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Covid-19 And Outdoor Recreation In Maine And New Hampshire: Analysis Of Trends Using Passive Visitation Data, Andrea Knapp May 2022

Covid-19 And Outdoor Recreation In Maine And New Hampshire: Analysis Of Trends Using Passive Visitation Data, Andrea Knapp

Honors College

The COVID-19 pandemic has motivated alterations to the way people approach and practice outdoor recreation. Access to outdoor areas has changed rapidly in response to measures like travel bans, closures, and health and safety guidelines. Recreation managers have had to act quickly to keep up with these visitor use fluctuations in order to protect resources from use degradation. I explored how pandemic effects have changed visitation behaviors and trends in outdoor recreation in Acadia National Park and the White Mountain National Forest. Acadia National Park is a well-known and highly trafficked outdoor recreation area with over 3 million visits annually …


Using Photovoice To Navigate Social-Ecological Change In Coastal Maine: A Case Study On Visibility, Visuality, And Visual Literacy, Kevin P. Duffy Dec 2021

Using Photovoice To Navigate Social-Ecological Change In Coastal Maine: A Case Study On Visibility, Visuality, And Visual Literacy, Kevin P. Duffy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Media representations of the environment support specific cultures of viewing that can create expectations about how to observe social-ecological interactions in everyday life. While public perceptions may appear, in some cases, to reflect these normative representations, more critical and participatory approaches to environmental research and management have begun to complicate these representations as they are negotiated through intrapersonal, interpersonal, and group communication. Working from a visual cultural approach that interrogates issues of visibility, visuality, and visual literacy, this dissertation theorizes how coastal residents represent their own observations and experiences of environmental change through photography and what impact their views have …


The Holocaust In Białystok: Urban, Rural, And Forest Environments As Spaces Of Resistance, Survival, And Persecution, Dakota Gramour Aug 2021

The Holocaust In Białystok: Urban, Rural, And Forest Environments As Spaces Of Resistance, Survival, And Persecution, Dakota Gramour

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During the German occupation of Poland in World War II, thousands of Jews escaped city or ghetto life by seeking refuge within rural villages or fleeing to the forests. Numerous factors shaped individual survivor experiences within these spaces. In particular, gender, age or familial status, environmental factors like weather conditions or terrain, as well as personal politics and language or technical skills, all molded how one could act or was forced to react in these spaces. This study emphasizes the unique two-way relationships between experience and three kinds of environments found in the Białystok District: the city of Białystok, small …


Why Are Events Important And How To Compute Them In Geospatial Research?, May Yuan Jul 2021

Why Are Events Important And How To Compute Them In Geospatial Research?, May Yuan

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Geospatial research has long centered around objects. While attention to events is growing rapidly, events remain objectified in spatial databases. This paper aims to highlight the importance of events in scientific inquiries and overview general event-based approaches to data modeling and computing. As machine learning algorithms and big data become popular in geospatial research, many studies appear to be the products of convenience with readily adaptable data and codes rather than curiosity. By asking why events are important and how to compute events in geospatial research, the author intends to provoke thinking into the rationale and conceptual basis of event-based …


Movement Analytics For Sustainable Mobility, Harvey J. Miller Jul 2021

Movement Analytics For Sustainable Mobility, Harvey J. Miller

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Mobility is central to urbanity, and urbanity is central to our common future as the world's population crowds into urban areas. This is creating a global urban mobility crisis due to the unsustainability of our 20th century transportation systems for an urban world. Fortunately, the science and planning of urban mobility is transforming away from infrastructure as the solution towards a sustainable mobility paradigm that manages rather than encourages travel, diminishes mobility and accessibility inequities, and reduces the harms of mobility to people and environments. In this essay, I discuss the contributions over the past decade of movement analytics to …


Climate Resilient Development And Discourse In The Peruvian Highlands, Jamie A. Haverkamp Aug 2019

Climate Resilient Development And Discourse In The Peruvian Highlands, Jamie A. Haverkamp

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation strives to rethink apolitical and ahistorical efforts for adapting to climate change in terms of a political struggle for survival in times of radical global environmental change. Drawing on ethnographic and participatory fieldwork with agro-pastoralists of the Peruvian Andes, government officials and international NGO actors, this dissertation follows emergent climate-resilient discourse of rapid glacier retreat as it travels from global origins and articulates with local culture and indigenous ecologies in the Cordillera Blanca. Through this research, I offer a critical interpretive analysis of modern, capitalist and rationalist ways of knowing and planning for climate change, finding that such …


Navigating Wilderness And Borderland: Environment And Culture In The Northeastern Americas During The American Revolution, Daniel S. Soucier May 2019

Navigating Wilderness And Borderland: Environment And Culture In The Northeastern Americas During The American Revolution, Daniel S. Soucier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the evolving interactions of nature and humans during the major military campaigns in the northern theatre of the American War for Independence (1775 – 1783) as local people, local environments, and military personnel from outside the region interacted with one another in complex ways. Examining the American Revolution at the convergence of environmental, military, and borderlands history, it elucidates the agency of nature and culture in shaping how three military campaigns in the “wilderness” unfolded. The invasion of Canada in 1775, the expedition from Quebec to Albany in 1777, and the invasion of Iroquoia in 1779 are …


Marine Research In Focus: Counteracting The ‘Myth Of Dry Feet’ In Dutch Planning For Flood Defense, Kristen Grant Aug 2018

Marine Research In Focus: Counteracting The ‘Myth Of Dry Feet’ In Dutch Planning For Flood Defense, Kristen Grant

Maine Sea Grant Publications

Coastal residents and towns need strategies to address climate change and its effects on sea-level rise, shoreline erosion, and coastal flooding. Extreme weather events can cause millions of dollars in damage and threaten coastal ecosystems and local economies. The Building a Resilient Coast project seeks to provide stakeholders with easy access to information to facilitate planning for climate and hazards impacts.


Modeling Movement Probabilities Within Heterogeneous Spatial Fields, Jed A. Long Jun 2018

Modeling Movement Probabilities Within Heterogeneous Spatial Fields, Jed A. Long

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Recent efforts have focused on modeling the internal structure of space-time prisms to estimate the unequal movement opportunities within. This paper further develops this area of research by formulating a model for field-based time geography that can be used to probabilistically model movement opportunities conditioned on underlying heterogeneous spatial fields. The development of field-based time geography draws heavily on well-established methods for cost-distance analysis, common to most GIS software packages. The field-based time geographic model is compared with two alternative approaches that are commonly employed to estimate probabilistic space-time prisms - (truncated) Brownian bridges and time geographic kernel density estimation. …


Quantifying Space, Understanding Minds: A Visual Summary Approach, Mark Simpson, Kai-Florian Richter, Jan Oliver Wallgrün, Alexander Klippel Dec 2017

Quantifying Space, Understanding Minds: A Visual Summary Approach, Mark Simpson, Kai-Florian Richter, Jan Oliver Wallgrün, Alexander Klippel

Journal of Spatial Information Science

This paper presents an illustrated, validated taxonomy of research that compares spatial measures to human behavior. Spatial measures quantify the spatial characteristics of environments, such as the centrality of intersections in a street network or the accessibility of a room in a building from all the other rooms. While spatial measures have been of interest to spatial sciences, they are also of importance in the behavioral sciences for use in modeling human behavior. A high correlation between values for spatial measures and specific behaviors can provide insights into an environment's legibility, and contribute to a deeper understanding of human spatial …


Mapping Neighborhood Scale Survey Responses With Uncertainty Metrics, Charles R. Ehlschlaeger, Yizhao Gao, James D. Westervelt, Robert C. Lozar, Marina V. Drigo, Jeffrey A. Burkhalter, Carey L. Baxter, Matthew D. Hiett, Natalie R. Myers, Ellen R. Hartman Dec 2016

Mapping Neighborhood Scale Survey Responses With Uncertainty Metrics, Charles R. Ehlschlaeger, Yizhao Gao, James D. Westervelt, Robert C. Lozar, Marina V. Drigo, Jeffrey A. Burkhalter, Carey L. Baxter, Matthew D. Hiett, Natalie R. Myers, Ellen R. Hartman

Journal of Spatial Information Science

This paper presents a methodology of mapping population-centric social, infrastructural, and environmental metrics at neighborhood scale. This methodology extends traditional survey analysis methods to create cartographic products useful in agent-based modeling and geographic information analysis. It utilizes and synthesizes survey microdata, sub-upazila attributes, land use information, and ground truth locations of attributes to create neighborhood scale multi-attribute maps. Monte Carlo methods are employed to combine any number of survey responses to stochastically weight survey cases and to simulate survey cases' locations in a study area. Through such Monte Carlo methods, known errors from each of the input sources can be …


Public Shoreline Access In Maine: A Citizen’S Guide To Coastal And Ocean Law, John Duff, Liana James, Victoria Labate Aug 2016

Public Shoreline Access In Maine: A Citizen’S Guide To Coastal And Ocean Law, John Duff, Liana James, Victoria Labate

Maine Sea Grant Publications

Getting to coastal waters in Maine can sometimes be a challenge, for despite the state’s 5,400 miles of mainland and island shoreline, only about 12% is in public ownership. Yet the public does have longstanding, although limited, rights to support traditional coastal uses along privately owned shoreline. In addition to the rights to “fish, fowl, and navigate,” members of the public have a variety of other means to secure access to shoreline areas and ocean waters. With more people attracted to Maine’s coastline for a variety of uses, it is important to understand the range of access rights that accommodate …


Invariant Spatial Information In Sketch Maps — A Study Of Survey Sketch Maps Of Urban Areas, Jia Wang, Angela Schwering Dec 2015

Invariant Spatial Information In Sketch Maps — A Study Of Survey Sketch Maps Of Urban Areas, Jia Wang, Angela Schwering

Journal of Spatial Information Science

It is commonly recognized that free-hand sketch maps are influenced by cognitive impacts and therefore sketch maps are incomplete, distorted, and schematized. This makes it difficult to achieve a one-to-one alignment between a sketch map and its corresponding geo-referenced metric map. Nevertheless, sketch maps are still useful to communicate spatial knowledge, indicating that sketch maps contain certain spatial information that is robust to cognitive impacts. In existing studies, sketch maps are used frequently to measure cognitive maps. However, little work has been done on invariant spatial information in sketch maps, which is the information of spatial configurations representing correctly the …


Role Of Dignity In Rural Natural Resource Governance, Tora Johnson Dec 2015

Role Of Dignity In Rural Natural Resource Governance, Tora Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dignity is “an internal state of peace that comes with the recognition and acceptance of the value and vulnerability of all living things” (Hicks, 2011, p. 1). Dignity is a crucial element in effective governance arrangements. This study applies dignity theory, and related theories of natural resource governance and environmental communication, to understand and overcome barriers to effective governance of common pool resources in rural communities. Chapter 1 reviews relevant literature on natural resource governance and develops a theoretical framework for dignity. Chapter 2 applies dignity theory to a contentious comprehensive planning process in a small Maine town in order …


A Comparative Study Of Linear And Region Based Diagrams, Björn Gottfried Jun 2015

A Comparative Study Of Linear And Region Based Diagrams, Björn Gottfried

Journal of Spatial Information Science

There are two categories of objects spatial information science investigates: actual objects and their spatial properties, such as in geography, and abstract objects which are employed metaphorically, as for visual languages. A prominent example of the latter are diagrams that model knowledge of some domain. Different aspects of diagrams are of interest, including their formal properties or how human users work with them, for example, with diagrams representing sets. The literature about diagrammatic systems for the representation of sets shows a dominance of region-based diagrams like Euler circles and Venn diagrams. The effectiveness of these diagrams, however, is limited because …


Vertical Color Maps: A Data Independent Alternative To Floor Plan Maps, Alexander Salveson Nossum, Nicholas A. Giudice, Hengshan Li Oct 2013

Vertical Color Maps: A Data Independent Alternative To Floor Plan Maps, Alexander Salveson Nossum, Nicholas A. Giudice, Hengshan Li

Spatial Information Science and Engineering Faculty Scholarship

Location sharing in indoor environments is limited by the sparse availability of indoor positioning and lack of geographical building data. Recently, several solutions have begun to implement digital maps for use in indoor space. The map design is often a variant of floor-plan maps. Whereas massive databases and GIS exist for outdoor use, the majority of indoor environments are not yet available in a consistent digital format. This dearth of indoor maps is problematic, as navigating multistorey buildings is known to create greater difficulty in maintaining spatial orientation and developing accurate cognitive maps. The development of standardized, more intuitive indoor …


Interactive Maps: What We Know And What We Need To Know, Robert E. Roth Jun 2013

Interactive Maps: What We Know And What We Need To Know, Robert E. Roth

Journal of Spatial Information Science

This article provides a review of the current state of science regarding cartographic interaction a complement to the traditional focus within cartography on cartographic representation. Cartographic interaction is defined as the dialog between a human and map mediated through a computing device and is essential to the research into interactive cartography geovisualization and geovisual analytics. The review is structured around six fundamental questions facing a science of cartographic interaction: (1) what is cartographic interaction (e.g. digital versus analog interactions interaction versus interfaces stages of interaction interactive maps versus mapping systems versus map mash-ups); (2) why provide cartographic interaction (e.g. visual …


A Wayfinding Aid To Increase Navigator Independence, Wilfred Waters, Stephan Winter Oct 2012

A Wayfinding Aid To Increase Navigator Independence, Wilfred Waters, Stephan Winter

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Wayfinding aids are of great benefit because users do not have to rely on their learned geographic knowledge or orientation skills alone for successful navigation. Additionally cognitive resources usually captured by this activity can be spent elsewhere. A challenge however remains for wayfinding aid developers. Due to the automation of wayfinding aids navigator independence may be decreasing via the use of these aids. In order to address this wayfinding aids might be improved additionally to perform a training role. Since the most versatile wayfinders appear to deploy a dual strategy for geographic orientation it is proposed that wayfinding aids be …


Spatial Behavior And Linguistic Representation: Collaborative Interdisciplinary Specialized Workshop, Thora Tenbrink, Jan Wiener, Christophe Claramunt, Marios Avraamides, Rainer Malaka, Hanspeter A. Mallot Oct 2012

Spatial Behavior And Linguistic Representation: Collaborative Interdisciplinary Specialized Workshop, Thora Tenbrink, Jan Wiener, Christophe Claramunt, Marios Avraamides, Rainer Malaka, Hanspeter A. Mallot

Journal of Spatial Information Science

The Collaborative Interdisciplinary Specialized Workshop on Spatial Behavior and Linguistic Representation took place on April 23–24, 2010, at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, Institute for Advanced Study (HWK), in Delmenhorst, Germany. We report the scientific motivation for this workshop and report its outcomes together with the impact of a gathering of this kind for the scientific community.


Structuring A Wayfinder's Dynamic And Uncertain Environment, Michael D. Hendricks May 2004

Structuring A Wayfinder's Dynamic And Uncertain Environment, Michael D. Hendricks

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Wayfinders typically travel in dynamic environments where barriers and requirements change over time. In many cases, uncertainty exists about the future state of this changing environment. Current geographic information systems lack tools to assist wayfinders in understanding the travel possibilities and path selection options in these dynamic and uncertain settings. The goal of this research is a better understanding of the impact of dynamic and uncertain environments on wayfinding travel possibilities. An integrated spatio-temporal framework, populated with barriers and requirements, models wayfinding scenarios by generating four travel possibility partitions based on the wayfinder's maximum travel speed. Using these partitions, wayfinders …


"The Little City In Itself": Middle-Class Aspirations In Bangor, Maine, 1880-1920, Sara K. Martin Jan 2001

"The Little City In Itself": Middle-Class Aspirations In Bangor, Maine, 1880-1920, Sara K. Martin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the inception and growth of "the Little City in Itself," a residential neighborhood in Bangor, Maine, as a case study of middle-class suburbanization and domestic life in small cities around the turn of the twentieth century. The development of Little City is the story of builders' and residents' efforts to shape a middle-class neighborhood in a small American city, a place distinct from the crowded downtown neighborhoods of immigrants and the elegant mansions of the wealthy. The purpose of this study is to explore builders' response to the aspirations of the neighborhood's residents for home and neighborhood …