Dr. James Benes joined the School of Global Integrative Studies as a lecturer in Fall 2025. He teaches courses on physical geography, world regional geography, biogeography and military geography. He has also served in the U.S. Coast Guard and is currently in the U.S. Navy Reserves. His research focuses on environmental change, paleoecology, and fire history, but he actively pursues a wide range of interdisciplinary research topics. One of his academic passions is mentorship, especially through programs at UNL such as UCARE. He’s a First-Generation student and a proud Nebraskan with rural roots.

Curriculum Vita
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Related stories on Nebraska Today

• Onetime UCARE student Benes now mentors two students in research | Read online
• Doctoral student studying history of Nebraska fires | Read online

Current Research and Projects

Jim has sediment cores from different parts of the Nebraska Sandhills that he uses to reconstruct past environmental change, including fire history. The transport of charcoal within the Sandhills ecosystem and how the landscape changed from Indigenous to Euro-American land use are current aspects of research focus.

Courses

• GEOG 181 Global Environmental Issues
• GEOG 155 Introduction to Physical Geography
• GEOG 189H Battlespace Geography
• GEOG 308 Biogeography

Selected Publications

Benes, J. V., Hanson, P. R., & Fritz, S. C., 2025. Fires and Drought During the Euro-American Settlement Period (1850-1950) in the Nebraska Sand Hills. The Holocene. 35(9).

Benes, J. V., Iglesias, V., & Whitlock, C., 2019. Postglacial vegetation dynamics at high elevation from Fairy Lake in the northern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Montana, USA. Quaternary Research, pp. 1-16.

Lu, Y., Fritz, S.C., Stone, J.R., Krause, T.R., Whitlock, C., Brown, E.T. and Benes, J.V., 2017. Trends in catchment processes and lake evolution during the late-glacial and early-to mid-Holocene inferred from high-resolution XRF data in the Yellowstone region. Journal of Paleolimnology, 58(4), pp.551-569.

Benes, James, 2020. Book review for Phantom Islands: In Search of Mythical Lands by Dirk Liesemer. Historical Geography 48, pp. 159-161.

Benes, James, 2019. Book review for The Cedar Choppers: Life on the Edge of Nothing, by Ken Roberts. Great Plains Quarterly 39(3), pp. 318-319.