Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The World Reborn: A Phenomenological Study Of 12th Unnamed Cave, Tennessee Through Photogrammetry, 3d Gis, And Archaeoacoustics, Jordan L. Schaefer

Doctoral Dissertations

Traditional methods for analyzing rock art locations within caves tend to rely on two-dimensional (2D) mapping methods. While useful, these techniques do not effectively capture the phenomenology, or experiential characteristics, of caves as physical spaces. This dissertation therefore adopts a three-dimensional perspective to study the distribution of rock art inside 12th Unnamed Cave, a dark-zone cave art site in Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau region, with the goal of identifying why certain types of images appear in their respective contexts. Photogrammetry is used to produce a three-dimensional (3D) model of the cave’s interior, on which surveyed rock art locations are georeferenced for …

Purpose In Place: Discerning And Forefronting Forgotten Landscapes Using The Methodological Lens Of Augmented Reality, Lindy Westenhoff

Doctoral Dissertations

Augmented reality (AR) is an under-studied tool that deserves more academic attention and gaze. By using the built landscape as its point of orientation, but providing a virtual interface with which to engage, the augmented landscape serves as a departure of the traditional digital-physical divide. This realm raises questions regarding purpose and intention, but also has its own limitations and issues with dynamic, complex spaces that change frequently. Each chapter of this dissertation stands alone as a “part” – they connect, however, through the use of this technology to answer questions unique to their spaces.

Part 1 explores the relationship …

Multidimensional Investigation Of Tennessee’S Urban Forest, Jillian L. Gorrell

Doctoral Dissertations

Preserving existing trees in urban areas and properly cultivating urban forest conservation and management opportunities is valuable to the ever-growing urban environment and necessary for creating optimal experiences and educational tools to meet the needs of increasing urban populations. This dissertation contains studies investigating several facets of the urban forest, including environmental effects of deforestation and urbanization, tree equity, and urban forest facility management and accessibility. Community education and outreach at arboreta about the importance of the tree canopy can help promote environmental stewardship. A digital questionnaire was electronically distributed to representatives of arboreta certified through the Tennessee Division of …

Access Beyond Geographic Accessibility: Understanding Opportunities To Human Needs In A Physical-Virtual World, Jimmy Feng

Doctoral Dissertations

Access to basic human needs, such as food and healthcare, is conceptually understood to be comprised of multiple spatial and aspatial dimensions. However, research in this area has traditionally been explored with spatial accessibility measures that almost exclusively focus on just two dimensions. Namely, the availability of resources, services, and facilities, and the accessibility or ease to which locations of these opportunities can be reached with existing land-use and transport systems under temporal constraints and considering individual characteristics of people. These calculated measures are insufficient in holistically capturing available opportunities as they ignore other components, such as the emergence of …

Covid-19 Renters And Housing Instability: Combatting The Eviction Epidemic During The Covid-19 Pandemic In Knox County, Tennessee, Samantha B. Myers-Miller

Masters Theses

COVID-19 has exacerbated preexisting inequities in Knox County, Tennessee. The disruption to employment caused by the pandemic has imposed a great financial burden for many individuals who rent housing. The primary relief that was afforded to renters during the pandemic was enabled by a federal eviction moratorium order, where covered renters could defer payments to avoid eviction while the moratorium was in effect. Some additional rental assistance was provided to local governments through the federal CARES Act pandemic relief package. Despite these provisions, many people experienced housing crises in Knox County, where over 3,000 renters have faced eviction filing from …

Exchange And Social Interaction In The Tennessee River Valley: A Geospatial Approach To The Analysis Of Late Archaic Archaeological Sites, Justin S. Bailey

Masters Theses

The cultural manifestation known as the Shell Mound Archaic persisted in the lower Midwest and Midsouth region of the Eastern United States for over four millennia beginning in the Middle Archaic ca. 8900 cal BP and terminating at the end of the Late Archaic ca 3200 cal BP. A geospatial approach is applied to the analysis of exotic material exchange of the Late Archaic (ca. 5800-3200 cal BP) to assess how foraging peoples in the Tennessee River Valley interacted and persisted during this time. Exotic material items manufactured from copper, marine shell, steatite, and other nonlocal materials demonstrate distinct spatial …

Statistical And Spatial Analysis Of Hurricane-Induced Power Outage And Restoration, Dakotah Daniel Maguire

Masters Theses

Tropical cyclones (TC) cause billions of dollars in damage to coastal areas in the United States annually. Global climate change is increasing favorable environmental conditions for TCs which produce heavy flooding and precipitation. It is important to understand the communities that will be most affected, and will likely suffer the longest power outages. County-level power outage data from the Department of Energy’s Environment for Analysis of Geo-Located Energy Information (EAGLE-I) were used to analyze the relationships of environmental and socioeconomic variables on power outage trends, response, and recovery for power outages caused by two North Atlantic Basin hurricanes: Hurricane Florence …

Landslide Mapping And Susceptibility Assessment Of Chittagong Hilly Areas, Bangladesh, Yasin Wahid Rabby

Doctoral Dissertations

Landslides are natural phenomena in mountainous areas that cause damage to properties and death to people around the world. In Bangladesh, landslides have caused enormous economic loss and casualty in Chittagong Hilly Areas (CHA). In this dissertation, a landslide inventory of CHA was prepared using Google Earth and field mapping. Google Earth-based mapping helped in recording landslides in inaccessible areas like forests. In contrast, field mapping helped in mapping landslides in accessible areas like areas near road networks. For absence data sampling of landslide susceptibility mapping, this research proposed the Mahalanobis distance (MD) based absence data sampling and compared it …

Terra Incognita: Post-Traumatic Infrastructural Opportunism, Zachary Corre Orig

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

In anticipation of the impending results of a world affected by climate change, architecture is now more than ever positioned to leverage its unique influence, communication, and power to fight problems that the world cannot see. Every day we turn a lamp on, start a car, or make a pot of coffee, we are engaging into a complex system of interacting with the world’s natural resources: fossil fuels. The United Nations, as of 2019, predicts we have but twelve years at most until climate change is irreversible. As the world runs out of time to cool down, global traumatic …

Association Between Stream Impairment By Mercury And Superfund Sites In The Conterminous Usa, Karessa L. Manning

Masters Theses

Mercury is a natural element that can cause harm to the brain, heart, kidneys, lungs, and immune system, especially to fetuses developing in the womb. Many natural and anthropogenic factors contribute to mercury in the environment, such as geologic deposits, landfills, gold and silver mining operations, cement production, and atmospheric deposition. Mercury has been identified as a contaminant of concern at many National Priority List (NPL) sites, however, studies on contamination at NPL sites are often only conducted on a local level. This study was to analyze the potential connection between mercury-contaminated NPL sites and the presence of mercury impaired …

Ecosystem Services Of Urban Tree Canopy For The Mitigation Of Climate Change: Measuring Carbon Sequestration And Understory Temperature Reduction Of Knoxville’S Urban Forest, Tyler Hounshell

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

In the future, the city of Knoxville, Tennessee will be impacted by climate warming due to anthropogenic climate change. Yet, the ecosystem services provided by urban tree canopy in Knoxville’s urban forest can help mitigate the effects of climate warming. In addition to improving air quality, regulating water flow, and reducing noise pollution, Knoxville’s urban forest serves as a carbon sink and sequesters carbon dioxide on an annual basis. Utilizing methods for calculating carbon sequestration by trees in urban and suburban settings developed by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the sequestration potential and its uncertainty is calculated until the year …

Lidar-Based Sinkhole Detection And Mapping In Knox County, Tennessee, J Clint Shannon, David Moore, Yingkui Li, Cathy Olsen

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

Sinkholes are one of the major causes of damage to roads, buildings, and other infrastructure throughout the US. Sinkholes near or on roads are especially costly and occasionally deadly. Knox County and much of East Tennessee are located within karst areas (comprised of porous and soluble limestone and dolomite), deeming it at risk for sinkholes. Currently, Knox County uses contour maps to manually identify sinkholes. Supported by a geographic information system (GIS), we developed a streamlined model to identify the locations and extents of potential sinkholes using 1.3-ft resolution LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data and applied it to the …

Fandom On The Air: Assessing Regional Identity Through College Football Radio Networks, J. A. Cooper, Edward H. Davis

Geography Publications and Other Works

Sports fandom represents a significant aspect of place identity, as demonstrated by the colorful landscapes associated with team loyalty. However, there has been little research on the geography of sports fandom. While several geographers have studied the link between Southern regional identity and the sport of stock car racing, American football is the most popular spectator sport in the United States, and it seems to have a particular strength in the United States South. Therefore, examining the geography of football fandom can add depth to the study of place identity. A 1988 article by Roseman and Shelley on the geography …

The Geography Of Opiate Addiction, Overdose, And Treatment In Tennessee, David Stanley Leventhal, Meghan Russell, Kali Williams

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

Opioid addiction and overdose has become a national epidemic in the United States over the past 30 years. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 20,000 Americans died from prescription drugs alone in 2014. Tennessee ranks especially high in the number of opioid prescriptions and overdoses when compared to the rest of the US. The Volunteer State is one of only 13 where doctors issued between 96-143 opioid prescriptions per 100 people. This project maps opiate prescription rates and overdose death rates in Tennessee to identify trends in the geospatial, socioeconomic, and demographic makeup of victims, …

Validating Geospatial Analysis With Community Risk Perception Survey In Big Island, Hawaii, Darcy Ann Ayers

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

Military vehicle-generated particulate matter released into the atmosphere are possible concerns for human health. The author’s prior geospatial research has been to identify, using GIS analysis, the local populations surrounding a military installation in Hawaii that are most at-risk from the vehicle-generated particulate matter. A continuation of the past research, this project aims to assess the perceived impact of the identified dust pollution among local residents by conducting a survey through both qualitative and quantitative methods. The survey of health and public perception is then used to validate the model developed in the previous GIS analysis. This research is a …

Spatial Analysis Of Tornado Warning System Understanding And Relationship With Tornado Occurrence, Chesnea A. Skeen

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

Tornadoes present a significant threat to life and property. The National Weather Service watch and warning system warns the public of tornadoes. If these warnings are not heeded by the public, the potential fatalities and destruction of property cannot be minimized. Thus, to prevent further loss of life and property, it is necessary to understand how the public understands the watch and warning system, as well as how they react. This paper aims to understand the correlation between understanding of watches and warnings and the occurrence of tornadoes, as well as how understanding varies spatially. Survey data were collected from …

Reflecting Human Knowledge Of Place And Route-Choice Behavior Using Big Data, Jiaoli Chen

Doctoral Dissertations

Exploring human knowledge of geographical space and related behavior not only helps in understanding human-environment interactions and dynamic geographic processes, but also advances Geographic Information Systems (GIS) toward a human-centric paradigm to make daily life more efficient. Today’s relatively easy acquisition of various big data provides an unprecedented opportunity for geographers to answer research questions that previously could not be adequately addressed. However, new challenges also arise regarding data quality and bias as well as change in methodology for dealing with big data that are different from traditional data types.

Representing people’s perception of place and studying driver’s route-choice behavior …

Dynamics Of Collaborative Navigation And Applying Data Driven Methods To Improve Pedestrian Navigation Instructions At Decision Points For People Of Varying Spatial Aptitudes, Gengen He

Doctoral Dissertations

Cognitive Geography seeks to understand individual decision-making variations based on fundamental cognitive differences between people of varying spatial aptitudes. Understanding fundamental behavioral discrepancies among individuals is an important step to improve navigation algorithms and the overall travel experience. Contemporary navigation aids, although helpful in providing turn-by-turn directions, lack important capabilities to distinguish decision points for their features and importance. Existing systems lack the ability to generate landmark or decision point based instructions using real-time or crowd sourced data. Systems cannot customize personalized instructions for individuals based on inherent spatial ability, travel history, or situations.

This dissertation presents a novel experimental …

Modelling Cash Crop Growth In Tn, Spencer Weston

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Effects Of Switchgrass Related Land-Use Changes On Aquatic Macroinvertebrates, Latha Malar Baskaran

Doctoral Dissertations

This research examines if switchgrass-based land-management practices have the potential to influence aquatic macroinvertebrates through changes in stream flow and water quality. The number of taxa in Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, and Trichoptera orders (EPT taxa richness/EPT-TR) is analyzed as an aquatic macroinvertebrate bioindicator in the context of regional environmental effects, and changes in stream flow and water quality. This dissertation is structured as three manuscripts that link together to address the overall research question.

The first manuscript focuses on identifying regional environmental variables that influence EPT-TR across ecoregions in Tennessee. The influences of temperature, precipitation, geology, soil, stream flow and velocity …

Regional Dynamic Price Relationships Of Distillers Dried Grains In U.S. Feed Markets, Matthew Fulton Johnson

Masters Theses

Distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS) is now a mainstream substitute in U.S. animal feed rations. DDGS is rich in fat and protein content and serves as a competitive feed source in livestock markets. The objective of this study is to identify dynamic price relationships among DDGS, corn, soybean meal, and livestock outputs in context of specific livestock sectors and their geographic location. Four locations associated with a predominant livestock sector are selected for analysis by measuring density and relative proportion of a livestock sector’s grain consumption at the county level. A vector error correction model is applied to post-mandate …

Geography Of Health Care Access: Measurement, Analyses And Integration, Huairen Ye

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the geography of healthcare access and disparity issues in the United States using geospatial methods. Disparities in access to quality healthcare services are of great concern in the field of both public health and geography. Access is a key element within the healthcare delivery system, influenced by both spatial factors and non-spatial factors. Focusing on the spatial dimensions of access, an innovative contribution of this dissertation is the integration of spatial modeling, geo-statistics and location problems in a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment to investigate healthcare access.

Improving health access begins with developing reliable methods to measure …

Portrait Of Hiv For The East Region Of Tennessee, Emmitt Lee Turner

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Classifying Nominal Voltage Of Electric Power Transmission Lines Using Remotely-Sensed Data, Erik Herman Schmidt

Masters Theses

Geospatial data of national infrastructure are a valuable resource for visualization, analysis, and modeling. Building these geospatial foundation-level infrastructure datasets presents numerous challenges. Among those challenges is that of acquiring non-visible attribution of particular infrastructure entities for which there is no viable tabular source. In the case of electric power transmission lines, these data are difficult to acquire, particularly nation-wide. The route, or geometry of transmission lines can be determined from aerial imagery, but nominal voltage, a fundamental requirement for analysis and modeling, is not readily apparent. However, inferences can be made about the nominal voltage based on visual characteristics, …

Cell Towers As Urban Sensors: Understanding The Strengths And Limitations Of Mobile Phone Location Data, Ziliang Zhao

Doctoral Dissertations

Understanding urban dynamics and human mobility patterns not only benefits a wide range of real-world applications (e.g., business site selection, public transit planning), but also helps address many urgent issues caused by the rapid urbanization processes (e.g., population explosion, congestion, pollution). In the past few years, given the pervasive usage of mobile devices, call detail records collected by mobile network operators has been widely used in urban dynamics and human mobility studies. However, the derived knowledge might be strongly biased due to the uneven distribution of people’s phone communication activities in space and time.

This dissertation research applies different analytical …

Mobility And Activity Space: Understanding Human Dynamics From Mobile Phone Location Data, Yang Xu

Doctoral Dissertations

Studying human mobility patterns and people’s use of space has been a major focus in geographic research for ages. Recent advancements of location-aware technologies have produced large collections of individual tracking datasets. Mobile phone location data, as one of the many emerging data sources, provide new opportunities to understand how people move around at a relatively low cost and unprecedented scale. However, the increasing data volume, issue of data sparsity, and lack of supplementary information introduce additional challenges when such data are used for human behavioral research. Effective analytical methods are needed to meet the challenges to gain an improved …

Non-Residential Pedestrian Access To Transit Systems: A Gis Modeling Application, Luis Miguel Taboada

Masters Theses

The success of a city’s urban transit system relies on the efficacy of its pedestrian infrastructure. A functional and access-oriented pedestrian network translates into safer pedestrian travel, increased demand in transit ridership, increases in commerce patronage, and reduced motorized travel (i.e., less congestion, and less vehicle emissions). Prioritization and allocation of sidewalk construction improvements are not always done in conjunction with transit service provisions. As a result, potential destinations are left inaccessible to pedestrians using the transit system. This study is motivated by concurrent research involving sidewalk improvement prioritization methods, within the scope of home-based work pedestrian transit trips. This …

Human And Black Bear Interactions In Buncombe County, North Carolina, From 1993–2013, Adam Guy Alsamadisi

Masters Theses

Over the past 20 years the frequency of interactions between humans and black bears in Buncombe County, North Carolina has been increasing, posing threats to human safety, black bear populations, ecological stability, and conservation support. During this time, both the human population and the American black bear population increased in southern Appalachia, which, combined with both urban expansion and landscape fragmentation, led to an increase in human and black bear interactions. Reducing future interactions with black bears is important as these interactions put support for conservation at risk. I performed a landscape analysis to better understand where human and black …

Four Dimensional Approach To Center City Transformation: A Case Study Of Knoxville, Tn: 1884—1950, Joseph Ryan Roberts

Masters Theses

Urban morphological models were created to enhance our understanding of urban growth and form. Prior to Geographical Information Systems (GIS), these models were supplementary products of ideas and concepts that set out to explain the spatial configuration of the urban landscape. While these models are of great importance to the field, they are mostly two-dimensional (2D) and static. Three-dimensional (3D) modeling has strengths in landscape visualization, manipulation, and planning, where analyses of historical urban landscapes may be carried out efficiently and thoroughly. A method that utilizes 3D modeling through time or four-dimensional (4D) modeling will enhance our understanding of transformation …

A Study Of Colloquial Place Names Through Geotagged Social Media Data, Yuan Liu

Masters Theses

Place is a rich but vague geographic concept. Much work has been done to explore the collective understanding and perceived location of place. The last few decades have seen rapid expansion in the use of online social media and data sharing services, which provide a large amount of valuable data for research of colloquial place names. This study explored how geotagged social media data can be used to understand geographic place names, and delimit the perceived geographic extent of a place. The author proposes a probabilistic method to map the perceived geographic extent of a place using Kernel Density Estimation …