of Oklahoma!

Find your Future

Find the Bachelor's degree that's meant for you

Take your education to the next level

Find out why our research enterprise is like no other

See all the opportunities a path at DGES can offer

DGES Upcoming Events

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"A Century After Nanook” A lecture and film by Kirk French

A Century After Nanook is a documentary focused on the drastic environmental and cultural changes that have occurred over the last 100 years in the Inuit village of Inukjuak. The film explores the many traumas experienced by Inukjuakmiut due to colonialism, as well as the devastating effects of Arctic warming, and highlights the strength, adaptiveness, and ingenuity of the community that provides real hope for a better future.

Wednesday, April 9th, at 3 PM in Gould Hall room 155

B3C Presents: Second Tuesday Coffee Hour.
B3C Presents: Second Tuesday Coffee Hour

Please join us for socializing, coffee, and breakfast snacks with your fellow students, faculty, and staff. Feel free to swing by for a few minutes or stay the whole time.

DGES Calendar Events


DGES News

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Liam Thompson Named a 2025 Goldwater Scholar

Congratulations to Liam Thompson being named a 2025 Barry Goldwater Scholar!

See Recipiants

congratulations "boomer zoomers" Geo Bowl Team, 2nd place champions 2024.
Two DGES Undergraduate Students Awarded Engineering Just Futures Fellowship

Congratulations to Bria Dillard and Abby Williams, two DGES undergraduate students who successfully applied for the Engineering Just Futures Fellowship! The EJF program is a year-long professional learning experience for students interested in Transdisciplinary and Convergent Systems Thinking.

Learn more

Congratulations! Liam Thompson
Junior Liam Thompson Publishes "Assessment of convection-permitting hydroclimate modeling in urban areas across the contiguous United States"

Liam Thompson, a junior and a double major in the University of Oklahoma’s Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability (DGES) and School of Meteorology (SOM), recently published a research article titled Assessment of convection-permitting hydroclimate modeling in urban areas across the contiguous United States as the first author in the Journal Urban Climate. This paper is an outcome of his undergraduate research project funded by the DGES in summer 2024, during which he evaluated the performance of CONUS404, a long-term, 4-km continental-scale hydroclimate simulation in U.S. cities. Liam conducted this research while working as a DGES-funded Undergraduate Research Assistant under the guidance of Dr. Chenghao Wang.

Learn more

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DGES Undergraduate Student Places 1st at SWAAG Paper Competition

Congratulations to Noah Stilwell for winning 1st place in the SWAAG Undergraduate Student Paper Competition AND Best Paper by an undergraduate student from the Applied Geography Group!

Congratulations! América R. Gaviria Pabon.
Rebecca Lave Delivers Colloquium and Workshop

DGES was fortunate to host Rebecca Lave, the Associate Dean for the Social & Historical Sciences at Indiana University and Past-President of the American Association of Geographers.  Her research takes a Critical Physical Geography approach, combining political economy, STS, and fluvial geomorphology to analyze stream restoration, the politics of environmental expertise, and non-structural approaches to flooding. Her most recent book, The Field Guide to Mixing Social and Biophysical Methods in Environmental Research was released late February. 


College Calendar

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