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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Assessing The Cooling Effects Of Urban Vegetation On Urban Heat Mitigation In Selected U.S. Cities, Qiuyan Yu Nov 2018

Assessing The Cooling Effects Of Urban Vegetation On Urban Heat Mitigation In Selected U.S. Cities, Qiuyan Yu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Urban Heat Island (UHI) is a growing problem worldwide. Mitigation of UHI is necessary for cities to adapt to climate change and enhance sustainable development at a city scale. Cooling cities with urban vegetation management is a sustainable solution for urban heat mitigation. Urban vegetation influences urban microclimate through the shading effect, surface roughness, and evapotranspiration. The differences in horizontal and vertical structures of urban vegetation determine the shading effect, surface roughness, and evapotranspiration. Enhancing the cooling effect of urban vegetation requires a comprehensive understanding of how vegetation structure affects UHI. The effects of horizontal structure on land surface temperature …


The Effect Of Sub-Facet Scale Geometry On Vertical Facet Temperatures In Urban Street Canyons, Rainer V.J. Hilland Oct 2018

The Effect Of Sub-Facet Scale Geometry On Vertical Facet Temperatures In Urban Street Canyons, Rainer V.J. Hilland

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Surface temperature plays a key role in many micro-scale urban processes. Walls comprise a significant percentage of the urban surface, yet are under-represented by many methods of thermal remote sensing and not considered in detail by micro-scale surface temperature mod- els. This thesis presents a novel method of mobile thermal observation performed in urban street canyons in London, ON that uses a thermal imager as well as a visual spectrum camera to provide dense spatial and temporal resolution of micro-scale wall temperature distributions. Images are manually classified by a series of nominal variables and the resulting data set discusses the …


A Comparative Study On Coastal Zone Changes And Anthropogenic Impacts Between Tampa Bay, Usa, And Xiangshan Harbor, China, During The Last 30 Years, Qiandong Guo Jun 2018

A Comparative Study On Coastal Zone Changes And Anthropogenic Impacts Between Tampa Bay, Usa, And Xiangshan Harbor, China, During The Last 30 Years, Qiandong Guo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Currently, the U.S. and China are the two largest national economic entities in the world. However, it is noticeable that the two countries have considerably different strategies for economic development, environmental protection and land supply in coastal zones. In order to understand the coastline dynamics, land use land cover (LULC) changes and land management policies in the U.S. and China, a case study of the Tampa Bay (TB) watershed, Florida, U.S., and Xiangshan Harbor (XH), Zhejiang Province, China was conducted. The two areas possess similar humid subtropical climate and dense population, but experienced different anthropogenic impacts. TB sat at a …


Speleogenetic Evolution And Geological Remote Sensing Of The Gypsum Plain, Eddy County, New Mexico, Jessica Shields May 2018

Speleogenetic Evolution And Geological Remote Sensing Of The Gypsum Plain, Eddy County, New Mexico, Jessica Shields

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Permian evaporites of the Gypsum Plain region of the Delaware Basin host extensive karst phenomena, as well as unique diagenetic alterations of host strata. Because of the complex, poorly understood hydrogeologic system, little has been established concerning the relation and evolution of the overprinted, modern and ancient karst manifestations within the Gypsum Plain, as a whole. Through a combination of traditional field studies and the development of improved remote sensing methodologies, this study established the speleogenetic evolution of the Gypsum Plain in relation to the greater tectonic, stratigraphic, hydrogeologic and climatic history of the Delaware Basin. Emphasis was focused on …


Leveraging Overhead Imagery For Localization, Mapping, And Understanding, Scott Workman Jan 2018

Leveraging Overhead Imagery For Localization, Mapping, And Understanding, Scott Workman

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Ground-level and overhead images provide complementary viewpoints of the world. This thesis proposes methods which leverage dense overhead imagery, in addition to sparsely distributed ground-level imagery, to advance traditional computer vision problems, such as ground-level image localization and fine-grained urban mapping. Our work focuses on three primary research areas: learning a joint feature representation between ground-level and overhead imagery to enable direct comparison for the task of image geolocalization, incorporating unlabeled overhead images by inferring labels from nearby ground-level images to improve image-driven mapping, and fusing ground-level imagery with overhead imagery to enhance understanding. The ultimate contribution of this thesis …


Fusing Satellite Data To Monitor The Urban Area's Effect On Plant Phenology, Norman Gervais Jan 2018

Fusing Satellite Data To Monitor The Urban Area's Effect On Plant Phenology, Norman Gervais

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation centrally focuses on developing and validating the use of fused satellite imagery to monitor the effects of the urban area on plant phenology, specifically the timing of the start and end of the growing season (SOS and EOS, respectively). In the first paper, Chapter 2, data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Landsat were fused together using the Spatial and Temporal Adaptive Reflectance Fusion Model (STARFM) to produce a time series of a high spatial and high temporal resolution vegetation index. From this time series, the SOS and EOS were extracted and compared between the urban …


Mapping And Risk Assessment Of Juniper Encroachment Into A Prairie Landscape, Kyle D. Kaskie Jan 2018

Mapping And Risk Assessment Of Juniper Encroachment Into A Prairie Landscape, Kyle D. Kaskie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Juniper encroachment is a considerable threat to the prairie ecosystems of the Great Plains because it has the potential to alter native grasslands by changing soil characteristics, limiting herbaceous biomass, and hindering native community regeneration. Accurate maps of juniper cover and predictions of areas at risk for future expansion are needed to support proactive management measures. Therefore, our objectives are to: (1) Develop a practical workflow for large-scale juniper mapping using Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) imagery and partial unmixing techniques, (2) Compare the classification accuracies from the resulting map based on different juniper density thresholds and different types …