Digital Commons Network^™

Deep Learning Of High-Resolution Aerial Imagery For Coastal Marsh Change Detection: A Comparative Study, Grayson R. Morgan, Cuizhen Wang, Zhenlong Li, Steven R. Schill, Daniel R. Morgan

Faculty Publications

Deep learning techniques are increasingly being recognized as effective image classifiers. Aside from their successful performance in past studies, the accuracies have varied in complex environments, in comparison with the popularly of applied machine learning classifiers. This study seeks to explore the feasibility of using a U-Net deep learning architecture to classify bi-temporal, high-resolution, county-scale aerial images to determine the spatial extent and changes of land cover classes that directly or indirectly impact tidal marsh. The image set used in the analysis is a collection of a 1-m resolution collection of National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) tiles from 2009 and …

Exploring Pre-Service Teachers’ Perspectives: Gender And Gender Representation Across Human Protagonists In Picture Books, Taraneh Matloob Haghanikar, Shan Jiang, Sara Tomek, Lisa M. Hooper

Faculty Publications

Gender is ever present in education preparation, school materials, curriculum, and school systems. To improve our knowledge about different facets of gender and the extent to which the depiction of gender has changed over time in picture books, there is a need to dig beneath the surface of questions about gender representation in picture books. Given that in-service teachers have proximity to approximately 75 million K-12 students, how in-service teachers think about gender, gender representation, and their own experiences with gender socialization have important implications on how K-12 students think, act, and feel about gender. In this study, we focused …

The Problem Of The Color Line: Spatial Access To Hospital Services For Minoritized Racial And Ethnic Groups, Jan M. Eberth, Pelvin Hung, Gabriel A. Benavidez, Janice Probst, Whitney E. Zahnd, Mary-Katherine Mcnatt, Ebony Toussaint, Melinda A. Merrell, Elizabeth L. Crouch

Faculty Publications

Examining how spatial access to health care varies across geography is key to documenting structural inequalities in the United States. In this article and the accompanying StoryMap, our team identified ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs) with the largest share of minoritized racial and ethnic populations and measured distances to the nearest hospital offering emergency services, trauma care, obstetrics, outpatient surgery, intensive care, and cardiac care. In rural areas, ZCTAs with high Black or American Indian/Alaska Native representation were significantly farther from services than ZCTAs with high White representation. The opposite was true for urban ZCTAs, with high White ZCTAs being …

Shaping Arctic’S Tomorrow Through Indigenous Knowledge Engagement And Knowledge Co-Production, Tatiana Degai, Andrey N. Petrov, Renuka Badhe, Parnuna P. Egede Dahl, Nina Döring, Stephan Dudeck, Thora M. Hermann, Andrei Golovnev, Liza Mack, Elle Merete Omma, Gunn Britt Retter, Gertrude Saxinger, Annette J.M. Scheepstra, Chief Vyachelav Shadrin, Norma Shorty, Colleen Strawhacker

Faculty Publications

This perspective presents a statement of the 10th International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences Indigenous Knowledge and knowledge co-production panel and discussion group, 20 July 2021. The statement is designed to serve as a characterization of the state-of-the-art and guidance for further advancement of Indigenous Knowledge and knowledge co-production in the Arctic. It identifies existing challenges and provides specific recommendations for researchers, Indigenous communities, and funding agencies on meaningful recognition and engagement of Indigenous Knowledge systems.

Diversity And Distribution Patterns Of Endemic Medicinal And Aromatic Plants Of Iran: Implications For Conservation And Habitat Management, Mohammad Bagher Hassanpouraghdam, Hamideh Ghorbani, Marzieh Esmaeilpour, Mac H. Alford, Maciej Strzemski, Slawomir Dresler

Faculty Publications

Iran, with its unique climatic and topographic conditions, is home to about 8200 species of vascular plants. Approximately 2300 of the 8200 species are popularly characterized as medicinal or aromatic. Here, we compile information about the endemic medicinal and aromatic plants (MAPs) of Iran and map their distributions. Our survey found 180 endemic species of MAPs, belonging to 10 families and 30 genera. The majority of species are found in Lamiaceae, Fabaceae, and Apiaceae, with 86, 30, and 18 species, respectively. Approximately 70% of these plants have been recorded in the 10 provinces of Esfahan, Kerman, Fars, Tehran, Chaharmahal va …

Investigation Of Innovation In Wine Industry Via Meta-Analysis, Ali Dogru, Joseph Peyrefitte

Faculty Publications

This study provides a systematic review of 76 relevant wine business studies published in the last 30 years. Our meta-analysis investigates six commonly used variables to explain wine innovation: absorptive capacity, technology adoption, sustainable practices, export orientation, firm size, and firm age. We also investigate the association between innovation and financial performance, using the reported effect sizes in the literature. Our meta-analysis reveals that absorptive capacity, technology adoption, sustainable practices, export orientation, and firm size positively correlate with innovation efforts, and innovation is positively associated with financial performance. However, we find no correlation between firm age and innovation. In addition …

A Comparison Of Sporadic-E Occurrence Rates Using Gps Radio Occultation And Ionosonde Measurements, Rodney Carmona, Omar A. Nava, Eugene V. Dao, Daniel J. Emmons

Faculty Publications

Sporadic-E (E_s) occurrence rates from Global Position Satellite radio occultation (GPS-RO) measurements have shown to vary by a factor of five between studies, motivating the need for a comparison with ground-based measurements. In an attempt to find accurate GPS-RO techniques for detecting E_s formation, occurrence rates derived using five previously developed GPS-RO techniques are compared to ionosonde measurements over an eight-year period from 2010–2017. GPS-RO measurements within 170 km of a ionosonde site are used to calculate E_s occurrence rates and compared to the ground-truth ionosonde measurements. The techniques are compared individually for each ionosonde site …

Reassessing The Role Of Anthropogenic Climate Change In The Extinction Of Silphium, Paul Pollaro, Paul Robertson

Faculty Publications

The famed ancient herb, known to the Romans as silphium (Greeksilphion), is widely regarded as the first recorded instance of human-induced species extinction. Modern scholars have largely credited direct exploitation (e.g., over-harvesting; over-grazing) as the primary cause of silphium's extinction, due to an overwhelming demand for the plant in ancient times. Recent research has revealed strict cold-stratification requirements for the germination of silphium's closest living relatives, revealing the likelihood that silphium shared these same germination requirements. Documented environmental changes in ancient Cyrenaica (e.g., widespread deforestation; cropland expansion) likely resulted in accelerated rates of desertification throughout the region as well as …

Future Of Winter In Northeastern North America: Climate Indicators Portray Warming And Snow Loss That Will Impact Ecosystems And Communities, Elizabeth Burakowski, Alix Contosta, Danielle Grogan, Sarah Nelson, Sarah Garlick, Nora Casson

Faculty Publications

Winters in northeastern North America have warmed faster than summers, with impacts on ecosystems and society. Global climate models (GCMs) indicate that winters will continue to warm and lose snow in the future, but uncertainty remains regarding the magnitude of warming. Here, we project future trends in winter indicators under lower and higher climate-warming scenarios based on emission levels across northeastern North America at a fine spatial scale (1/16°) relevant to climate-related decision making. Under both climate scenarios, winters continue to warm with coincident increases in days above freezing, decreases in days with snow cover, and fewer nights below freezing. …

An Exploratory Study On The Microbiome Of Northern And Southern Populations Of Ixodes Scapularis Ticks Predicts Changes And Unique Bacterial Interactions, Deepak Kumar, Latoyia P. Downs, Abdulsalam Adegoke, Erika Machtinger, Kelly Oggenfuss, Richard S. Ostfeld, Monica Embers, Shahid Karim

Faculty Publications

The black-legged tick (Ixodes scapularis) is the primary vector of Borrelia burgdorferi, the causative agent of Lyme disease in North America. However, the prevalence of Lyme borreliosis is clustered around the Northern States of the United States of America. This study utilized a metagenomic sequencing approach to compare the microbial communities residing within Ix. scapularis populations from northern and southern geographic locations in the USA. Using a SparCC network construction model, we performed potential interactions between members of the microbial communities from Borrelia burgdorferi–infected tissues of unfed and blood-fed ticks. A significant difference in bacterial composition …

The Times, They Are A-Changin’: Tracking Shifts In Mental Health Signals From Early Phase To Later Phase Of The Covid-19 Pandemic In Australia, Siqin Wang, Xiao Huang, Tao Hu, Mengxi Zhang, Zhenlong Li, Huan Ning, Jonathan Corcoran, Asaduzzaman Khan, Yan Liu, Jiajia Zhang Ph.D., Xiaoming Li Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

Introduction Widespread problems of psychological distress have been observed in many countries following the outbreak of COVID-19, including Australia. What is lacking from current scholarship is a national-scale assessment that tracks the shifts in mental health during the pandemic timeline and across geographic contexts.

Methods Drawing on 244 406 geotagged tweets in Australia from 1 January 2020 to 31 May 2021, we employed machine learning and spatial mapping techniques to classify, measure and map changes in the Australian public’s mental health signals, and track their change across the different phases of the pandemic in eight Australian capital cities.

Results Australians’ …

Unmanned Aerial Remote Sensing Of Coastal Vegetation: A Review, Grayson R. Morgan, Michael E. Hodgson, Cuizhen Wang, Steven R. Schill

Faculty Publications

Coastal wetlands contribute greatly to our coasts economically and ecologically. The utility of coastal wetland vegetation, along with the multitude of dynamic forces they encounter, suggests the need of regular monitoring for sustainable management. While traditional in situ survey methods and remote sensing from space and manned platforms have provided means to monitor and study the coastal zone thus far, the recent developments of small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) fill a small void between traditional in situ survey methods and the high spatial resolution of manned aircraft imagery. As an on-demand personal remote sensing device, an sUAS can be deployed …

Brazilian Mangroves: Blue Carbon Hotspots Of National And Global Relevance To Natural Climate Solutions, Andre S. Rovai, Robert R. Twilley, Thomas A. Worthington, Pablo Riul

Faculty Publications

Mangroves are known for large carbon stocks and high sequestration rates in biomass and soils, making these intertidal wetlands a cost-effective strategy for some nations to compensate for a portion of their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. However, few countries have the national-level inventories required to support the inclusion of mangroves into national carbon credit markets. This is the case for Brazil, home of the second largest mangrove area in the world but lacking an integrated mangrove carbon inventory that captures the diversity of coastline types and climatic zones in which mangroves are present. Here we reviewed published datasets to derive …

Using Situational Analysis To Reimagine Infrastructure, Mary Le Rouge, Clancy Ratliff, Donnie Johnson Sackey

Faculty Publications

In this article, we ask what it means to think of infrastructure discursively through situational analysis. First, we consider how policymakers have historically used writing and rhetoric to redefine, reframe, and resituate what infrastructure can be in technical documents. Second, we address the impact of policymakers’ discursive practices on the spaces and material realities of communities. We view the infrastructural function of writing “as a conceptual foundation for revealing structures and foundations of organizations that affect people” (Read, 2019, p. 237). We use three texts as the space of our discourse mapping: President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chat on the Recovery …

Survey Of Applications Of Neural Networks And Machine Learning To Covid-19 Predictions, Richard S. Segall

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate how artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have been used for COVID-19 detection and analysis. Specifically, the use of neural networks (NN) and machine learning (ML) are described along with which countries are creating these techniques and how these are being used for COVID-19 diagnosis and detection. Illustrations of multi-layer convolutional neural networks (CNN), recurrent neural networks (RNN), and deep neural networks (DNN) are provided to show how these are used for COVID-19 detection and prediction. A summary of big data analytics for COVID-19 and some available COVID-19 open-source data sets and repositories and …

Financially Constrained Mortgage Servicers, Darren Aiello

Faculty Publications

Financially constrained mortgage servicers destroyed substantial MBS investor value during the financial crisis through their management of delinquent mortgages. Servicers advance to investors monthly payments missed by borrowers. In order to minimize this obligation to extend financing to distressed borrowers, constrained servicers aggressively pursued foreclosures and modifications at the expense of investors, borrowers, and future mortgage performance. When agency frictions between the servicer and the investor are higher, the servicer’s financial constraints matter more. IV regressions suggest that, on average per defaulted loan, servicers’ financial constraints are responsible for 20% of the total investor value reduction during the financial crisis.

Arctic Navigation And Climate Change: Projections From Science For The Law Of The Sea, Charles H. Norchi, Amanda H. Lynch

Faculty Publications

Above latitude 66°33’44” north of the Equator lies the Arctic Circle. The center of the Circle is water, mostly covered by ice. The smallest of the world’s five oceans, it has been paddled, sailed, and traversed over centu-ries—to access its abundant resources, to reach the magnetic north pole, to discover routes connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to expand sci-entific knowledge, to live, to discover, and to conquer. Peoples indigenous to the Arctic have long thrived in the lands and near-shore environments that bound the ocean.

By the age of European exploration of the Arctic, the 1648 Peace of Westphalia …

Addressing Asian (In)Visiblity In The Academy, Shruti Rana, Cyra Akila Choudhury

Faculty Publications

To be Asian American in the legal academy is to be caught between a paradox and a dichotomy, with both marked by silencing and erasure. The paradox exists within the term "Asian American" itself, as "'Asian' and 'American' have historically been posed as antithetical" identities in U.S. history and jurisprudence. On one side is a representation of unassimilable perpetual foreignness with Asian bodies targeted for violence and unequal protection of the law often justified by their perceived threat to national security. On the other is the lure of assimilation, where the model minority myth offers a purported path into acceptance …

Food, Freedom, Fairness, And The Family Farm, Robin M. Rotman, Sophie Mendelson

Faculty Publications

The concept of the “family farm” holds powerful sway within the American narrative, embodying both nostalgia for an imagined past and anxiety for a future perceived to be under threat. Since the founding of the United States, this cultural ideal has been invoked in support of a rosy vision of agrarian democracy while obscuring the ways in which the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s codified definition of “family farm” has unfairly aggregated advantages for the benefit of a particular kind of family (nuclear) and farmer (white, male, straight). At the same time, consumers are misled by an under-interrogated conflation of family …

The Band Of American Ladies : Children’S Librarians And The Creation Of Children’S Literature In The Long 19th Century, Suzanne Stauffer

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Going Virtual: Academic Conferences In The Age Of Covid-19, Leandro Rodriguez Medina, Wesley Shrum

Faculty Publications

In the context of the 2020 world pandemic of COVID-19, many professional and scientific associations have had to change the way that they gather and reorganize their scholarly conferences. For many of them, conferences are a main source of income and important occasions for business meetings and managerial decisions. Yet, with trips and face-to-face encounters banned, the opportunity arrived for going virtual and developing human and technical capacities to provide online environments for virtual conferences. In this article, we analyze the case of an e-conference co-organized by two international organizations at two levels: (a) the decision-making process and (b) the …

Molecular Data From The Holotype Of The Enigmatic Bornean Black Shrew, Suncus Ater Medway, 1965 (Soricidae, Crocidurinae), Place It In The Genus Palawanosorex, Jonathan A. Nations, Thomas C. Giarla, Muhd Amsyari Morni, Julius William Dee, Mark T. Swanson, Anna E. Hiller, Faisal Ali Anwarali Khan, Jacob A. Esselstyn

Faculty Publications

Although Borneo has received more attention from biologists than most other islands in the Malay Ar-chipelago, many questions regarding the systematic relationships of Bornean mammals remain. Using next-generation sequencing technology, we obtained mitochondrial DNA sequences from the holotype of Suncus ater, the only known specimen of this shrew. Several shrews collected recently in Sarawak are closely aligned, both morphologically and mitochondrially, with the holotype of S. ater. Phylogenetic analyses of mitochondrial sequences indicate that the S. ater holotype and new Sarawak specimens do not belong to the genus Suncus, but instead are most closely related to Palawanosorex muscorum. Until now …

Healthcare Education Leaves The Hills: Frontier Nursing University’S Move From Appalachia, Hannah Haksgaard

Faculty Publications

Rural communities lack maternity and childbirth services, and access is getting worse. Despite the serious need for more rural-focused childbirth services, Frontier Nursing—the most famous rural-focused childbirth healthcare provider and educator—recently left the historic rural location it had called home since its inception nearly a century ago. Frontier Nursing, established in the Appalachian Mountains in 1925, initially provided nursing and midwifery care focused on the residents of Leslie County, Kentucky, and in 1939 established a school in Leslie County to train future rural nurse-midwives. Despite success over nearly 100 years deep in the remote and rural Appalachian foothills, Frontier Nursing …

Gis-Automated Delineation Of Hospital Service Areas In Florida: From Dartmouth Method To Network Community Detection Methods, Changzhen Wang, Fahui Wang

Faculty Publications

Since the Dartmouth Hospital Service Areas (HSAs) were proposed three decades ago, there has been a large body of work using the unit in examining the geographic variation in health care in the U.S. for evaluating health care system performance and informing health policy. However, many studies question the replicability and reliability of the Dartmouth HSAs in meeting the challenges of an ever-changing and a diverse set of health care services. This research develops a reproducible, automated, and efficient GIS tool to implement Dartmouth method for defining HSAs. Moreover, the research adapts two popular network community detection methods to account …

Ecology Of Family Experiences: Contextualizing Family Leisure For Human Development & Family Relations, Karen K. Melton, Camilla Hodge, Mat D. Duerden

Faculty Publications

All family leisure is not equal. Yet, little is known about the mechanisms linking different types of family leisure to different human development and family relations outcomes. The Ecology of Family Experiences (EFE) framework provides a sensitizing lens for the study of the conditions under which family leisure is beneficial to individuals and families. Specifically, the framework suggests three domains—Family, Activity, and Time—iteratively interact to generate different levels of individual and family outcomes (i.e., responses, meaning, and development). The EFE necessitates research built on ecologically valid study designs that incorporate innovative measurement approaches. Scholars using such approaches can increase the …

Megaliths And Monumental Architecture At Coal Bed Village, An Ancestral Pueblo Site In Southeastern Utah, James R. Allison, Fumi Arakawa, Marion Forest, Katie K. Richards, David T. Yoder

Faculty Publications

Worldwide, megaliths are a common form of monumental architecture in Neolithic and later societies. Archaeologists in western Europe, and other parts of the world where megalithic monuments occur, have often discussed the meanings of megalithic features as well as their associations with ritual, territoriality, and social organization. In the Pueblo Southwest, most monumental architecture takes the form of large, unusually tall buildings (“great houses”), oversized ritual architecture (“great kivas”), or landscape features (roads and berms), all of which are most commonly associated with the Chaco system. Ancestral Pueblo people also occasionally built with ostentatiously large rocks, but megalithic features and …

Rural Estrangement And The Regulatory State, Ann M. Eisenberg

Faculty Publications

In today’s polarized social and political climate, rural alienation from government is often dismissed as “just more politics” or a symptom of problematic cultural norms. This Article takes rural disaffection from government seriously, with a focus on rural relationships with the federal regulatory state. The Article argues that rural disaffection from the regulatory state is not solely a cultural or political phenomenon among white conservatives. Rural disaffection is also a broader structural issue that stems in part from the regulatory state’s crisis of legitimacy.

Two factors show that rural disaffection from the regulatory state is more diffuse and profound than …

How To Map Soil Sealing, Land Take And Impervious Surfaces? A Systematic Review, Francesca Peroni, Salvatore Eugenio Pappalardo, Francesco Facchinelli, Edoardo Crescini, Michele Munafò, Michael E. Hodgson, Massimo De Marchi

Faculty Publications

Soil degradation is one of the main environmental issues within the international agendas on sustainability and climate adaptation. Among degradation processes, soil sealing represents the major threat, as ecosystem services dramatically decrease or are even nullified. The increasing use of big open data from satellites combined with AI algorithms are making geodata mining and mapping techniques essential to quantify soil sealing. Different keywords are adopted to define the phenomenon. However, at present, review articles presenting the state-of-the-art on mapping soil sealing by including the most common definitions are currently not available. Hence, we analyzed: (a) impervious surface, (b) soil sealing, …

Young Firms, Old Capital, Song Ma, Justin Murfin, Ryan Pratt

Faculty Publications

Across a broad range of equipment types and industries, we document a pattern of local capital reallocation from older firms to younger firms. Start-ups purchase a disproportion- ate share of old physical capital previously owned by more mature firms. The evidence is consistent with financial constraints driving differential demand for vintage capital. The local supply of used capital influences start-up entry, job creation, investment choices, and growth, particularly when capital is immobile. Meanwhile, as suppliers of used capital, in- cumbents accelerate capital replacement in the presence of younger firms. The evidence suggests previously undocumented benefits to co-location between old and …

Survey Of Recent Applications Of Artificial Intelligence For Detection And Analysis Of Covid-19 And Other Infectious Diseases, Richard S. Segall, Vidhya Sankarasubbu

Faculty Publications

The purpose is to illustrate how artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have been used for detection and analysis of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases such as breast, lung, and skin cancers; heart disease; and others. Specifically, the use of neural networks (NN) and machine learning (ML) are described along with which countries are creating these techniques and how these are being used for COVID-19 or other disease diagnosis and detection. Illustrations of multi-layer convolutional neural networks (CNN), recurrent neural networks (RNN), and deep neural networks (DNN) are provided to show how these are used for COVID-19 or other disease detection and …