Marc Mayes
Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1710 University Ave., Room 144
Madison, WI 53726 USA
608-890-2514 tel
608-265-4113 fax
mmayes@wisc.edu

Marc Mayes (CHANGE Fellow) is an M.S. Candidate in the Nelson Institute's Environment and Resources program. Broadly, Marc is interested in the environmental impacts of regional and global land cover/land use change, and relationships between spatial patterns of land development and water and energy use. He enjoys using a wide range of tools to study environmental problems, from satellite remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to organic geochemistry. Initially, his research at SAGE will focus on developing new methods for classifying and quantifying land cover change in urban and peri-urban environments in the US and China using LANDSAT and hyperspectral imagery and census statistics. He hopes to connect his research to other questions on the coupled impacts of climate and land cover change on human health and the health of aquatic ecosystems.

Marc also enjoys science writing. A student member of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), he has written for a range of publications and pursued research on integrating the teaching of writing and communication skills into undergraduate science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) classes.

For his undergraduate studies, Marc attended Brown University in Providence, RI, earning a Geology-Chemistry ScB. in May 2009. Since 2006, he has been working with Dr. James Russell on paleolimnology research in numerous lakes throughout East Africa. As part of his senior thesis, Marc constructed new lake surface temperature, precipitation and monsoon wind strength records for Lake Tanganyika and used them to study the relationships between lake surface temperature and wind strength on pelagic productivity. He is a proud alumnus of The Nyanza Project, a ten-year effort to study the climate history and limnology of Lake Tanganyika. In addition, Marc worked as a Writing Fellow for classes in Geological Sciences, History, Environmental Studies and Engineering.

When he is not working, Marc enjoys cycling, running, swimming and volunteering. He is also a musician. He plays piano and saxophones, and likes classical, jazz, funk, folk and bluegrass.