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Full-Text Articles in Geography

A Multi-Metric Approach To Fay-Herriot Small Area Estimation Of Forests, Zachary Dorminey Aug 2024

A Multi-Metric Approach To Fay-Herriot Small Area Estimation Of Forests, Zachary Dorminey

Masters Theses

Forest managers are tasked with decisions regarding silvicultural practices that require detailed information about the environments they serve. Managing complex structures like forests demands consideration of many interrelated variables characterizing the overall condition of a forest. Success in these management initiatives includes not only maximum production from the timber assets, but also proof that these operations accord with modern sustainable practices. Small area estimates obtained from a National Forest Inventory (NFI) dataset lack necessary statistical certainty due to a relatively small sample of forest plots. These inventory datasets are spatially sparse, yet attribute-rich. Given these properties, research efforts in this …


Exchange And Social Interaction In The Tennessee River Valley: A Geospatial Approach To The Analysis Of Late Archaic Archaeological Sites, Justin S. Bailey Aug 2022

Exchange And Social Interaction In The Tennessee River Valley: A Geospatial Approach To The Analysis Of Late Archaic Archaeological Sites, Justin S. Bailey

Masters Theses

The cultural manifestation known as the Shell Mound Archaic persisted in the lower Midwest and Midsouth region of the Eastern United States for over four millennia beginning in the Middle Archaic ca. 8900 cal BP and terminating at the end of the Late Archaic ca 3200 cal BP. A geospatial approach is applied to the analysis of exotic material exchange of the Late Archaic (ca. 5800-3200 cal BP) to assess how foraging peoples in the Tennessee River Valley interacted and persisted during this time. Exotic material items manufactured from copper, marine shell, steatite, and other nonlocal materials demonstrate distinct spatial …


Identifying Smokestacks In Remotely Sensed Imagery Via Deep Learning Algorithms, Kenneth Moss Aug 2020

Identifying Smokestacks In Remotely Sensed Imagery Via Deep Learning Algorithms, Kenneth Moss

Masters Theses

Locating smokestacks in remote sensing imagery is a crucial first step to calculating smokestack heights, which allows for the accurate modeling of dioxin pollution spread and the study of resulting health impacts. In the interest of automating this process, this thesis examines deep learning networks and how changes in input datasets and network architecture affect image detection accuracy. This initial image detection serves as the first step in automated object recognition and height calculation. While this is applicable to general land use classification, this study specifically addresses detecting smokestack images. Different dataset scenarios are generated from the massive Functional Map …


Time Series Analysis Of Modis Ndvi Data With Cloudy Pixels: Frequency-Domain And Sizer Analyses Of Vegetation Change In Western Rwanda, Ephraim Robert Love May 2015

Time Series Analysis Of Modis Ndvi Data With Cloudy Pixels: Frequency-Domain And Sizer Analyses Of Vegetation Change In Western Rwanda, Ephraim Robert Love

Masters Theses

Remote sensing is a valuable source of data for the study of human ecology in rural areas. In this thesis, I attempt to analyze the presence of a long-term trend indicative of post-resettlement adaptation in the vegetation signals of Western Rwanda. There is a dearth of research utilizing medium resolution imagery to study difficult environments, such as tropical-montane regions, where complex topography and cloud cover diminish image accuracy. I attempt to add to the extant literature on frequency-domain smoothing methods as well as the literature on human-environment interaction in tropical-montane regions by applying a harmonic filtering and smoothing algorithm to …