Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Sentiment Analysis Of Swedish And Finnish Twitter Users’ Views Toward Nato Pre- And Post- 2022 2nd Russian Invasion Of Ukraine, Alexander Scott Fulham

Theses and Dissertations

This study seeks to analyze the changes in Swedes’ and Finns’ opinions toward the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in light of the 2022 2nd Russian Invasion of Ukraine. To do so, a large dataset of geotagged tweets containing keywords related to NATO is analyzed using lexicon-based sentiment analysis to study spatiotemporal trends. The study shows that overall discussion remains very neutral, with less than a quarter of all tweets having a non-zero sentiment score, and differs markedly from public opinion polling in both countries while spatiotemporally, the discussions is concentrated in the major population centers and exhibits little month …

The Role Of Geographic Context In Tornado Risk, Risk Perception, And Protective Action Behavior, Sarah L. Jackson

Theses and Dissertations

Our current understanding of tornado risk, risk perception, and protective action behavior lacks proper spatial consideration of local physical and social geographic contexts. This investigation asks how the conceptual drivers of tornado risk (geographic context, risk perception, and response) interact to create the spatiality of tornado risk. The study proposes that the inclusion of geographic context and its influence on perception and behavior produces differential tornado risk and seeks to determine which factors contribute to such variability. A novel, researcher-designed Tornado Risk of Place (TROP) conceptual model guides the methodological framework, incorporating statistical and geospatial analytics in an Illinois State …

Projecting The Effects Of Climate Change And Urbanization On Longleaf Pine Stands In The Florida Flatwoods, Lilian Grace Hutchens

Theses and Dissertations

The southeastern United States once held millions of hectares of highly connected longleaf pine ecosystem. In a dramatic range reduction, longleaf pine now occupies less than 5% of its original extent, its remnant patches existing within a matrix of human-dominated land uses. Conservation planning for longleaf pine ecosystems is complicated given the ecosystem’s reliance on fire and the broad spatial and temporal scales at which longleaf pine management must operate. Planning timelines for longleaf pine management extend into the end of the 21st century, a period during which climate, fire regimes, and land cover are all expected to change, influencing …

A Flood Of Information: Assessing The Effectiveness Of An Enhanced Flash Flood Warning Social Media Graphic, Christopher John Long

Theses and Dissertations

Flash flooding is the most frequent and damaging type of severe weather globally. In the United States, heat is the only weather-related cause of death more frequent than flooding. However, while the number of deaths associated with other types of severe weather has decreased since the 1950s, the number of flash flood-related deaths has remained steady. Therefore, there exists a need to improve flash flood warning communication.

In this project, it is hypothesized that improving the National Weather Service’s flash flood warning social media graphic by including areas that commonly flood may increase individuals’ perceived storm risk, their intended compliance …

Spatial And Age Disparities In Covid-19 Outcomes, Qian Huang

Theses and Dissertations

COVID-19 has caused significant social, economic, environmental, and political impacts globally and affected communities unequally in the U.S. The pandemic has also sparked interest in age-specific manifestations of infection, for example, studies confirmed the risk of increasing age with COVID-19 severity. However, the nonstationarity effects of health determinants among age groups have not been well examined. This study aims to explore the nonstationarity effects of social, behavioral, environmental, health care access, and political contexts on COVID-19 outcomes. This study poses three broad questions: 1) how did COVID-19 vaccinations align with COVID-19 daily cases and deaths in the United States; 2) …

Gis Analysis Of Housing Delinquency After Repeated Flooding In Horry County, South Carolina, Andrew White

Theses and Dissertations

How communities react and change after disaster has been well-studied in recent decades. Knowledge around time scales, spatial scales, and specific facets of the built environment, such as housing recovery, have all developed largely around the opportunities that disasters have provided in understanding societal functions. This research has given policy makers and institutions insights into shortcomings of disaster specific recoveries, but these shortcomings are generalized beyond the scope of the originally studied areas. This thesis adapts this body of knowledge to a GIS methodology to help localize understanding to the coastal South Carolina context of Horry County. This low-lying area …

Neighborhood Change On The Mississippi Coast After Hurricane Katrina (2006 – 2019), Margot Habets

Theses and Dissertations

Hurricane Katrina was a historic event, forever changing many lives as well as altering impacted communities in the short and long term. In the fifteen years since the storm, patterns of damage, recovery programs and dollars, and existing neighborhood change have altered demographics in coastal Mississippi. This thesis investigates how population, median age, race, and education demographics have changed at the census tract level in the fourteen years since Hurricane Katrina (2006-2019) compared to pre-Katrina trends (1990-2000). A moving average using American Community Survey data as well as interval changes measure how different neighborhoods have been altered since the storm. …

Quantifying Human Mobility Patterns During Disruptive Events With Geospatial Big Data, Yuqin Jiang

Theses and Dissertations

Understanding human mobility patterns is an essence for geography and geographical information science. Although existing studies have found that human mobility patterns are highly predictable, such patterns can be disrupted by events, ranging from sports games to natural hazard caused evacuations. However, traditional data collection methods that heavily rely on self-reported travel behaviors are often delayed and at a small scale, and thus are often not sufficient to reveal the disrupted human mobility patterns. Fortunately, with the development of geolocating-related technologies, multiple platforms are able to capture human mobility data in unprecedented spatiotemporal scales and granularities. These data, such as …

Urban Forest Dynamics: Untangling Ecosystem Patterns At Harbison State Forest, Derek Matchette

Theses and Dissertations

As expansion continues to push the wildland-urban interface farther into the suburbs and the landscape which surrounds cities, it will become more important to understand the factors that influence species composition in remaining green spaces. Harbison State Forest, an ~890-hectare urban forest provides a convenient setting to analyze species composition patterns within a multipurpose urban green space.

The factors that can create these patterns include environmental (topography, soil nutrient content, light, temperature, and precipitation), naturally occurring disturbances that alter these factors (e.g., fire, windthrow), and anthropogenic disturbances such as logging and prescribed burning.

I measured basal area by species on …

Suas And Deep Learning For High-Resolution Monitoring Of Tidal Marshes In Coastal South Carolina, Grayson R. Morgan

Theses and Dissertations

Tidal marshes are dynamic environments, now more than ever threatened by both natural and anthropogenic forces. Best practices for monitoring tidal marshes, as well as the environmental factors that affect them, have been studied for more than 40 years. With recent technological advances in remote sensing, new capabilities for monitoring tidal marshes have emerged. One of these new opportunities and challenges is hyper-spatial resolution imagery (<10 >cm) that can be captured by small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS). Aside from enhanced visualization, structure-from-motion (SfM) technology can derive dense point clouds from overlapped sUAS images for high resolution digital elevation models (DEMs). …

Slow Violence And Racial Capitalism: Understanding Mass Incarceration Through A Case Study Of The California Prison System, Mason Joiner

Senior Theses

This thesis will analyze the growth of the California prison system, situating it in the national context of mass incarceration in the United States. In Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, Gilmore utilizes the theory of racial capitalism to explain the history and development of the California prison system. By analyzing Gilmore’s arguments about racial capitalism and integrating them with Rob Nixon’s theory of slow violence from his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, this thesis provides a new perspective in the current discourse around mass incarceration. …

An Analysis Of Wet Bulb Globe Temperature Estimation Methods And Microclimate Heat Variability In Columbia, South Carolina, Stafford Mullin

Theses and Dissertations

Extreme heat is the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States and poses major health risks in the wake of rising global average temperatures. Wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT) is a holistic measure of human heat stress, but is not feasible to implement in most settings because the equipment is expensive and troublesome to operate. This research evaluates the performance of WBGT estimation methods using more standard meteorological variables, measured in-situ and a local National Weather Service Automated Surface Observing Station, and examines how WBGT and its components vary across two distinct microclimates in Columbia, SC. Results indicate …

Life In The Time Of Covid-19: The Everyday Impacts Of The Pandemic In Amman, Jordan, Patrick Mckenzie

Theses and Dissertations

The COVID-19 pandemic and the responses taken to combat it caused enormous changes to the everyday lives of people around the world. Jordan, in its early success against the virus and with its large refugee population, represents a unique country in which to study these everyday impacts. From May to August of 2021, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Jordanian capital city of Amman while working with the refugee nongovernmental organization the Collateral Repair Project. In this thesis, I explore the COVID-19 Spectacle, examining the ways in which policies and discourses at the national and international scales bled into the …

Capital City Ventures Towards An Equitable Clean Energy Transition: A Case Study Comparison Between Columbia, South Carolina And Richmond, Virginia, Claire Windsor

Senior Theses

Combatting climate change requires a rapid transition to renewable sources for energy generation. In the United States, the electricity sector alone accounts for 28% of greenhouse gas emissions (28%), with about 63% of electricity generation derived from burning of fossil fuels (EPA, 2020). In order to lower greenhouse emissions from the energy sector, federal, state, and local policies must pave the way for renewable energy and energy efficiency innovations and policies. However, political action to address the effects and combat the causes of climate change have been limited due to political gridlock at the federal level. In addition, under neoliberalism, …

Satellite Observations And Spatiotemporal Assessment Of Salt Marsh /Dieback Along Coastal South Carolina (1990-2019), Huixuan Li

Theses and Dissertations

Coastal wetland mapping is often difficult because of the heterogeneous vegetation compositions and associated tidal effects. Past studies in the Gulf/Atlantic coast states have reported acute marsh dieback events in which marsh rapidly browned and thinned, leaving stubble of dead stems or mudflad with damaged ecosystem services. Reported marsh dieback in South Carolina (SC), USA, however, have been limited. Previous studies have suggested a suite of possibly abiotic and biotic attributes responsible for salt marsh dieback. However, there are no consensus answers in current literature explaining what led to marsh dieback in past decades, especially from the spatiotemporal perspective. In …

Taking The Pulse Of Undergraduate Introductory Geographic Information Systems Courses, Christopher Krause

Theses and Dissertations

As colleges and universities expand their geographic information systems (GIS) course offerings, the pedagogies involved in teaching such courses ought to be critically evaluated. Existing research concerning the teaching of geospatial technologies has been characterized as “sparse, inconsistent, and overly anecdotal” (Baker et al., 2015, p. 118). Answering the call for “more systematic and replicable” (p. 118) GIS education research, this study adopted a suite of mixed methods used within other discipline-based education research (DBER) and deployed them in introductory GIS courses. These methods included classroom observation protocols, interview protocols, focus group protocols, and student questionnaires.

This research had three …

Military Communities And Natural Hazards In The United States, Logan Lee

Theses and Dissertations

The vulnerability and resilience of communities to hazards is a concept that has gained traction in the research community in recent decades. Climate change, combined with increasing damages from natural hazards, has energized researchers and practitioners alike to identify the risks to people and places from future losses. Military communities support large military bases and are composed of service members, their families, and civilian populations alike. Due to the presence of military installations and military populations, the characteristics of the population and influences in military communities are unique. However, there is a gap in current research to assess whether the …

Politics Of Belonging: Identity, Integration, And Spatial Practices Of Algerian Immigrants And Their Descendants In Paris, France, Elizabeth Nelson

Theses and Dissertations

Using a geographic framework, this dissertation explores how Algerian immigrants and their descendants perform identity and negotiate belonging in French society. Bringing together critical theorizations of race, identity, space, and place, this work investigates what it means to be a racialized minority in a postcolonial context and to learn and experience the boundaries of ‘Frenchness.’ It is based on the narratives of Algerian immigrants who have migrated to Paris, France, and their French-born children. The empirical evidence of the case studies highlights the myriad ways in which Algerian immigrants and their descendants encounter and structure their interactions with French society, …

The Eviction Landscape In South Carolina, Ethan Magnuson

Senior Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to describe and analyze the South Carolinian eviction crisis from the perspective of radical geography. South Carolina was chosen for the severity of its crisis and the lack of research at a sub-state level. Court records of eviction filings from 2019 were geocoded and tested for spatial clustering, which was clearly visible. Plaintiff names were used to identify the most frequent filers and distinguish landlords by type. At the census tract level, eviction filing counts were compared with neighborhood characteristics using negative binomial regression, and most were found to be significant in South Carolina. …

Using Aeolian Depositional Lag Times To Relate Dune Vegetation And Topographic Change, Jacquelyn Brianna Ferguson

Theses and Dissertations

Sediment deposition impacts dune morphology and is a product of many environmental factors. Dune vegetation is related to post-storm dune recovery and morphology. Though it is widely agreed that vegetation impacts sediment deposition, this relationship has not yet been quantified in the field. This research was conducted at Isle of Palms, a meso-tidal barrier island in South Carolina, where we collected topographic and vegetation data over an incipient foredune. Vegetation data were classified by functional type (dune-builder or dune-stabilizer) or land cover (sand, wrack). We identified land cover changes resulting in greater surface roughness. To relate land cover change to …

Spatio-Temporal Modeling Of Earthquake Recovery, Sahar Derakhshan

Theses and Dissertations

The recovery process after a major disaster or disruption, is impacted by the inequality of risk prior to and post event. In the past decades there has been few efforts to model the recovery process and the focus is mainly on staged models (i.e. emergency, restoration, and reconstruction). The overarching research question asks how a non-stage-like model could apply to the recovery process. This study poses three broad questions: 1) what are the indicators suitable for monitoring the recovery process; 2) what are the driving factors of differential recovery trends; and 3) what are the predicted development trajectories for communities …

Immigrant Belonging In Belgium: Laws, Localities, And Living Together, Samuel P. Nielson

Theses and Dissertations

Nationalism is rising in Europe and the world. Much of it responds to massive migration, with nationalistic Europeans vocalizing their belief that immigrants do not “belong” in their countries. Many states respond to this influx of people and rising antiimmigrant sentiment by creating laws demanding immigrant “integration.” Yet a clear understanding of what defines “integration” remains elusive. So too does an understanding of how laws aimed at immigrant integration influence relationships between immigrants and local citizens, institutions, and spaces. This research addresses both of these points in Belgium, a politically and culturally fractured country that serves as a microcosm of …

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 …

Race And Urban Development Of Arsenal Hill, Sc, Samira Nematollahi

Senior Theses

This thesis is a study on the Columbia neighborhood Arsenal Hill. It is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Columbia, but most of the neighborhood’s history is largely erased. In this paper, I studied the progression of change in Arsenal Hill with the goal of assessing who wielded power and to what extent race played a role in the neighborhood’s development. I find that race was the fundamental mover of change and that all other decisions and factors revolved around it. The initial decline of the neighborhood stemmed from its racial heterogeneity which then progressed into developers seeing Arsenal Hill …

A Gis-Based Risk Assessment For Fire Departments: Case Study Of Richland County, Sc, Tracy Whelen

Theses and Dissertations

Risk assessments enable fire departments to be better prepared for future incidents and to engage in more effective prevention activities. A combination of physical, demographic, and behavioral risk factors combined form a community’s level of risk. This research shows how spatial and nonspatial statistical methods can be used within a GIS framework to create such a risk assessment, with the Columbia-Richland Fire Department in Richland County, SC being used as a case study. Hot spot analysis and thematic mapping of incident rates were used to assess the first research question – what is the spatial variability of structure fires, carbon …

Flooding And Industrial Swine Farming In North Carolina: Implications Of Natech Hazards On The Assessment Of Environmental Justice, Jacob Ramthun

Theses and Dissertations

“Natech” events, in which natural hazards trigger anthropogenic hazards, are becoming increasingly common. Methodologies for measuring the impact of natech events on environmental justice assessments are lacking, particularly in rural scenarios. This study used additive, multiplicative, and z-score threshold methods of combining the density of industrial swine farms in eastern North Carolina and the presence of flood risk to determine whether or not natech risk exhibits emergent socioeconomic indicators and whether areas of high natech constitute environmental injustice. The multiplicative and z-score threshold methods generated variables representing natech risk to compare to socioeconomic indicators, as well as statistically significant hotspots. …

Innovative Approaches Using Multispectral Imagery To Detect Nearshore Bars And Elucidate Beach-Dune System Dynamics, Mayra A. Román-Rivera

Theses and Dissertations

Nearshore bars naturally protect the coast against erosion by dissipating wave energy. They are significant reservoirs of sand, and thus, they may impact the response of beaches to different wave conditions. Nearshore bar position and morphologic variability also influences long- and short-term beach and dune stability. This study reveals how nearshore bars influence beach-dune dynamics using very high-resolution (VHR) imagery. A new low- cost identification approach for bar identification was applied by integrating VHR imagery. Future nearshore bar research will benefit from integrating the larger spatial scale provided by satellite sensors. A rule-based OBIA approach was successful in identifying and …

Chronic Kidney Disease From Non-Traditional Causes Throughout Central America, Abigail K. Watson

Senior Theses

Throughout many Central American countries, incidence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) has been on the rise. The disease mainly affects agricultural workers and differs from typical CKD. Patients in these countries often do not have preexisting conditions such as diabetes or hypertension known to be traditional causes of CKD. They also experience increased damage to the kidney tubules, rather than the glomeruli generally more heavily impacted. There has been speculation regarding the causes of CKDnT (chronic kidney disease of nontraditional causes), but no consensus has been reached. Two major hypotheses to explain the high prevalence among Central American sugarcane workers …

Urban Greenway Vegetative Communities And Environmental Drivers In The Southeastern United States, Erika Y. Chin

Theses and Dissertations

Greenways serve as parks or non-motorized transportation routes for urban residents, but as greenspaces they also have the potential to enhance habitat quality and availability. This dissertation examined two aspects of urban greenways: the motivations for establishing greenways and the structure of vegetative communities found within them. Analysis of greenways plans revealed that the provision of natural resources and societal benefits are not promoted equally. In general, social and recreational functions are prioritized in greenway designs, while environmental benefits and services are expected to be inherently and equally possessed by all greenspaces and greenways. Consequently, specific conservation actions (e.g. habitat …

Don't Rock The Boat: An Analysis Of Boat Mitigation Prior To Hurricane Landfall, Jessica M. Brugh

Theses and Dissertations

Tropical cyclones are one of the most destructive and costly natural hazards in the United States. Boat owners and marinas are uniquely impacted by these devastating events. Boats pose a substantial monetary loss to owners unable to evacuate or mitigate damage prior to hurricane landfall, and the time it takes to secure them may impact a household’s ability to evacuate in a timely manner. The purpose of this study is to examine the physical and social variables that influence an owner’s decision, as well as how this decision affects the household’s ability to evacuate and the timing of that evacuation. …