Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Patterns Of Infringement, Risk, And Impact Driven By Coal Mining Permits In Indonesia, Tim T. Werner, Tessa Toumbourou, Victor Maus, Martin C. Lukas, Laura J. Sonter, Muhamad Muhdar, Rebecca K. Runting, Anthony J. Bebbington

Geography

Coal mining is known for its contributions to climate change, but its impacts on the environment and human lives near mine sites are less widely recognised. This study integrates remote sensing, GIS, stakeholder interviews and extensive review of provincial data and documents to identify patterns of infringement, risk and impact driven by coal mining expansion across East Kalimantan, Indonesia. Specifically, we map and analyse patterns of mining concessions, land clearing, water cover, human settlement, and safety risks, and link them with mining governance and regulatory infractions related to coal mining permits. We show that excessive, improper permit granting and insufficient …

Applying Landscape Fragmentation Analysis To Icescape Environments: Potential Impacts For The Pacific Walrus (Odobenus Rosmarus Divergens), Anthony Himmelberger, K E. Frey, Florencia Sangermano

Geography

Sea-ice cover across the Arctic has declined rapidly over the past several decades owing to amplified climate warming. The Pacific walrus (Odobenus rosmarus divergens) relies on sea-ice floes in the St. Lawrence Island (SLI) and Wainwright regions of the Bering and Chukchi seas surrounding Alaska as a platform for rest, feeding and reproduction. Lower concentrations of thick ice floes are generally associated with earlier seasonal fragmentation and shorter annual persistence of sea-ice cover, potentially affecting the life history of the Pacific walrus. In this study, 24 Landsat satellite images were classified into thick ice, thin ice or open water to …

The Total Operating Characteristic From Stratified Random Sampling With An Application To Flood Mapping, Zhen Liu, Robert Gilmore Pontius

Geography

The Total Operating Characteristic (TOC) measures how the ranks of an index variable distinguish between presence and absence in a binary reference variable. Previous methods to generate the TOC required the reference data to derive from a census or a simple random sample. However, many researchers apply stratified random sampling to collect reference data because stratified random sampling is more efficient than simple random sampling for many applications. Our manuscript derives a new methodology that uses stratified random sampling to generate the TOC. An application to flood mapping illustrates how the TOC compares the abilities of three indices to diagnose …

On The Use Of Unmanned Aerial Systems For Environmental Monitoring, Salvatore Manfreda, Matthew F. Mccabe, Pauline E. Miller, Richard Lucas, Victor Pajuelo Madrigal, Giorgos Mallinis, Eyal Ben Dor, David Helman, Lyndon Estes, Giuseppe Ciraolo, Jana Müllerová, Flavia Tauro, M. Isabel De Lima, João L.M.P. De Lima, Antonino Maltese, Felix Frances, Kelly Caylor, Marko Kohv, Matthew Perks, Guiomar Ruiz-Pérez, Zhongbo Su, Giulia Vico, Brigitta Toth

Geography

Environmental monitoring plays a central role in diagnosing climate and management impacts on natural and agricultural systems; enhancing the understanding of hydrological processes; optimizing the allocation and distribution of water resources; and assessing, forecasting, and even preventing natural disasters. Nowadays, most monitoring and data collection systems are based upon a combination of ground-based measurements, manned airborne sensors, and satellite observations. These data are utilized in describing both small- and large-scale processes, but have spatiotemporal constraints inherent to each respective collection system. Bridging the unique spatial and temporal divides that limit current monitoring platforms is key to improving our understanding of …

Evaluating Amphibian Vulnerability To Mercury Pollution From Artisanal And Small-Scale Gold Mining In Madre De Dios, Peru, Kate Markham

International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE)

Environmental hazards commonly associated with gold mining include local pollution of the air, water, and soil. Specifically, mercury used to extract gold bioaccumulates in the environment, contaminating rivers and watersheds and posing a danger to wildlife in regards to its developmental, hormonal, and neurological effects. To conceal these typically illegal operations happening along rivers, artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) often occurs in remote areas with high faunal biodiversity. The Madre de Dios region of southern Peru is a global biodiversity hotspot and has been undergoing extensive ASGM for years. The impact of ASGM on biodiversity is largely unknown. This …

Sentinel-1 Slc Processing: Summer Internship With Clark Labs, Lei Tang

International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE)

My summer internship with Clark Labs was mainly focused on technological and methodological exploration of Sentinel-1 SLC data, under the direct supervision of James Toledano. The main responsibilities of my internship were understanding theory and science behind Sentinel-1, utilizing the SNAP toolbox to determine the proper imagery processing steps in order to distinguish the land structure clearly. 36 testing on different combination of acquisition modes, speckle filters and time gap were conducted during that time.

I would highly recommend this internship to other GISDE students. The dynamic nature of the GISDE program provides students with the opportunity to be able …

A Platform For Crowdsourcing The Creation Of Representative, Accurate Landcover Maps, Lyndon Estes, D. Mcritchie, J. Choi, S. Debats, T. Evans, W. Guthe, D. Luo, G. Ragazzo, R. Zempleni, K. K. Caylor

Geography

Accurate landcover maps are fundamental to understanding socio-economic and environmental patterns and processes, but existing datasets contain substantial errors. Crowdsourcing map creation may substantially improve accuracy, particularly for discrete cover types, but the quality and representativeness of crowdsourced data is hard to verify. We present an open-sourced platform, DIYlandcover, that serves representative samples of high resolution imagery to an online job market, where workers delineate individual landcover features of interest. Worker mapping skill is frequently assessed, providing estimates of overall map accuracy and a basis for performance-based payments. A trial of DIYlandcover showed that novice workers delineated South African cropland …

High-Resolution Mapping Of Time Since Disturbance And Forest Carbon Flux From Remote Sensing And Inventory Data To Assess Harvest, Fire, And Beetle Disturbance Legacies In The Pacific Northwest, Huan Gu, Christopher A. Williams, Bardan Ghimire, Feng Zhao, Chengquan Huang

Geography

Accurate assessment of forest carbon storage and uptake is central to policymaking aimed at mitigating climate change and understanding the role forests play in the global carbon cycle. Disturbances have highly diverse impacts on forest carbon dynamics, making them a challenge to quantify and report. Time since disturbance is a key intermediate determinant that AIDS the assessment of disturbancedriven carbon emissions and removals legacies. We propose a new methodology of quantifying time since disturbance and carbon flux across forested landscapes in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) at a fine scale (30 m) by combining remote sensing (RS)-based disturbance year, disturbance type, …

Preface: Climate Extremes And Biogeochemical Cycles In The Terrestrial Biosphere: Impacts And Feedbacks Across Scales, M. Bahn, M. Reichstein, K. Guan, J. M. Moreno, Christopher A. Williams

Geography

No abstract provided.

Improving Operational Land Surface Model Canopy Evapotranspiration In Africa Using A Direct Remote Sensing Approach, M. Marshall, K. Tu, C. Funk, J. Michaelsen, P. Williams, Christopher A. Williams, J. Ardö, M. Boucher, B. Cappelaere, A. De Grandcourt, A. Nickless, Y. Nouvellon, R. Scholes, W. Kutsch

Geography

Climate change is expected to have the greatest impact on the world's economically poor. In the Sahel, a climatically sensitive region where rain-fed agriculture is the primary livelihood, expected decreases in water supply will increase food insecurity. Studies on climate change and the intensification of the water cycle in sub-Saharan Africa are few. This is due in part to poor calibration of modeled evapotranspiration (ET), a key input in continental-scale hydrologic models. In this study, a remote sensing model of transpiration (the primary component of ET), driven by a time series of vegetation indices, was used to substitute transpiration from …

Satellite-Based Estimates Of Antarctic Surface Meltwater Fluxes, Luke D. Trusel, Karen E. Frey, Sarah B. Das, Peter Kuipers Munneke, Michiel R. Van Den Broeke

Geography

This study generates novel satellite-derived estimates of Antarctic-wide annual (1999-2009) surface meltwater production using an empirical relationship between radar backscatter from the QuikSCAT (QSCAT) satellite and melt calculated from in situ energy balance observations. The resulting QSCAT-derived melt fluxes significantly agree with output from the regional climate model RACMO2.1 and with independent ground-based observations. The high-resolution (4.45 km) QSCAT-based melt fluxes uniquely detect interannually persistent and intense melt (>400 mm water equivalent (w.e.) year-1) on interior Larsen C Ice Shelf that is not simulated by RACMO2.1. This supports a growing understanding of the importance of a föhn effect in …

Antarctic Surface Melting Dynamics: Enhanced Perspectives From Radar Scatterometer Data, L. D. Trusel, K. E. Frey, S. B. Das

Geography

Antarctic ice sheet surface melting can regionally influence ice shelf stability, mass balance, and glacier dynamics, in addition to modulating near-surface physical and chemical properties over wide areas. Here, we investigate variability in surface melting from 1999 to 2009 using radar backscatter time series from the SeaWinds scatterometer aboard the QuikSCAT satellite. These daily, continent-wide observations are explored in concert with in situ meteorological records to validate a threshold-based melt detection method. Radar backscatter decreases during melting are significantly correlated with in situ positive degree-days as well as meltwater production determined from energy balance modeling at Neumayer Station, East Antarctica. …

Death To Kappa: Birth Of Quantity Disagreement And Allocation Disagreement For Accuracy Assessment, Robert Gilmore Pontius, Marco Millones

Geography

The family of Kappa indices of agreement claim to compare a map's observed classification accuracy relative to the expected accuracy of baseline maps that can have two types of randomness: (1) random distribution of the quantity of each category and (2) random spatial allocation of the categories. Use of the Kappa indices has become part of the culture in remote sensing and other fields. This article exam- ines five different Kappa indices, some of which were derived by the first author in 2000. We expose the indices' properties mathematically and illustrate their limitations graphically, with emphasis on Kappa's use of …

Utilizing Temporally Invariant Calibration Sites To Classify Multiple Dates And Types Of Satellite Imagery, Joe Fortier, John Rogan, Curtis E. Woodcock, Daniel Miller Runfola

Geography

Mapping past time periods (retrospective mapping) using remotely sensed data is hindered by a lack of coincident calibration and validation information. The identification of features of same ground cover invariant across time and their use as calibration and validation data addresses this challenge by: (a) streamlining the process of image calibration for multiple dates, and (b) allowing each image to generate its own spectral signature. This study investigates the use of temporally invariant calibration and validation data to map land-cover in Massachusetts, employing five satellite images collected from five separate dates and different sensors. The results indicate that this technique …

Land-Cover Change Monitoring With Classification Trees Using Landsat Tm And Ancillary Data, John Rogan, Jennifer Miller, Doug Stow, Janet Franklin, Lisa Levien, Chris Fischer

Geography

We monitored land-cover change in San Diego County (1990-1996) using multitemporal Landsat TM data. Change vectors of Kauth Thomas features were combined with stable multitemporal Kauth Thomas features and a suite of ancillary variables within a classification tree classifier. A combination of aerial photointerpretation and field measurements yielded training and validation data. Maps of land-cover change were generated for three hierarchical levels of change classification of increasing detail: change vs. no-change; four classes representing broad increase and decrease classes; and nine classes distinguishing increases or decreases in tree canopy cover, shrub cover, and urban change. The multitemporal Kauth Thomas (both …

Measuring The Physical Composition Of Urban Morphology Using Multiple Endmember Spectral Mixture Models, Tarek Rashed, John R. Weeks, Dar Roberts, John Rogan, Rebecca Powell

Geography

The application of multiple endmember spectral mixture analysis (MESMA) to map the physical composition of urban morphology using Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data is evaluated and tested. MESMA models mixed pixels as linear combinations of pure spectra, called endmembers, while allowing the types and number of endmembers to vary on a per-pixel basis. A total of 63 two-, three-, and four-endmember models were applied to a Landsat TM image for Los Angeles County, and a smaller subset of these models was chosen based on fraction and root-mean-squared error (RMSE) criteria. From this subset, an optimal model was selected for each …

Statistical Methods To Partition Effects Of Quantity And Location During Comparison Of Categorical Maps At Multiple Resolutions, R. Gil Pontius

Geography

New generalized statistical methods to measure agreement between two maps at multiple-resolutions, where each cell in each map has a multinomial distribution among any number of categories, are presented. This methodology quantifies agreement between any two categorical maps, where either map uses fuzzy or crisp classification. The method measures the agreement at various resolutions by aggregating neighboring cells into an increasingly coarse grid. At each resolution, the method partitions the overall agreement into correct due to chance, correct due to quantity, correct due to location, error due to location, and error due to quantity. In addition, the method computes six …