Ruth Mostern is a specialist in spatial and environmental history focusing on imperial China and the world. Her research interests bridging the humanities, social sciences, information science and environmental science.She is currently working on two large-scale projects: The World-Historical Gazetteer is an NEH-funded initiative to develop content and infrastructure for databases of historical place-names that have been used around the world for the last five hundred years.  It will be a reference work in its own right and a back-end source for historical maps and spatial search.Following the Tracks of Yu: The Ecological and Imperial Worlds of the Yellow River is a book that describes how people interacted with and transformed a dynamic riparian system of water and silt over thousands of years. The book relies on spatial and data analysis along with close readings of documents.