Physical and Environmental Geography Commons^™

Factors Affecting Groundwater Nitrate Concentration In Madinah Area, Saudi Arabia, Majed M. Almutairi

Masters Theses

High levels of nitrate in groundwater are a serious problem in Madinah Area, Saudi Arabia. Identifying factors affecting groundwater nitrate contamination is important for managing groundwater quality. This study examined factors that have significant impacts on the high level of groundwater nitrate in Madinah Area. Factors examined included well-depth and land cover. Relationships between variables were explored using three statistical approaches: the Kruskal-Wallis test and two types of regression (ordinary least squares [OLS] and geographically weighted regression [GWR]).

Nitrate concentration data show that 73% of obtained groundwater samples exceeded the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maximum contaminant level (MCL) …

Michigan's Clay Bluffs: The Description And Comparison Of An Erosion-Dependent Natural Community, Nathaniel G. Fuller

Masters Theses

The clay bluffs of Michigan are a natural community found along the shores of the Great Lakes. Groundwater is found to be critical to sustaining the alkaline wetlands on the face of the bluff as well as the source of most erosion events. The clay bluffs are unusual in their vegetation, disturbance regime and geographical context. This thesis focuses primarily on describing seeping clay bluffs and exploring the comparison to other natural communities. The purpose of this is twofold, to better understand the ways in which natural communities are described as distinct from one another, and to assess the distinctness …

Predictive Modeling In The Search For Vertebrate Fossils: Geographic Object Based Image Analysis (Geobia) In The Eocene Of Wyoming, Bryan Bommersbach

Masters Theses

The development and testing of predictive models for identifying productive fossil localities represents a promising interdisciplinary endeavor among geographic information scientists, paleoanthropologists, and vertebrate paleontologists. This thesis analyzed high resolution (2m spatial resolution) commercial satellite imagery from the Worldview-2 satellite of five areas of the Great Divide Basin using a GEographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) technique, which segments the image into spectrally homogeneous, multi-pixel image objects. In addition to allowing statistical analysis of the spectral characteristics of the image objects, GEOBIA techniques also let analysts incorporate expert knowledge and contextual information to improve classification accuracy. The spectral characteristics of the …