Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Multiple Methods Of Public Engagement: Disaggregating Socio-Spatial Data For Environmental Planning In Western Washington, Usa, Rebecca J. Mclain, David Banis, Alexa Todd, Lee Cerveny

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Highlights

• The effectiveness of participatory GIS approaches at engaging different publics was explored.

• Online surveys engaged urbanites; community workshops engaged rural residents.

• Urban and rural residents went to similar places but engaged in different activities.

• Use of multiple data collection methods will broaden public engagement.

• Mapping behavior studies are needed to improve understandings of PPGIS data quality.

Accessing Blue Spaces: Social And Geographic Factors Structuring Familiarity With, Use Of, And Appreciation Of Urban Waterways, Melissa Haeffner, Douglas Jackson-Smith, Martin Buchert, Jordan Risley

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Are urban waterways amenities, and if so, are there inequities in household access? While urban waterways represent a potential site for access to nature within the urban environment, there have been few studies on the accessibility and interactions with water features in particular, what we refer to as “blue spaces." This study drew on a sample of households in Northern Utah living in neighborhoods with a nearby river or canal to ask if local waterways provide positive impacts to households and if proximity to them increased the likelihood of households spending time at them and being familiar with them. We …

Removing Dams, Constructing Science: Coproduction Of Undammed Riverscapes By Politics, Finance, Environment, Society And Technology, Zbigniew J. Grabowski, Ashlie Denton, Mary Ann Rozance, Marissa Matsler, Sarah Kidd

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Dam removal in the United States has continued to increase in pace and scope, transitioning from a dam-safety engineering practice to an integral component of many large-scale river restoration programmes. At the same time, knowledge around dam removals remains fragmented by disciplinary silos and a lack of knowledge transfer between communities of practice around dam removal and academia. Here we argue that dam removal science, as a study of large restoration-oriented infrastructure interventions, requires the construction of an interdisciplinary framework to integrate knowledge relevant to decision-making on dam removal. Drawing upon infrastructure studies, relational theories of coproduction of knowledge and …

Values Mapping And Counter-Mapping In Contested Landscapes: An Olympic Peninsula (Usa) Case Study, Rebecca J. Mclain, Lee Cerveny, Kelly Biedenweg, David Banis

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Indigenous peoples, local communities, and other groups can use counter-mapping to make land claims, identify areas of desired access, or convey cultural values that diverge from the dominant paradigm. While sometimes created independently, counter-maps also can be formulated during public participation mapping events sponsored by natural resource planning agencies. Public participation mapping elicits values, uses, and meanings of landscapes from diverse stakeholders, yet individuals and advocacy groups can use the mapping process as an opportunity to make visible strongly held values and viewpoints. We present three cases from the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State to illustrate how stakeholders intentionally used …

Finding Water Scarcity Amid Abundance Using Human–Natural System Models, William K. Jaeger, Adell Amos, Daniel P. Bigelow, Heejun Chang, David R. Conklin, Roy Haggerty, Christian Langpap, Kathleen Moore, Philip Mote, Anne W. Nolin, Andrew J. Plantinga, Cynthia L. Schwartz, Desiree Tullos, David P. Turner

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Water scarcity afflicts societies worldwide. Anticipating water shortages is vital because of water’s indispensable role in social-ecological systems. But the challenge is daunting due to heterogeneity, feedbacks, and water’s spatial-temporal sequencing throughout such systems. Regional system models with sufficient detail can help address this challenge. In our study, a detailed coupled human–natural system model of one such region identifies how climate change and socioeconomic growth will alter the availability and use of water in coming decades. Results demonstrate how water scarcity varies greatly across small distances and brief time periods, even in basins where water may be relatively abundant overall. …

Quantifying Resilience Of Multiple Ecosystem Services And Biodiversity In A Temperate Forest Landscape, Elena Cantarello, Adrian C. Newton, Phillip A. Martin, Paul M. Evans, Arjan Gosal, Melissa S. Lucash

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Resilience is increasingly being considered as a new paradigm of forest management among scientists, practitioners, and policymakers. However, metrics of resilience to environmental change are lacking. Faced with novel disturbances, forests may be able to sustain existing ecosystem services and biodiversity by exhibiting resilience, or alternatively these attributes may undergo either a linear or nonlinear decline. Here we provide a novel quantitative approach for assessing forest resilience that focuses on three components of resilience, namely resistance, recovery, and net change, using a spatially explicit model of forest dynamics. Under the pulse set scenarios, we explored the resilience of nine ecosystem …

Detecting Change In Rainstorm Properties From 1977-2016 And Associated Future Flood Risks In Portland, Oregon, Alexis Kirsten Cooley

Dissertations and Theses

In response to increased greenhouse gases and global temperatures, changes to the hydrologic cycle are projected to occur and new precipitation characteristics are expected to emerge. The study of these characteristics is facilitated by common indices to measure precipitation and temperature developed by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI). These indices can be used to describe the likely consequences of climate change such as increased daily precipitation intensity (SDII) and heavier rainfall events (R95p). This study calculates a subset of these indices from observed and modelled precipitation data in Portland, Oregon. Five rainfall gages from a …

Making Software, Making Regions: Labor Market Dualization, Segmentation, And Feminization In Austin, Portland And Seattle, Dillon Mahmoudi

Dissertations and Theses

Through mixed-methods research, this dissertation details the regionally variegated and place-specific software production processes in three second-tier US software regions. I focus on the relationship between different industrial, firm, and worker production configurations and broad-based economic development, prosperity, and inequality. I develop four main empirical findings.

First, I argue for a periodization of software production that tracks with changes in software laboring activity, software technologies, and wage-employment relationships. Through a GIS-based method, I use the IPUMS-USA to extensively measure the amount and type of software labor in industries across the US between 1970 and 2015. I map the uneven geography …

Southern Annular Mode Drives Multicentury Wildfire Activity In Southern South America, Andrés Holz, Juan Paritsis, Ignacio A. Mundo, Thomas T. Veblen, Thomas Kitzberger, Grant J. Williamson, Ezequiel Aráoz, Carlos Bustos-Schindler, Mauro E. González, H. Ricardo Grau, Juan M. Quezada

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Southern Annular Mode (SAM) is the main driver of climate variability at mid to high latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere, affecting wildfire activity, which in turn pollutes the air and contributes to human health problems and mortality, and potentially provides strong feedback to the climate system through emissions and land cover changes. Here we report the largest Southern Hemisphere network of annually resolved tree ring fire histories, consisting of 1,767 fire-scarred trees from 97 sites (from 22 °S to 54 °S) in southern South America (SAS), to quantify the coupling of SAM and regional wildfire variability using recently created …

Gis Spatial Analysis Of Arctic Settlement Patterns: A Case Study In Northwest Alaska, Justin Andrew Junge

Dissertations and Theses

In northwest Alaska, archaeologists hypothesize that environmental variability was a major factor in both growing coastal population density, with large aggregated villages and large houses, between 1000 and 500 years ago (ya), and subsequent decreasing population density between 500 ya and the contact era. After 500 ya people are thought to have dispersed to smaller settlements with smaller house sizes in coastal areas, and perhaps, upriver. This settlement pattern was identified through research at four site locations over 30 years ago. The changing geographic distribution of sites, associated settlement size, and house size has not been examined in detail. A …

The Geography Of Glaciers And Perennial Snowfields In The American West, Andrew G. Fountain, Bryce Glenn, Hassan J. Basagic

Geology Faculty Publications and Presentations

A comprehensive mid-20th century inventory of glaciers and perennial snowfields (G&PS) was compiled for the American West, west of the 100° meridian. The inventory was derived from U.S. Geological Survey 1:24,000 topographic maps based on aerial photographs acquired during 35 years, 1955–1990, of which the first 20 years or more was a cool period with little glacier change. The mapped features were filtered for those greater than 0.01 km². Results show that 5036 G&PS (672 km², 14 km³) populate eight states, of which about 1276 (554 km^2, 12 km³) are glaciers. …

Analyzing Dam Feasibility In The Willamette River Watershed, Alexander Cameron Nagel

Dissertations and Theses

This study conducts a dam-scale cost versus benefit analysis in order to explore the feasibility of each the 13 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) commissioned dams in Oregon’s Willamette River network. Constructed between 1941 and 1969, these structures function in collaboration to comprise the Willamette River Basin Reservoir System (WRBRS). The motivation for this project derives from a growing awareness of the biophysical impacts that dam structures can have on riparian habitats. This project compares each of the 13 dams being assessed, to prioritize their level of utility within the system. The study takes the metrics from the top …

Mapping Meaningful Places On Washington’S Olympic Peninsula: Toward A Deeper Understanding Of Landscape Values, Lee Cerveny, Kelly Biedenweg, Rebecca J. Mclain

Institute for Sustainable Solutions Publications and Presentations

Landscape values mapping has been widely employed as a form of public participation GIS (PPGIS) in natural resource planning and decision-making to capture the complex array of values, uses, and interactions between people and landscapes. A landscape values typology has been commonly employed in the mapping of social and environmental values in a variety of management settings and scales. We explore how people attribute meanings and assign values to special places on the Olympic Peninsula (Washington, USA) using both a landscape values typology and qualitative responses about residents’ placerelationships. Using geographically referenced social values data collected in community meetings (n …

Participation Is Not A Panacea, Britta Ricker

Resistance GIS

Britta Ricker is an Assistant Professor in the Urban Studies program at the University Washington Tacoma. Ricker teaches a wide variety of courses related to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Science and Urban Research Methods. Her research interests convergence around spatial information collection and dissemination opportunities afforded by mobile computers. She is interested in applying these tools for spatial learning related to emergency preparedness and environmental communication initiatives. Her professional experience includes acting as a Hazard Mapping Analyst for Dewberry and Davis, a consultant for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). She has also acted as a cartographic consultation for …

Gis As A Tool For Neighborhood, Adam Brunelle

Resistance GIS

Adam Brunelle is a community organizer and advocacy planner with experience incubating communityprojects and programs at the grassroots level, including his work on climate change as a co-founder of nonprofit 350PDX and more recently engage Portland’s Lents community on livability issues through local nonprofit Green Lents. Brunelle is committed to bottom-up change and community-led advocacy, focusing his work on improving livability, preserving affordability, and fostering community control in the Lents area. He received his Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning from Portland State University in 2016, and was awarded the Excellence in Sustainability: Inspiring Student Award in 2016 by the …

Ground-Truthing: Geographic Information Systems (Gis) As Community-Based And Anti-Racist Praxis, Verónica N. Vélez

Resistance GIS

Dr. Verónica Nelly Vélez is an Assistant Professor and the Director of the Education and Social Justice Minor at Western Washington University (WWU). Before joining WWU, Verónica worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and the Director of Public Programming at the Center for Latino Policy Research at UC Berkeley. Her research interests include Critical Race Theory and Latina/o Critical Theory in Education, the politics of parent engagement in educational reform, particularly for Latina/o (im)migrant families, participatory action and community-based models of research, and the use of GIS technologies to further a critical race research agenda on the study of space …

Spatial Narratives In A Post-Truth World, Dillon Mahmoudi

Resistance GIS

Dillon Mahmoudi will graduate in June 2017 with a PhD in Urban Studies
at Portland State University. He also received his Graduate Certificate in GIS from the Geography department. In the fall of 2017, he will be moving to Baltimore to be Assistant Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland Baltimore County where he will teach courses in advanced GIS methods and economic geography. His research and community engagement focuses on critical methods for GIS, bifurcation and deskilling in tech work (software and cartography), geographies of urban inequity, and the intersections of cities and digital technologies.

Resistance (?) Gis (?), Jim Thatcher

Resistance GIS

Jim Thatcher is an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Washington Tacoma. His research examines relationships between extremely large geospatial data sets and the creation and analysis of those data sets and society, with a focus on how data has come to mediate, saturate, and sustain modern urban environments. Often referred to as Critical Data Studies or Digital Political Ecologies, Jim’s work has been featured in media outlets including NPR and The Atlantic. His first edited volume, Thinking Big Data In Geography: New Regimes, New Research, is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press.

Federal Data: Strategies For Maintaining Access And Availability, Elizabeth F. Pickard

Resistance GIS

Beth Pickard is a librarian and assistant professor at Portland State University where she works with geographers and other scientists. She earned her BA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and her MSI in Information Science from the University of Michigan. In addition to her work in academia, she writes poetry, fiction and other genre-resistant pieces. Her work has appeared in Underwater New York, the Portland Review and elsewhere.

Before coming to PSU, Beth served as Interim Engineering Librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago and as University Library Associate at the Art, Architecture and Engineering Library …

In Support Of “Difficult Data”, Jamaal Green

Resistance GIS

Jamaal Green is a doctoral candidate in the Urban Studies and Planning Department at PSU. He is an economic development planners, and a sometimes economic geographer, interested in the intersections of land-use and labor market outcomes. Specifically, his dissertation will be studying the conversion of industrial land to non-industrial uses in the country’s fifty largest cities and the politics therein. He cares passionately about the potential for planning to be a progressive force in the development of our cities. He uses GIS as a way to explore questions about the socio-spatial and socio-economic relations of city-regions from the locations of …

Introductory Statement By The Organizers, Resistance Gis Conference

Resistance GIS

Introductory statement by the organizers of the Resistance GIS 2017 Conference, entitled "From our Perspective: What is Resistance GIS?"

An Operational Drought Prediction Framework With Application Of Vine Copula Functions, Mahkameh Zarekarizi

Student Research Symposium

Early and accurate drought predictions can benefit water resources and emergency managers by enhancing drought preparedness. Soil moisture memory is shown to contain helpful information for prediction of future values. This study uses the soil moisture memory to predict their future states via multivariate statistical modeling. We present a drought forecasting framework which issues monthly and seasonal drought forecasts. This framework estimates droughts with different lead times and updates the forecasts when more data become available. Forecasts are generated by conditioning future soil moisture values on antecedent drought status. The statistical model is initialized by soil moisture simulations retrieved from …

Stream Sedimentation Patterns In An Urban Beaver System: Fanno Creek, Oregon, Alexandra Joan Santora

Geography Masters Research Papers

Beaver activities can cause drastic changes to hydrogeomorphic processes by impounding waterways through the construction of dams, trapping sediments and reducing the downstream sediment load. The presence of beaver is increasing in urban areas. Urban streams exhibit hydrogeomorphic processes distinct from natural systems because of changes in land cover that alter hydrology. This case study was developed as part of an effort to understand the sedimentation patterns of a beaver impounded urban stream in Beaverton, Oregon. Twelve sediment samples were collected and processed for organic matter content and particle size and sediment depths were calculated using GIS software from data …

Environmental Justice And Gis: A Comparison Of Three Gis Methods For Estimating Vulnerable Population Exposed To Brownfield Pollution In Portland, Oregon, Kyle Goodman

Geography Masters Research Papers

This project compares three GIS techniques that estimate populations who are potentially affected by environmental contamination in Portland, Oregon. All three GIS techniques utilize polygon containment to estimate populations potentially exposed to pollutants based on block level census data. In this study, multiple buffer distances at half-mile increments were used across all three techniques. Circular Euclidean distance buffers surrounding a known contaminated property, such as documented brownfields, approximate the contamination zone. Accurate estimates for populations exposed to harmful environmental conditions could provide a better understanding of environmental justice issues. The specific research questions were: 1) Are the population estimates sensitive …

Characterizing Large-Scale Meteorological Patterns And Associated Temperature And Precipitation Extremes Over The Northwestern United States Using Self-Organizing Maps, Paul C. Loikith, Benjamin R. Lintner, Alex Sweeney

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

The self-organizing maps (SOMs) approach is demonstrated as a way to identify a range of archetypal large-scale meteorological patterns (LSMPs) over the northwestern United States and connect these patterns with local-scale temperature and precipitation extremes. SOMs are used to construct a set of 12 characteristic LSMPs (nodes) based on daily reanalysis circulation fields spanning the range of observed synoptic-scale variability for the summer and winter seasons for the period 1979–2013. Composites of surface variables are constructed for subsets of days assigned to each node to explore relationships between temperature, precipitation, and the node patterns. The SOMs approach also captures interannual …

Stacking Functions: Identifying Motivational Frames Guiding Urban Agriculture Organizations And Businesses In The United States And Canada, Nathan Mcclintock, Michael Simpson

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

While a growing body of scholarship identifies urban agriculture's broad suite of benefits and drivers, it remains unclear how motivations to engage in urban agriculture (UA) interrelate or how they differ across cities and types of organizations. In this paper, we draw on survey responses collected from more than 250 UA organizations and businesses from 84 cities across the United States and Canada. Synthesizing the results of our quantitative analysis of responses (including principal components analysis), qualitative analysis of textual data excerpted from open-ended responses, and a review of existing literature, we describe six motivational frames that appear to guide …

Precipitation Intensity Trend Detection Using Hourly And Daily Observations In Portland, Oregon, Alexis Cooley, Heejun Chang

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

The intensity of precipitation is expected to increase in response to climate change, but the regions where this may occur are unclear. The lack of certainty from climate models warrants an examination of trends in observational records. However, the temporal resolution of records may affect the success of trend detection. Daily observations are often used, but may be too coarse to detect changes. Sub-daily records may improve detection, but their value is not yet quantified. Using daily and hourly records from 24 rain gages in Portland, Oregon (OR), trends in precipitation intensity and volume are examined for the period of …

Individual Decision Making In Online Public-Participation Transportation Planning, Martin Swobodzinski

PSU Transportation Seminars

The empirical evaluation of complex decision support systems is often limited to the self-reported satisfaction of the systems’ users.

Such an approach is problematic due to the conflation of the user's satisfaction related to the decision support system and the decision making process and its outcomes.

In addition, it bears limitations that are common among most techniques that solicit participant-stated feedback.

In this talk, based on data that was gathered by a web-based participatory system for transportation planning in the Puget Sound region, I present analytical methods for the empirical evaluation of decision support systems based on human-computer interaction. In …

Effects Of Spatially Distributed Stream Power On Check Dam Function In Small Upland Watersheds: A Case Study Of The Upper Laja Watershed, Guanajuato, Mexico, Zachary Andrew Herzfeld

Dissertations and Theses

Watershed restoration comes in a variety of forms depending on which set of problems are sought to be remedied. Severe soil erosion, in the form of gullying and/or headcutting, can be mitigated through constructing check dams in well-selected locations. This practice has been used throughout the upland subwatersheds within the Upper Laja River watershed in Guanajuato, México. The present study employed Wolman pebble counts to systematically assess the effectiveness of 21 check dams located near the city of San Miguel de Allende. Particle size distributions taken directly downstream and upstream of each check dam were differentiated, aggregated and compared--with the …

Out In "The Numbers": Youth And Gang Violence Initiatives And Uneven Development In Portland's Periphery, Dirk Kinsey

Dissertations and Theses

Incidence of youth and gang violence in the Portland, Oregon metro area has increased dramatically over the past five years. This violence has recently become more spatially diffuse, shifting outwards from gentrified, inner city neighborhoods, towards the city's periphery. These incidents exist within the context of a shifting regional political economy, characterized by a process of gentrification associated displacement and growing, and distinctly racialized and spatialized, inequalities. While gang researchers have long argued a corollary between the emergence of gangs and economically and culturally polarized urban landscapes, the ongoing suburbanization of poverty in American cities suggests a new landscape of …