Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Collaborative Approaches To The Management Of Geospatial Data Collections In Canadian Academic Libraries: A Historical Case Study, Leanne Trimble, Cheryl Woods, Francine Berish, Daniel Jakubek, Sarah Simpkin

Western Libraries Publications

Special Issue: Geospatial Data Management, Curation, and Preservation - Part 2

The Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) is a consortium of the twenty-one university libraries in Ontario, Canada. Since 1967, OCUL member institutions have worked together to share costs and workload through collective purchasing and licensing of information resources and more recently through the establishment of a shared digital infrastructure known as Scholars Portal. Under the auspices of OCUL, Ontario's university map librarians formed the OCUL Map Group in 1973 to seek opportunities to communicate and collaborate to improve the collections and services they offer their users. The opportunities …

Grain Sorting In The Morphological Active Layer Of A Braided River Physical Model., Pauline Leduc, Peter Ashmore, James T. Gardner

Geography & Environment Publications

A physical scale model of a gravel-bed braided river was used to measure vertical grain size sorting in the morphological active layer aggregated over the width of the river. This vertical sorting is important for analyzing braided river sedimentology, for numerical modeling of braided river morphodynamics, and for measuring and predicting bedload transport rate. We define the morphological active layer as the bed material between the maximum and minimum bed elevations at a point over extended time periods sufficient for braiding processes to rework the river bed. The vertical extent of the active layer was measured using 40 hourly high-resolution …

Adapting To Climate Change: The Case Of Multi-Level Governance And Municipal Adaptation Planning In Nova Scotia, Canada, Brennan A. Vogel

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Nova Scotia is the only province in Canada to use the gas tax as a financial incentive to create a regulatory mandate for ‘Municipal Climate Change Action Plans’ (MCCAPs). The MCCAP adaptation policy mandate initiated and enabled climate change vulnerability assessment and the development of climate risk priorities and adaptation plans to uniformly occur at the local scale in 53 Nova Scotian municipalities. This dissertation seeks to answer the question: What are the social factors that impacted municipal climate change adaptation policy and planning processes in the multi-level governance context of Nova Scotia’s MCCAP?

The study develops and operationalizes a …

Wind Energy Development In Ontario: Factors Influencing Deployment And Policy Outcomes, Emmanuel T. Songsore

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The goal of this thesis is to gain an understanding of the factors promoting and hindering wind energy development (henceforth WED) from the perspective of communities and developers in Ontario. Ontario arguably has one of the most ambitious policies for WED in the world, centered on the Green Energy and Green Economy Act, 2009 (henceforth GEA). Despite progressing to become Canada’s leading province in installed wind energy capacity, various conflicts and roadblocks to deployment remain evident.

In response to gaps identified in literature seeking to understand the factors that impact the (un)successful deployment of wind power, the current thesis provides …

Understanding Immigrant Housing Integration In Canada — The Role Of Transnational Engagements, Vincent Zubedaar Kuuire

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examined the relationship between immigrant housing consumption behaviours in Canada and transnational engagements (specifically remittances and transnational housing investments). Immigrant integration remains a paramount issue of interest to scholars and policy experts especially because of Canada’s adoption of immigration inflow as its principal population growth policy. Within the broader context of immigrant integration, adequate housing of immigrants is an important marker of integration; justified by the many benefits associated with it including improvement in children’s educational outcomes, enhancement of employment stability and enhancement of both physical and mental health, among others. However, a corollary of increasing number of …

Relationship Between Household Food Insecurity And Health In The Upper West Region Of Ghana, Kilian Nasung Atuoye

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Although the importance of food as a social determinant of health has been elucidated, it remains underexplored in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where a significant population is faced with challenges of accessing food, largely from a combination many factors including low economic power, poor livelihoods, political instability and policy gaps. Despite tremendous improvement on food security in Ghana, the northern part of the country including the Upper West Region still experience disproportionally high levels of deprivation and food insecurity. Research has tends to explain the dynamics and complexities of food insecurity in the Region, yet variation of the incidence of food …

Evolution Towards “Housing First”: A Qualitative Analysis Of Service Provider And Participant Perspectives, James Kennedy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Over the past decade, “Housing First” has gained momentum as an approach to address the needs of individuals facing homelessness. More recently adopted within the Canadian context, Housing First has received considerable praise for effectively housing the chronically and episodically homeless, by getting them off the streets and out of emergency shelters. While the increased adoption of Housing First within the homeless sector in Canada has been backed by evidence-based research, qualitative studies regarding the perceptions of front-line service providers towards Housing First are limited. Using qualitative methods, in-depth interviews and focus group discussions were conducted with service providers and …

Conceptualizing Response Capacity And Flood Action In The City Of Vancouver And District Of Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Canada, Jonathan P. Raikes

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Attention to effective local flood response has become a necessity in urban governance as issues pertaining to floods become increasingly visible with disasters rising. This research identifies components of response capacity to floods and municipal action, and potential mechanisms to increase response capacity in the City of Vancouver and District of Maple Ridge using interviews (n=7), Q methodology (n=12), and a literature review. Findings show that legislation, institutional behaviour and collective action, technological pathways and resource management are fundamental to an institution or organization’s response capacity. Municipal action is influenced by competing priorities as determined through legal responsibility and liability, …

Dendroclimatic Studies Of White Spruce In The Yukon Territory, Canada, David S. Morimoto

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

An extensive network of 111 white spruce tree-ring chronologies (2983 trees) from treeline sites was developed across the Yukon Territory and adjacent areas of Alaska and British Columbia. Ring-width series from 73 chronologies with adequate signal strength back to 1800 were analysed using correlation and Principal Component analyses. Although 50 chronologies showed a strong common growth pattern over the 1900-1950 period (45.6% of the variance in PC1), PC1 over the 1950-2000 period included only 22 (27.1% of the variance). Correlation with temperature data from the central-north Yukon indicated that 1900-1950 PC1 chronologies showed significant positive relationships to summer (JJA) minimum …

Environment And Human Health In The Anthropocene: Interaction Between Natural And Social Systems In Coastal Tanzania, Frederick A. Armah

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Coastal Tanzania, a region of historical and geopolitical importance in the western Indian Ocean, is a place where the problem of rapid environmental change is inextricably entwined with the challenges of development. In this region, although the fingerprint of the anthropocene has been discernible over the last century, there is paucity of research on how the population has interacted with the changing environment to generate disparities in perceptions of climate change and human health outcomes. The objectives of this thesis are four-fold: to assess barriers to climate change adaptation based on context (place), to explain group disparities in barriers to …

Mining, Resistance And Livelihood In Rural Bangladesh, Md Rashedul Alam

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In 2006, over fifty thousand people in the Phulbari Sub-District of Bangladesh mobilized against an open-pit coal mining-project that posed serious environmental and social risks. The state authorities negotiated with the protesters intensively over four days to reach an agreement. However, the state failed to fulfill the agreement, and the protest movement continued. The agrarian communities successfully halted the mining project for the last nine years. My research aims to understand how the protesters resisted this project. My objectives have been to explore the practices of a grassroots movement, attendant transformations in the sociopolitical landscape and role of the state …

Impact Of Agroecology Adoption, Migration And Remittance Receipt On Household Welfare, Joseph Kangmennaang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis aims to examine the impact of two livelihood strategies on household wellbeing in Northern and Central Malawi. Specifically, the study aims to examine how agroecology adoption, migration and remittance receipt impact household food security and asset poverty levels. Prior research has revealed that agroecological farming methods and remittance receipt can increase productivity, yield stability and resilience of family farmers as well as increase their incomes and propel them out of poverty. Agroecology as an alternative agricultural approach has gained momentum through some high-level FAO meetings as well as reports highlighting its potential. Migration and remittances flows have also …

Mothers’ Perceptions And Experiences Of Accessing Maternal Health Care : Exploring The Role Of Community Health Workers And Continuing Professional Development In Rwanda:, Germaine Tuyisenge

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Reducing barriers to accessing maternal healthcare and training health professionals in emergency maternal health care are critical components of improving overall maternal health. This study used a qualitative approach to understand mothers’ perceptions and experiences of accessing maternal health in Rwanda and explored the potential of Community Health Workers (CHWs) and Continuing Professional Development (CPD) to improve maternal healthcare. Socio-economic and geographical factors were found to be the primary barriers to accessing maternal healthcare. The findings reveal the important role of CHWs to improving maternal health and health professionals who received CPD training indicated that they were more confident working …

Agrarian Change And Peasant Prospects In Haiti, Marylynn Elizabeth Steckley

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Haiti is one of the poorest and most severely hunger-stricken countries in the world (GHI 2013). Its contradictions are jarring: although Haiti has the largest relative agrarian population in the Western Hemisphere and relatively less land inequality than the rest of the region (Smucker et al. 2000; Wiens and Sobrado 1998), it is extremely food insecure. Almost 90 percent of the rural population lives below the poverty line (FAO 2014; IFAD 2014), and Haiti relies on food imports for 60 percent of national consumption (OXFAM 2010). Some scholars argue that the spread of commodity relations, persistent rural class differentiation, and …

Enterprising Outsiders: Livelihood Strategies Of Cape Town’S Forced Migrants, Madeleine Ann Northcote

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Although refugees and registered asylum-seekers have a legal right to work in South Africa, research shows that prevailing anti-immigrant attitudes and South African employers’ suspicion of these migrants’ documents makes employment extraordinarily difficult to acquire. This thesis investigates how, in the face of such challenges, forced migrants in Cape Town secure their day-to-day livelihoods. The research is based on semi-structured, open-ended interviews with thirty-two refugees and other forced migrants who live and operate in the Cape Town area, as well as five key informant interviews with employees of refugee service organizations. It also draws from literature on both South Africa’s …

"We Are The Land": Researching Environmental Repossession With Anishinaabe Elders, Joshua K. Tobias

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Research shows that Indigenous connection to land carries important health benefits. Amongst Anishinaabe peoples, the land is the foundation for Indigenous Knowledge and central to physical, spiritual, mental and emotional health. Today, many of the most pressing health inequities experienced by Indigenous peoples are shaped by historic and on-going processes of environmental dispossession. This dissertation was framed by a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach conducted in collaboration with two Anishinaabe communities on Lake Superior (Ontario, Canada), the greater goal being to develop strategies of environmental repossession. Developed around three manuscripts, this thesis addressed four objectives:

1) to examine the strengths …

Claims Of The City? Rights Of The Countryside? Politics Of Water Contestation In The Mumbai-Thane Region Of India, Bharat Khushal Punjabi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation comprises three papers that focus on the interplay of formal and informal institutional processes in the sharing of water between the Mumbai Metropolitan region and an agricultural area to its north and east in Thane district. The first paper focuses on the interests and motivations that influence the everyday practices of the canal bureaucracy in the Surya project in Dahanu. This paper is largely a critique of the application of rational choice theory to analyzing bureaucratic corruption in a literature in development studies that was pioneered by Robert Wade. Using an ethnographic narrative style, the paper seeks to …

Multi-Method Exploration Of The Economic Sustainability Of Probiotic Yoghurt Kitchens In Mwanza, Tanzania, Emily Eyles

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This research aimed to examine the economic and locational aspects of a probiotic yoghurt kitchen development project facilitated by Western Heads East in Mwanza, Tanzania. This study is based upon 41 semi-structured interviews with 57 participants in three groups: kitchen group members, customers, and staff of the African Probiotic Yoghurt Network. This research contributes to the literature on development geography, specifically on the ins and outs of the everyday of the kitchens, as well as proposing a new approach to multicriteria evaluation using qualitative data, and the ‘researcher as instrument’ approach. The results demonstrate that while there are problems in …

Integration Of Multi-Temporal Optical And L-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (Sar) Imagery For Hierarchical Agricultural Crop Classification In Northeastern Ontario, Canada, Autumn A. Gambles

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study integrated multi-temporal, multispectral optical and L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery to classify agricultural crops throughout a single growing season in northeastern Ontario, Canada. Various optical and SAR band/date combinations were tested to identify optimal dates and datasets for crop classification at various phenological stages using both object-based decision tree rulesets and traditional per-pixel strategies. Object-based decision tree classification of 2 pairs of SPOT-5 optical and L-Band ALOS SAR imagery yielded crop identification accuracy results comparable with hierarchically masked per-pixel classification, with corn classes regularly achieving high classification accuracies (+90%). Regardless of classification approach, results indicate that at …

Transformative Geomorphic Research Using Laboratory Experimentation, Sean J. Bennett, Peter Ashmore, Cheryl Mckenna Neuman

Geography & Environment Publications

Laboratory experiments in geomorphology is the theme of the 46th annual Binghamton Geomorphology Symposium (BGS). While geomorphic research historically has been dominated by field-based endeavors, laboratory experimentation has emerged as an important methodological approach to study these phenomena, employed primarily to address issues related to scale and the analytical treatment of the geomorphic processes. It is contended here that geomorphic laboratory experiments have resulted in transformative research. Several examples drawn from the fluvial and aeolian research communities are offered as testament to this belief, and these select transformative endeavors often share very similar attributes. The 46th BGS will focus on …

Towards A Sociogeomorphology Of Rivers, Peter Ashmore

Geography & Environment Publications

While human impacts on rivers and other landforms have long been a component of geomorphic research, little of this work explicitly includes insights into human agency from social science or recognises that in many cases rivers can be considered to be hybrid coproductions or „socio-natures‟. A socio-geomorphic approach proposed here has parallels with some aspects of sociohydrology and can extend and enrich existing geomorphic explanations of the morphology of, for example, urban rivers by explicitly recognising and working with the coevolution of the human and natural systems. Examples from recent literature illustrate ways in which these relationships can be understood …