Geography Commons^™

Quantifying Current Soil Brine Contamination Within The Smackover Oil Field In Arkansas Using Multispectral Digital Imagery, Victoria Williams

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A remote sensing study was performed to quantify current soil brine contamination across the historic Smackover Oil Field in south-central Arkansas, United States. The oil field was established in 1922 and was not subject to the future waste regulations created by the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission. Brine is a waste product of oil manufacturing which contains water with high salt levels. The storage and transport of brine in the oil field created landscape scarring across the study area.

Landsat 9 multispectral digital imagery was utilized to create supervised classification maps based on earthen pits and creek scarring across the …

Adapting Deep Learning Techniques For Geologic Investigations Of Hydrothermal Venting At Seafloor Spreading Ridges Using Auv Surveys, Isaac Keohane

Theses and Dissertations

Locating hydrothermal chimney sites unlocks research into their correlations with geology, lithospheric cooling, and deep-sea biogeography at seafloor spreading ridges. High-resolution bathymetry and sidescan sonar collected by Automated Underwater Vehicles allows for chimneys, only a few meters wide and tall, and fissures, only a few meters wide, to be resolved across large areas (>100 km2). We developed a Chimney Identification Tool (CIT) that utilizes a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a Machine-Learning model able to classify based on shapes and textures, to identify chimneys in 1m-gridded bathymetry. We then utilized the CIT to identify many potential off-axis chimney structures at …

The Relationship Between Water Temperature And Proximity To Surface Urban Heat Islands Within The Lower Chesapeake Bay Watershed For The Summer Of 2019, Sarah Kerner

Student Research Submissions

Surface urban heat islands (SUHIs) are land surfaces with high concentrations of impervious surfaces like roofs, roads, sidewalks and other infrastructures that trap, absorb, and re-emit heat throughout the day/night and typically present higher temperatures than their surrounding rural areas. In this study, I evaluate how presence of and distance to SUHIs are associated with water temperature in the lower Chesapeake Bay watershed for the summer of 2019. When heavy precipitation events occur, flooding creates stormwater runoff, which is exposed to the hotter temperatures in urban areas. This introduces thermal pollution to nearby rivers and streams disrupting aquatic ecosystems. The …

Estimating Solar Energy Production In Urban Areas For Electric Vehicles, Shaimaa Ahmed

Theses and Dissertations

Cities have a high potential for solar energy from PVs installed on buildings' rooftops. There is an increased demand for solar energy in cities to reduce the negative effect of climate change. The thesis investigates solar energy potential in urban areas. It tries to determine how to detect and identify available rooftop areas, how to calculate suitable ones after excluding the effects of the shade, and the estimated energy generated from PVs. Geographic Information Sciences (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) are used in solar city planning. The goal of this research is to assess available and suitable rooftops areas using …

Glacier Segmentation From Remote Sensing Imagery Using Deep Learning, Bibek Aryal

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Large-scale study of glaciers improves our understanding of global glacier change and is imperative for monitoring the ecological environment, preventing disasters, and studying the effects of global climate change. In recent years, remote sensing imagery has been preferred over riskier and resource-intensive field visits for tracking landscape level changes like glaciers. However, periodic manual labeling of glaciers over a large area is not feasible due to the considerable amount of time it requires while automatic segmentation of glaciers has its own set of challenges. Our work aims to study the challenges associated with segmentation of glaciers from remote sensing imagery …

Spatiotemporal Change Detection Of The Alpine Meadows At Holcomb Valley, San Bernardino Mountain National Forest, Using Gis And Remote Sensing Techniques, Rama Ewing

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Holcomb Valley, with a general elevation between 2200-2257m, is in the Northeast of Big Bear Lake in the San Bernardino Mountains. Holcomb Valley is covered by Alpine meadows, unlike most mountain landscapes, which are rarely found in Mediterranean climates such as California. The cultural-environmental history of the San Bernardino Mountains in the past century speaks of intense anthropogenic activities such as timbering, grazing, gold mining, and extreme climate changes (i.e., drought, fires, floods). A study is conducted to identify and calculate the changes in the Alpine meadows at Holcomb Valley. The climatical data has been acquired to compute and visualize …

Fragmented Landscapes: An Archaeology Of Transformations In The Pra River Basin, Southern Ghana, Sean Hamilton Reid

Dissertations - ALL

This doctoral archaeological research examines the Pra River Basin in southern Ghana through lenses of landscape, temporality, and transformation. Drawing on the Annales school and the writings of Tim Ingold, this study moves away from binary constructions of natural and cultural landscape features toward a more integrated view of the landscape's long human history. The primary temporal focus of this research is the past three millennia but evidence recovered of even more ancient eras is also examined. The artifacts and features documented while surveying this landscape allow us to glimpse pre-Atlantic (pre-1450 CE) settlement patterns, subsistence, and technology, as well …

Using Deep Learning And Uav Imagery To Detect Elkhorn Coral In St. Croix’S East End Marine Park, Samuel Wyatt

Master's Theses

Elkhorn coral, or Acropora palmata, is an important reef building species that promotes species abundance and other ecological services to the communities in the US Virgin Islands. We captured high resolution imagery of a reef in St. Croix’s East End Marine Park using a Wingtra One UAV. We then used deep learning techniques to detect individual coral colonies. We compared two deep learning models, FasterRCNN and MaskRCNN, and found that the models achieved accuracy shores up to 0.78. These scores improved when examining only larger corals in shallow waters. The model was able to both detect Elkhorn coral and …

Identification Of Poverty Areas By Using Machine Learning Classification Methods From Satellite Imagery In Buraydah City, In The Qassim Region Of Saudi Arabia, Amal Alfawzan

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

Saudi Arabia is a wealthy country with its many resources, but it has seen an increase in poverty recently because of a high rate of population growth with a high rate of unemployment. Some estimate that the number of Saudi Arabians living in poverty is between two and four million. This research aims to develop a way to detect poverty through remote sensing. The study area is Buraydah City, the largest city of the Qassim region, an important agricultural center that plays a significant role in the economy of Saudi Arabia. The research hypothesized that there are poor areas within …

Algorithm Performance On The Estimation Of Cdom And Doc In The North Slopes Of Alaska, Monica Weisenbach

Masters Theses

Use of satellite imagery makes environmental monitoring easy and convenient with little of the logistics involved in planning sampling campaigns. Colored dissolved organic matter (CDOM) is an important component to track as a proxy for the large pool of dissolved organic carbon (DOC). In a world contending with the looming issue of global climate change, the ability to investigate the carbon cycle of inland to coastal environments allows for examination of the magnitude of carbon flowing through the system and potential changes over years. The Arctic region is a critical area for climate change impacts but is a difficult landscape …

Observations Of Post-Wildfire Landcover Trends In Boreal Alaska Using A Suite Of Remote Sensing Approaches, Eric John Deutsch

Theses - ALL

Wildfires are a common occurrence in the boreal ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest. Studies suggest that anthropogenic climate change has fostered more frequent and higher severity fires in recent decades in these forests, which may result in substantial changes in vegetation structure and ecosystem functioning. However, large-scale studies examining the linkages between changing boreal wildfire regimes and vegetation structure have historically been limited in spatial scope due to the broad area and inaccessibility of many boreal regions, including the Alaskan interior. The development and advancement of satellite remote sensing instruments and geospatial analysis techniques provide researchers with unmatched abilities to …

Spatial Assessment Of Urban Growth In Cities Of The Decapolis; And The Implications For Modern Cities, Wade A. Pierson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Levant’s Decapolis was a network of ten cities in Greco-Roman Israel, Jordan, and Syria that established a thriving economic community. The Decapolis was home to ancient and modern cities like Damascus (Dammásq) and Amman (Philadelphia). Despite the various origins of these cities, Roman administration and their city planners oversaw the implementation of idealized Roman city form throughout the region. Three Decapolis cities represent intriguing examples of the larger confederation. Philadelphia (Amman), Gerasa (Jerash), and Gadara (Umm Qais) represent cities of common original urban form which developed drastically diverse urban morphologies over time.

Spatial analyses of these cities required working …

Remote Sensing Applications In Population Estimation, Regression Analysis, And Urban Growth Simulation Modeling For A Middle Eastern City, Elaf Amer Alyasiri

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Due to a change in government regime and population migration, the City of Hillah in Iraq has been facing several urban issues, particularly population estimating and urban growth planning. Since the last census conducted in 1997, population in Iraq has been estimated based on the annual growth, without considering migration as factor of the population growth. Therefore, the aim of this dissertation study was to develop a population estimation method and an urban growth simulation method for the City of Hillah. Population data were estimated for Hillah, using the Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI) derived from Remote Sensing (RS) and …

A Karst Feature Prediction Model For Prince Of Wales Island, Alaska Based On High Resolution Lidar Imagery, Alexander Lyles

Master's Theses

Investigation into surface karst formation is significant to hazard prediction, hydrogeologic drainage, and land management. Southeast Alaska contains over 600,000 acres of mapped carbonate bedrock, and some of the fastest recorded karst dissolution in the world. The objectives of this study are to develop and compare multiple semi-automated models to map and delineate karst features from bare-earth LiDAR imagery using ArcGIS Desktop 10.7, and to apply a preliminary geostatistical analysis of sinkhole morphometric parameters to highlight potential spatial patterns of karst evolution on Prince of Wales Island, Alaska. A semi-automated approach of mapping karst features provides a dataset that minimizes …

Snow-Albedo Feedback In Northern Alaska: How Vegetation Influences Snowmelt, Lucas C. Reckhaus

Theses and Dissertations

This paper investigates how the snow-albedo feedback mechanism of the arctic is changing in response to rising climate temperatures. Specifically, the interplay of vegetation and snowmelt, and how these two variables can be correlated. This has the potential to refine climate modelling of the spring transition season. Research was conducted at the ecoregion scale in northern Alaska from 2000 to 2020. Each ecoregion is defined by distinct topographic and ecological conditions, allowing for meaningful contrast between the patterns of spring albedo transition across surface conditions and vegetation types. The five most northerly ecoregions of Alaska are chosen as they encompass …

Changes In Land Use Land Cover (Lulc), Surface Water Quality And Modelling Surface Discharge In Beaver Creek Watershed, Northeast Tennessee And Southwest Virginia, Tosin James

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Beaver Creek is an impaired streams that is not supporting its designated use for recreation due to Escherichia coli (E.coli), and sediment. To address this problem, this thesis was divided into two studies.

The first study explored changes in Land Use Land Cover (LULC), and its impact on surface water quality. Changes in E.coli load between 1997-2001 and 2014-2018 were analyzed. Also, Landsat data of 2001, and 2018 were examined in Terrset 18.31. Mann-Whitney test only showed a significant reduction in E.coli for one site. Negative correlation was established between E.coli load, and Developed LULC, Forest LULC, and …

An Evaluation Of Unmanned Aircraft Systems' Ability To Assess Stripe Rust In Large Wheat Breeding Nursies, Jamison T. Murry

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Stripe Rust (Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici) is a foliar disease that significantly impacts global wheat production, and resistant cultivars provide the most efficient method of control. High-throughput phenotyping using unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) offers a potentially more efficient method for field-based phenotyping compared to visual assessment. Here we tested the ability of remote sensing to predict stripe rust severity in a diverse population of 594 soft red winter wheat lines, planted in single-rows, and evaluated them by visually rating stripe rust intensity and remotely using the dark green color index (DGCI), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and blue NDVI. …

Remote Sensing And Social Sensing For Improved Flood Awareness And Exposure Analysis In The Big Data Era, Xiao Huang

Theses and Dissertations

Floods are among the most devastating hazards on Earth, posing great threats to a large amount of population in the world. As the severity and frequency of flood events have noticeably increased, there is a growing need to improve the flood awareness and exposure analysis to assist flood mitigation. Fortunately, the Era of Big Data has fostered many innovative spatial data sources as well as spatial data analytics. This dissertation advances the existing flood monitoring studies by obtaining enhanced flood awareness via the development of a data fusion enable and deep learning supported flood monitoring framework that systematically integrates remotely …

Assessment Of Land Cover Change In St. Martin’S Marsh Aquatic Preserve, Florida, Usa, Katie Wagner

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

St. Martin’s Marsh Aquatic Preserve (SMMAP) is a 28,461 acre (115.18 km2) preserve located on the coast of Citrus County, Florida, USA. There has been no published research that focused on coastal change on this unique coast. This thesis research focuses on coastal land cover change that has occurred within the preserve from 1988 to 2018. Multitemporal Landsat images were classified using a support vector machine (SVM) classification, while changes in vegetation were evaluated using the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). Field research was conducted to examine nineteen sites for classification training and test data and notes on habitat composition. …

Estimating Free-Flow Speed With Lidar And Overhead Imagery, Armin Hadzic

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Understanding free-flow speed is fundamental to transportation engineering in order to improve traffic flow, control, and planning. The free-flow speed of a road segment is the average speed of automobiles unaffected by traffic congestion or delay. Collecting speed data across a state is both expensive and time consuming. Some approaches have been presented to estimate speed using geometric road features for certain types of roads in limited environments. However, estimating speed at state scale for varying landscapes, environments, and road qualities has been relegated to manual engineering and expensive sensor networks. This thesis proposes an automated approach for estimating free-flow …

A Karst Feature Predictability Model Within Barber County, Kansas, Gary M. Kelner

Master's Theses

This research consisted of two topics: 1) geographic predictive models of karst features and 2), a petrographic study examining the lithology of the study area. The study area is a privately owned ranch in the Gypsum Hills of Barber County, Kansas and is known to have karst features. Two predictive models for karst features were utilized. Previously identified features, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), and Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) imagery aided in the creation of these predictive models. These predictability models also used the ESRI ArcMap software platform. The data for these models consists of slope, …

Using Unmanned Aerial Systems (Drones) With A Thermal Sensor To Map And Count Deer Population, Maxwell C. Ott

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The number of deer in an area is an important statistic for land managers to know, as overabundance has many negative effects. There are many methods that have been used to count deer in the past, such as using manned helicopters and airplanes, walking on foot, and conducting controlled hunts. UAS (unmanned aerial systems) is a growing field that provides many benefits over traditional methods of counting deer, such as lower cost and missions being less time consuming. Using a thermal sensor attached to a UAS makes it simple to spot any deer during a flight. Two main methods of …

Change Is The Only Constant: A Snowpack Retention Analysis And Climate Vulnerability Road Map For The Skalkaho Creek Sub-Basin, Zachary Freeman Goodwin

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Climate change is impacting the whole of North America, although the impacts differ depending on regional geography. In the Intermountain West, climate change is contributing to lower overall snowpack totals and diminished late season streamflows. These changes will likely contribute to vulnerabilities in how much water is available to irrigators, municipalities, and fisheries dependent upon a consistent yearly flow of meltwater. This paper explores how snowpack retention has changed via the NASA dataset Daymet, which provides gridded estimates of weather parameters including Snow Water Equivalent in the Bitterroot River Basin of western Montana. This analysis showed that snowpack retention from …

Spatiotemporal Analysis Of Lake Water Quality Indicators On Small Lakes, Lake Bloomington And Evergreen Lake In Central Illinois, Using Satellite Remote Sensing, Gare Ambrose-Igho

Theses and Dissertations

This research explores the use of Sentinel-2 satellite to determine the spatiotemporal patterns of lake water quality indicators (e.g. chlorophyll a) in Lake Bloomington and Evergreen Lake. Lake water quality issues related to algal blooms is a serious problem in basins with abundant agricultural lands causing harmful effects to freshwater ecosystems such as pollution of beaches, taste and odor problems in drinking water, depletion of oxygen levels causing fish kills and the issue of water exceeding safe drinking water standards. Developing monitoring techniques using various water quality indicators of algal blooms is crucial. In this project, remote sensing and field …

Mountain Livelihoods In A Time Of Change: A Case Study Of Upper Mustang In Nepal, Sandesh Shrestha

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A case study was conducted in a remote Himalayan village—Yara—in the Upper Mustang region of Nepal. The goal of this study was to understand and assess the livelihood strategies of local people in the village. The study focused on understanding the socio-economic and environmental driving factors of livelihood vulnerability, prevalent livelihood activities, emergent livelihood strategies, and resulting livelihood outcomes in the village. We used multiple data generation methods, which included both qualitative social science and quantitative biophysical components. For the qualitative component, we utilized multiple data generation methods including key informant interviews, semi-structured household interviews, group discussions, and field observations. …

Empirical Analysis Of Urban Sprawl In Canadian Census Metropolitan Areas Using Satellite Imagery, 1986-2016, Xiaoxuan Sun

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Major Canadian cities have experienced rapid sprawl in the last 30 years. This dissertation presents two studies that empirically examine the causes of urban sprawl, merging census socioeconomics data and satellite imageries of 11 major Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs). The monocentric city model and the Tiebout model are the main traditional theories explaining urban boundary changes and mobility residential. The first study focuses on the cross-sectional comparison among the 11 CMAs in 2016. In the second study, we zoom into the Toronto CMA and examine the longitudinal changes in its urban coverage at the fringe. We detect land cover/use changes …

Remote Sensing Of Planetary Boundary Layer Height And Particulate Matter 2.5 In New York State Mesonet Network, Bhupal Shrestha

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Abstract:

Utilization Of Various Methods And A Landsat Ndvi/Google Earth Engine Product For Classifying Irrigated Land Cover, Andrew Nemecek

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Methods for classifying irrigated land cover are often complex and not quickly reproducible. Further, moderate resolution time-series datasets have been consistently utilized to produce irrigated land cover products over the past decade, and the body of irrigation classification literature contains no examples of subclassification of irrigated land cover by irrigation method. Creation of geospatial irrigated land cover products with higher resolution datasets could improve reliability, and subclassification of irrigation by method could provide better information for hydrologists and climatologists attempting to model the role of irrigation in the surface-ground water cycle and the water-energy balance. This study summarizes a simple, …

Evaluation Of An Extended Pics (Epics) For Calibration And Stability Monitoring Of Optical Satellite Sensors, Md Nahid Hasan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pseudo Invariant Calibration Sites (PICS) have been increasingly used as an independent data source for on-orbit radiometric calibration and stability monitoring of optical satellite sensors. Generally, this would be a small region of land that is extremely stable in time and space, predominantly found in North Africa. Use of these small regions, referred to as traditional PICS, can be limited by: i) the spatial extent of an individual Region of Interest (ROI) and/or site; ii) and the frequency of how often the site can be acquired, based on orbital patterns and cloud cover at the site, both impacting the time …

Object-Based Supervised Machine Learning Regional-Scale Land-Cover Classification Using High Resolution Remotely Sensed Data, Christopher A. Ramezan

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

High spatial resolution (HR) (1m – 5m) remotely sensed data in conjunction with supervised machine learning classification are commonly used to construct land-cover classifications. Despite the increasing availability of HR data, most studies investigating HR remotely sensed data and associated classification methods employ relatively small study areas. This work therefore drew on a 2,609 km2, regional-scale study in northeastern West Virginia, USA, to investigates a number of core aspects of HR land-cover supervised classification using machine learning. Issues explored include training sample selection, cross-validation parameter tuning, the choice of machine learning algorithm, training sample set size, and feature selection. A …