Geography Commons^™

Dendrogeomorphic Analysis Of Debris Slides On Mt. Le Conte, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee, U.S.A., Maegen Lee Rochner

Masters Theses

Research conducted during the past 30 years tested the use of tree rings to date mass movement events in the mountain areas of Europe and the western and southwestern United States, but few studies have been performed in the eastern U.S., where debris flows, landslides, and rock falls in the Appalachian Mountains pose a common threat to human life and property. One area of particular interest is Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP). For this study, I tested mature red spruce (Picea rubens Sarg.) trees located on or near a debris slide boundary on Mt. Le Conte (LC01) in …

Integrating Social Media In The Development Of A Special Event Population Dynamics Model, Kelly Michelle Sims

Masters Theses

With society’s increasing participation in social media, scientists now have access to new sources of data that reflect our daily activities in space and in time. Such data are plentiful and, more notably, at an unprecedented granular level. The ability for users to capture and express their geolocation through their phones’ global positioning system (GPS) or through a particular location’s hashtag or Facebook Page provides a great opportunity for modeling spatiotemporal population dynamics. High resolution population models and databases for episodic special events can be extremely useful for enhancing emergency management and response. This research assesses the feasibility of improving …

International Student Migration For Development: An Institutional Approach To The Norwegian Quota Scheme, Scott Eric Basford

Masters Theses

This paper addresses a call to acknowledge the varied actors that are involved in international student migration (ISM). In particular, this paper takes an institutional approach to investigate international education as a form of development aid. Research on ISM often omits non-student actors, which contributes to an incomplete understanding of the process. I study the Norwegian Quota Scheme to explore broader mechanisms of ISM. I first situate the Quota Scheme within literature on the internationalization of higher education and international education as development aid. I then use 26 interviews with 31 stakeholders at multiple scales of involvement in the Quota …

Impacts Of Climate Change On The Evolution Of The Electrical Grid, Melissa Ree Allen

Doctoral Dissertations

Maintaining interdependent infrastructures exposed to a changing climate requires understanding 1) the local impact on power assets; 2) how the infrastructure will evolve as the demand for infrastructure changes location and volume and; 3) what vulnerabilities are introduced by these changing infrastructure topologies. This dissertation attempts to develop a methodology that will a) downscale the climate direct effect on the infrastructure; b) allow population to redistribute in response to increasing extreme events that will increase under climate impacts; and c) project new distributions of electricity demand in the mid-21^st century.

The research was structured in three parts. The first …

Assessing Survivability Of The Beijing Subway System, Yan Li

Masters Theses

The assessment of survivability is a common topic in critical network infrastructure research. In order to examine the critical components whose disruptions can cause huge system degradation, many measures have been approached to depict the characteristics of network systems. Serving more than ten million passengers a day, the Beijing subway system, which ranks third in the world for its length and annual ridership, raises survivability issues in the face of potential disruptions of network components along with its constantly increasing complexity. In this research, we provide an accessibility-based survivability measure with which to explore how potential outages of network components …

Block 271, Reviving An Industrial Artifact, Jared Thomas Pohl

Masters Theses

Vacant industrial sites are scattered throughout our cities all across the country. These sites, these remnants of industry, are occupied by a very interesting category of buildings. They are artifacts from an industrial era that served very unique and specific functions. These service buildings suffered programmatic failure and have lost their vitality. They have entered a form of hibernation, waiting for the post-industrial epoch to wake them up.

The building stock under investigation makes up a large portion of the city’s structures. Identifiable by their heroic scale, clean articulated lines and tendency to be vacant, these service buildings raise arguments …

Belgian Identity Politics: At A Crossroad Between Nationalism And Regionalism, Jose Manuel Izquierdo

Masters Theses

The cultural-linguistic divide that separates Belgium’s two main ethnic groups, the Walloons and the Flemings, has contributed to a national identity crisis. The tension between the groups is often blamed on their cultural-linguistic differences. However, the political parties have also influenced Belgian identity. There are historical, political, and economic factors that have provided the political parties substantial influence over national identity in Belgium. Since the parties are regionally based, the regions have affected territorial identity. Consequently, attachment to the nation has significantly declined among Belgians. Political party power is all too often ignored. This key factor is usually overshadowed by …

Comparing Models Of Demographic Subpopulations, Jessica Jones Moehl

Masters Theses

Understanding specific multi-dimensional demographics of populations in the United States at high resolutions is made difficult by the restriction of data released by the Census Bureau because of privacy concerns. Efforts to model these subpopulations have been increasing in recent years. These modeled populations have applications in decision making at all levels of government as well as in academia and the private sector. Two models have shown promising techniques for incorporating multiple levels of data to model sub populations in a meaningful way. These models, the Copula Model by Kao et al. (2012) and the Penalized Maximum Entropy Model by …

Climate Drivers Of Wildfire Activity In The Magdalena Mountains Of New Mexico, U.S.A., Elizabeth Anne Schneider

Masters Theses

In recent years, crown fires have raged through mixed-conifer forests in the American Southwest that historically experienced frequent, low-severity wildfires. Land management agencies now wish to restore wildfires to their historical range of variability, but this requires information on fire regimes before Euro-American disturbance took place. We characterized the historical fire regime of a high elevation, mixed-conifer forest in the Magdalena Mountains, New Mexico. This research evaluated the different climate drivers, represented by the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), that influence the occurrence of …

Place And Crowdfunding: An Examination Of Two Distressed Cities, Brenna Elrod

Masters Theses

Crowdfunding is a relatively new form of funding made possible by Web 2.0. This study examines community-based projects made possible through the crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter. Projects were compiled that were successfully funded between the dates of April 28, 2009 and July 26, 2012. These projects were collected for all cities listed on the site in the United States. Subsequently they were compared across three measures: raw numbers of projects, normalized city population, and against the creative class index of Richard Florida. Using these measures, Detroit and New Orleans emerged as cities for further in depth analysis. Interviews with initiators in …

Exploring Institutional Responses To Climate Change: A Case Study Of Adaptation And Vulnerability In Hampton Roads, Virginia, Jamie Allison Haverkamp

Masters Theses

This research was undertaken to understand the role institutional actors play in shaping the social process of adaptation to climate change. Through a case study of coastal adaption in Hampton Roads, Virginia, I investigated the socio-political landscape in which institutional adaptation activities (e.g. planning, and formal and informal decision-making) are occurring. Using a qualitative methodological approach, data were gathered from semi-structured interviews with key actors, direct observation at regional Adaptation Forums, and content analyses of local and federal level adaptation planning documents. In this research, I examine the case of adaptation in Hampton Roads through a political ecology lens and …

An Analysis Of The Patterns Of Crime And Socioeconomic Status Visualized Through Self-Organized Maps, Jason Carlin Kaufman

Masters Theses

This work is research to explore the association of spatial patterns between crime and socioeconomic status (SES) through the use of self-organized maps (SOM). It had been found that the spatial patterns of crime could be associated with those of socioeconomic, and this work sought to further these analyses in order to better understand how crime patterns and SES were related. To explore this association, patterns of crime and SES were examined in three cities: Nashville, TN; Portland, OR; and Tucson, AZ. Three SOMs were used in each city: one to analyze the patterns of crime, a second to analyze …

Stable Isotope Analysis Of Lake Sediments From Laguna Santa Elena And Laguna Azul, Costa Rica, Matthew Timothy Kerr

Masters Theses

Lake sediments are increasingly important archives of human-environment interactions and paleoclimate in the neotropics. In Costa Rica, Anchukaitis and Horn (Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 221: 35–54, 2005) established a land-use history for Laguna Santa Elena (8.9306 N, 82.9275 W, 1055 m elevation), a small lake in the Diquís archaeological region, based on pollen and charcoal analyses of a 7-meter sediment core. I carried out stable carbon and nitrogen isotope and loss-on-ignition analyses at higher resolution to extend the existing 2000-year record. The new geochemical data parallel major trends in botanical proxies but also reveal aspects of human and environmental dynamics …

A Multidimensional Analysis Of The Great Green Wall: The Environmental And Social Effects Of Reafforestation In Senegal, Anna Eugenia Alsobrook

Masters Theses

The north-central region of Senegal is home to the Great Green Wall (GGW)—a reafforestation project aimed at restoring decades–old, degraded land conditions by establishing tree belts and community gardens. Its presence on the ground has changed the local landscape and altered the social institutions governing the daily lives of the people it aims to protect.

My study is an in-progress assessment of the GGW towards its two major goals: 1) improving the lives of the people of the Sahel and increasing their capacity to adapt to climate change and drought, and 2) improving the state of the ecosystem and increasing …