Digital Commons Network^™

Transit Access And Mobility Challenges Among Rowan University Students, Raven Vijayakumar, Nathalie Calvachi, Cedric Gadie, Qian He

STEM Student Research Symposium Posters

College students can face unique mobility challenges and are an essential group of riders who rely on public transportation. For commuting students, public transportation or the campus shuttle can be one of the most relied-on ways to get to school. For on-campus students, access to public transportation can play an important role in their well-being and academic performance. This project conducts a comprehensive survey study to understand the access to transit service, mobility challenges, and impacts on student well-being and academic performance at Rowan University.

Kinematic And Dynamic Structure Of The 18 May 2020 Squall Line Over South Korea, Wishnu Agum Swastiko, Chia-Lun Tsai, Seung Hee Kim, Gyuwon Lee

Institute for ECHO Articles and Research

The diagonal squall line that passed through the Korean Peninsula on the 18 May 2020 was examined using wind data retrieved from multiple Doppler radar synthesis focusing on its kinematic and dynamic aspects. The low-level jet, along with warm and moist air in the lower level, served as the primary source of moisture supply during the initiation and formation process. The presence of a cold pool accompanying the squall line played a role in retaining moisture at the surface. As the squall line approached the Korean Peninsula, the convective bands in the northern segment (NS) and southern segment (SS) of …

Food Tourism And Storytelling In The Scandinavian North, Kajsa G. Åberg

GSTC Academic Symposium - In conjunction with the GSTC Global Conference

The relation between place, food and tourism is gaining interest from actors in both private and public sectors in the Nordic countries. Food is discussed as potential for product development and image building, based on reasoning on how value may be added through geographical food branding. However, food and drink may also be regarded as a tangible way to communicate local ways of life and as bearers of symbolism and values. The process of commercialization is therefore closely linked to aspects of control and respect, elements found in the criteria section on socio-cultural sustainability in the Global Sustainable Tourism Council …

Estimating Effects Of Tourism Using Multiple Data Sources: The Miranda Tool As Part Of A Spatial Decision Support System For Sustainable Destination Development, Tobias Heldt

GSTC Academic Symposium - In conjunction with the GSTC Global Conference

Planning for sustainable mobility and destination development in rural areas is increasingly important when tourism grows in numbers. A key to address the challenge of transformation and adaptation of local communities to mitigate adverse effects in seasonal peak hours like traffic congestion, power failure, waste management and sewage flooding, is to properly estimate the number of visitors to a destination.

The problem of estimating tourism numbers is a known challenge since, for example, guest nights statistics are in-complete and non-commercial lodging (sharing solutions) are increasing. Recently, the promising utilization of mobile phone data has emerged as a means to estimate …

Sustainable Hospitality Workforce - A Study Of Decency And Dignity In Hotel Housekeeping, Maria Thulemark, Susanna Heldt Cassel Prof., Tara Duncan Prof.

GSTC Academic Symposium - In conjunction with the GSTC Global Conference

Key Words: hospitality work, decent work, sustainable work, working participant observation, embodied intersectionality

Family Medicine’S Role In Addressing The Intersections Of Redlining And Climate Change, Daryl O. Traylor, Eboni E. Anderson, Brianna Clark, Alex M. Smith, Cooper K. Allenbrand

Journal of Sustainable Social Impact

Redlining, the practice of discriminating against specific neighborhoods based on race and socioeconomic status, leads to persistent environmental hazards and socioeconomic inequalities that have lasting adverse health effects on their populations. Health disparities are further exacerbated through the concentration of environmental hazards, as well as the escalating impact of climate change, which poses an increased risk of respiratory illness, cardiovascular disease, mental health issues, heat-related illness, infectious diseases, food insecurity, and socioeconomic difficulties in redline neighborhoods.

This paper examines the interplay of redlining, climate change, and health disparities, with an emphasis on the enduring consequences for these marginalized communities. Through …

High And Dry - Contextualizing Domestic Root Cellar Drains In Southern Ontario, Anatolijs Venovcevs

Northeast Historical Archaeology

The subterranean root cellar is the quintessential feature of rural nineteenth-century archaeological sites in Ontario and much archaeological, historical, and architectural research on rural farmsteads has focused on defining and understanding these structures. However, this work has neglected an important component of this feature – the root cellar drain. This paper contextualizes these features within their broader nineteenth-century ideals of drainage and goes on to tackle the topic with the use of statistical analysis on the associated geographical, social, and economic attributes. The discussion presents opportunities that are present from the vast quantities of historical sites that have been excavated …

Bologna, City Of Gastronomy: Part 1, Jean Lavigne

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Human-Environment Interactions In Coastal Belize: Insights Into Sea-Level Rise And Ancient Maya Activities At The Paynes Creek Salt Works, Cheryl Mae Foster

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Dissertation excavations were carried out in 2019 and 2022 at the underwater sites of Ta’ab Nuk Na and Ek Way Nal in Paynes Creek National Park, Belize. Sea-level rise submerged the sites in antiquity and preserved the artifact record in red mangrove (Rhizophora mangle) peat. Red mangrove peat can be used as a proxy for sea-level rise. The goals of the two excavations included: 1) excavating a 14m-long transect within and extending beyond building J at Ta’ab Nuk Na to determine the function of the building, 2) investigating the production of salt making pottery at Ta’ab Nuk Na; …

Unveiling The Power Of Tourism Research: Navigating Insights From Montana For 2024 And Beyond, Melissa Weddell, Kara Grau, Matthew Pettigrew

Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research Publications

ITRR presentation from the 2024 Governor's Conference on Tourism

“It Didn’T Hurt Me”: Patients’ And Providers’ Perspectives On Unsupervised Take‑Home Doses, Drug Diversion, And Overdose Risks In The Provision Of Medication For Opioid Use Disorder During Covid‑19 In San Juan, Puerto Rico, Roberto Abadie, Celia B. Fisher

School of Global Integrative Studies: Faculty Publications

Background During the COVID−19 pandemic, clinics offering medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD) needed to rapidly introduce unsupervised take−home dosing, while relapsing patients and patients unable to enter treatment faced increased risks of fentanyl−related overdose deaths and other drug−related harms. Based on a qualitative study of people who inject drugs (PWID) receiving MOUD treatment and MOUD staff in Puerto Rico, this paper documents the lived experiences of patients and providers during this period and the risk perceptions and management strategies to address substance misuse and drug diversion attributable to unsupervised take−home−dose delivery

Methods In−depth qualitative interviews were conducted with patients …

Patterns, Drivers, And Implications Of Postfire Delayed Tree Mortality In Temperate Conifer Forests Of The Western United States, Sebastian Busby, Cody Evers, Andrés Holz

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Conifer forest resilience may be threatened by increasing wildfire activity and compound disturbances in western North America. Fire refugia enhance forest resilience, yet may decline over time due to delayed mortality—a process that remains poorly understood at landscape and regional scales. To address this uncertainty, we used high-resolution satellite imagery (5-m pixel) to map and quantify delayed mortality of conifer tree cover between 1 and 5 years postfire, across 30 large wildfires that burned within three montane ecoregions in the western United States. We used statistical models to explore the influence of burn severity, topography, soils, and climate moisture deficit …

Economically Affordable And Ecologically Sustainable Oil Spill Treatments: Review Of Recent Literature, Yue Fan, Jeanne Sumrall

SACAD: Scholarly Activities

Devastating impacts on organisms and the environment are brought by marine oil spills.

Superhydrophobic foams, sponges, aerogels, and biomass materials have been used as absorbents for oil spill treatment.  Among all, Polydimethylsiloxane multi-walled carbon nanotubes Polyaniline Polypropylene felt (Referred to as p-CNT/PANI@PP felt in the following parts) exhibits high absorption selectivity and capability, along with the ability to conduct in harsh environments and the ability to make use of solar/Joule-heating in absorbing a wide span of oil types with high viscosity.

Thus, p-CNT/PANI@PP should be considered as a potentially effective way to address the problem of marine oil spills.

An Interactive Web Map Of Historical Buildings Of Downtown Nacogdoches, Texas, Cari Mitchell

Undergraduate Research Conference

Objective: The goal of this project is to use GIS to create a product that allows users interested in the history of downtown Nacogdoches, Texas to explore descriptive and pictorial information about the present historical buildings within the area of interest.

Using Gis Applications To Monitor Post Ohio Train Derailment, Lillian Nix

2024 Student Academic Showcase

This research investigates the multifaceted impacts of the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment on February 3rd, 2023, with a specific focus on utilizing GIS applications for post-event analysis. The study aims to analyze the locations of soil, sediment, and water samples in relation to the landscape, as well as the potential effects on agricultural land use in the vicinity during the year prior to the accident and the year of the accident. Employing GIS overlay and spatial analysis techniques, the research constructs a visual representation of the data. This research aims to offer a comprehensive spatial approach and visual understanding …

Spring Greens: Two Culinary Experiments From My Kitchen In Saint Cloud, Jean Lavigne

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Spatial Behavior Of Hospital Visits By Hand, Foot, And Mouth Disease Patients In Nanchang, China, Zeliu Zheng

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Hand foot mouth disease (HFMD) is one of the widespread transmissible diseases that target preschool children, especially in urban regions in East Asia. Understanding the travel patterns of the HFMD patients helps us understand how the spatial behaviors of patients vary across space and what are the underlying forces. It is essential for understanding the healthcare market and planning for resource allocation. Foremost, health behavior and outcome change significantly across geographic regions of various urbanicities (i.e., degrees of urbanization) due to the uneven distribution of healthcare resource. In addition, health studies in the U.S. often use hospital service areas (HSAs) …

Positioning Disability In Wilderness Space, Rebecca Hobart

Geography ETDs

This thesis examines the social construction of the disabled body in recreational wilderness space. A political ecology framework guides the research questions: What are the actual or perceived barriers to participation for differently abled hikers in wilderness recreational spaces, and how do these challenges manifest in long-distance hiking spaces? In situating Foucault’s theories of the body as shaped by power relations, this thesis asserts wilderness spaces to be privileged based on power conceptualized in normative notions of ability. 44 participants who self-identified as wilderness recreationalists with a disability and/or chronic health illness completed this study’s mixed-method questionnaire. Themes around practices, …

Water Awareness In The Irung-Irung Tradition As Implementation Of Water And Sanitation Management For The Community Of Cihideung Village, West Bandung Regency, Anindyta Fitriyani, Siti Nurhalizah, Salma G. Felisa, Retno A. Hardiyanti

CSID Journal of Infrastructure Development

The local wisdom that exists within a community plays a crucial role in influencing the thinking and conduct of the community. One local wisdom that contains a hydrological educational message that impacts community awareness in maintaining water hygiene and proper sanitation is the Irung-Irung Tradition by the people of Cihideung Village, West Bandung Regency. The objective of this study is to comprehensively examine and assess the components of water awareness within the Irung-Irung Tradition practiced by the people of Cihideung Village in the West Bandung Regency. This study involves a descriptive qualitative research design, including data collection methods such as …

Platform Urbanism And “Splintering Amenitization”: An Analysis Of Canadian Cities, Anirudh Govind, Agnieszka Leszczynski, Ate Poorthuis

Geography & Environment Publications

This article engages with the spatialities of platform urbanism by foregrounding where digital platforms are located in cities. Drawing on a geocoded data set of visible, material traces of platformization collected across neighborhoods in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, we consider the influences that characteristics of urban built environments—including existing amenities, urban morphology, and area-level socioeconomic factors—have on platforms’ locations. Through a Poisson regression of these variables, we find that the presence of existing urban amenities most strongly explains the locations of material traces of urban platformization on the cityscape at the city block scale. We position platforms themselves as a …

We Need A Solid Scientific Basis For Nature-Based Climate Solutions In The United States, Kimberly A. Novick, Trevor F. Keenan, William R L Anderegg, Caroline P. Normile, Benjamin R K Runkle, Emily E. Oldfield, Gyami Shrestha, Margaret E K Evans, Dennis D. Baldocchi, James T. Randerson, Jonathan Sanderman, Margaret S. Torn, Anna T. Trugman, Christopher A. Williams

Geography

Opinion piece mapping the many challenges and variables around nature-based climate solutions (NbCS) in the United States, and the need to pinpoint large-scale strategies that will lead to significant, durable, and measurable net climate cooling. They must do so without simply displacing emissions to other locations.

Nowcasting Heavy Rainfall With Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory Networks: A Pixelwise Modeling Approach, Yi Victor Wang, Seung Hee Kim, Geunsu Lyu, Choeng-Lyong Lee, Soorok Ryu, Gyuwon Lee, Ki-Hong Min, Menas C. Kafatos

Institute for ECHO Articles and Research

The recent decades have seen an increasing academic interest in leveraging machine learning approaches to nowcast, or forecast in a highly short-term manner, precipitation at a high resolution, given the limitations of the traditional numerical weather prediction models on this task. To capture the spatiotemporal associations of data on input variables, a deep learning (DL) architecture with the combination of a convolutional neural network and a recurrent neural network can be an ideal design for nowcasting rainfall. In this study, a long short-term memory (LSTM) modeling structure is proposed with convolutional operations on input variables. To resolve the issue of …

Italian Pasta 101: Lessons From A Semester In Rome, Jean Lavigne

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Promoting Sustainability At The Branch Of Nashville Through Volunteer Training Visuals, Ainsley P. Foster, Nick Wilson, Sophia Vickers

[Archive] Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

The Branch of Nashville is a nonprofit organization that aims to provide comprehensive care to the diverse neighborhoods of Nashville, TN through food, ELL services, and individualized support. The services and resources that this organization provides are essential to the acclimation and thriving of vulnerable groups in their new communities. The volunteers at The Branch play a pivotal role in ensuring that each client is welcomed into the community and has their needs appropriately addressed. Thus, there is a need for volunteers to undergo adequate training to feel confident in performing these roles. The Branch, however, currently lacks training materials …

Unearthing The Past: A Comprehensive Study Of Natural And Anthropogenic Changes At An Archaeological Site Through Hydrogeologic Connectivity Utilizing Gis, Mehlich Ii Phosphorus Extractant, And Ph, Dana L. F. Herren

Theses

This thesis aims to thoroughly analyze the Mehlich II Phosphorus Extractant and pH levels at the Bains Gap Village Site in Anniston, AL., while examining the impact of various environmental factors and human activities on them. Phosphorus is often used in archaeology as an indicator of human activity. Soil core samples were collected to analyze anomalies in phosphorus levels.

To establish any relationships, phosphorus and pH levels from soil cores were correlated with findings from past excavation units and features. The potential effects of hydrogeologic connectivity on soil phosphorus and pH levels were investigated. Geospatial technologies were used to manage …

The Ghanaian War Against Malaria: A Geospatial Approach To Malaria And Healthcare Access In Ghana, Emmanuel Aklie

Theses

This geospatial research project aims to analyze the complex factors influencing malaria incidence in Ghana, including healthcare access, cultural beliefs, and preventive measures. Using GIS mapping and spatial analysis, the study examines malaria distribution and healthcare facility locations to identify hotspots and access inequalities. Combining quantitative data from sources like Demographic and Health Surveys with qualitative methods like surveys and interviews, the project analyzes the relationship between malaria prevalence and vaccination rates, bed net usage, and cultural views on treatment. By taking a comprehensive approach focused on evidence-based insights, the research seeks to inform targeted interventions by the Ghanaian government …

Food System Transformation: Farm To School, Dylan Upperman, Cameron Mahar

Undergraduate Scholarship

This project conducted with the Center for Resilient Communities at West Virginia University is focused on identifying and understanding barriers and opportunities present within the Farm to School program in West Virginia. Through this project, a producer survey was conducted to understand the production side of the program, a quantitative analysis was conducted of state and county level Farm to School purchasing data, and organizational sales through a local nonprofit were reviewed. Through this analysis, it was found that access to new markets and lack of knowledge and information posed a significant barrier for increased production from producers surveyed. It …

Montana Residents' Attitudes Towards Tourism - 2023, Carter Bermingham, Megan Schultz, Matthew Pettigrew

Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research Publications

A summary of Montana residents' attitudes towards tourism from the 2023 season. Overall, results from this study show that Montana residents hold a generally positive attitude towards tourism in the state. Residents are aware of the economic benefit that tourism provides to their communities, and agree that the overall benefits outweigh the negative impacts. Perceptions of crowding at the statewide and community level appear to be easing from previous years.

The Montana Travel Industry - 2023 Summary, Melissa Weddell

Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research Publications

2023 summary infographic of the Montana travel and recreation industry.

Depicting Racial Residential Segregation: An Empirical Analysis Of A Geographical Racial Project In Kent County, Michigan, 2000-2020, Deanna Hughes

Masters Theses

Racial residential segregation has been the foundation for social inequality in American society for many years with links back to slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Many different techniques have been created to study racial residential segregation, with a vast majority of the statistical calculations showing that segregation has been steadily decreasing since the 1960s, sometimes in large amounts. This study seeks to assess these claims by utilizing the same calculations used in those studies and producing dasymetric maps to depict how racial residential segregation is appearing in Kent County, Michigan including Grand Rapids and East Grand Rapids. The following calculations …