Geography Commons^™

Urban Crime Mapping And Analysis Using Gis, Alina Ristea, Michael Leitner

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Antarctica And The Southern Ocean, Jessica Blunden, Derek S. Arndt, E. Povl Abrahamsen, Sandra Barreira, Cecilia M. Bitz, Amy Butler, Kyle R. Clem, Steve Colwell, Lawrence Coy, Jos De Laat, Marcel D. Du Plessis, Ryan L. Fogt, Helen Amanda Fricker, John Fyfe, Alex S. Gardner, Sarah T. Gille, Tessa Gorte, L. Gregor, Will Hobbs, Bryan Johnson, Eric Keenan, Linda M. Keller, Natalya A. Kramarova, Matthew A. Lazzara, Jan T.M. Lenaerts, Jan L. Lieser, Hongxing Liu, Craig S. Long, Michelle Maclennan, Robert A. Massom, François Massonnet, Matthew R. Mazloff

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Southwest Pacific Tropical Cyclone Frequency And Intensity Related To Observed And Modeled Geophysical And Aerosol Variables, Rupsa Bhowmick

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The dissertation focuses on western region of Southwest Pacific Ocean (SWPO)

basin (135E - 180, and 5S - 35S) tropical cyclone (TC) climatology using observed

and modeled data. The classification-based machine learning approach

identifies the synoptic geophysical and aerosol environment favorable or unfavorable

for TC intensification and intensity change prior to landfall incorporating

observational and satellite data. A multiple poisson regression model with varying

temporal monthly lags was used to build a relationship between the number of

monthly TC days with basin wide average dust aerosol optical depth (AOD), sea

surface temperature (SST), and upper ocean temperature (UOT). This idea …

Evaluating Temporal Approximation Methods Using Burglary Data, Lukas Oswald, Michael Leitner

Faculty Publications

Law enforcement is very interested in knowing when a crime has happened. Unfortunately, the occurrence time of a crime is often not exactly known. In such circumstances, estimating the most likely time that a crime has happened is crucial for spatio-temporal analysis. The main purpose of this research is to introduce two novel temporal approximation methods, termed retrospective temporal analysis (RTA) and extended retrospective temporal analysis (RTAext). Both methods are compared to six existing temporal approximation methods and subsequently evaluated in order to identify the method that can most accurately estimate the occurrence time of crimes. This research is conducted …

Comparison Of Terrestrial Lidar, Sfm, And Mbes Resolution And Accuracy For Geomorphic Analyses In Physical Systems That Experience Subaerial And Subaqueous Conditions, Taylor Rowley, Mick Ursic, Kory Konsoer, Eddy Langendon, Mike Mutschler, Josh Sampey, Pawel Pocwiardowski

Faculty Publications

This study provides a systematic comparison of lidar, Multibeam Echo Sounders (MBES), and Structure-from-Motion (SfM) derived datasets collected over a fixed surface contained within a large outdoor flume converted to a 15 × 2.5 × 1.5 m tank. The surface incorporated various morphological features and structures for measurement technique comparison over varying surface type and geometries. Two lidar scans and two photograph sets (used in SfM) capture the subaerial surface within the experimental tank before and after the tank was filled for MBES measurements. MBES surveys at varied frequencies (200 and 400 kHz), swath widths (90° and 150°), and phase/amplitude …

Analyzing Climate Risk To Maritime Cypress Swamps And Pine Savannas Of The Gulf Of Mexico Coastal Plain, Clay Stephens Tucker

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

As sea levels rise, coastal trees are increasingly stressed by saltwater inundation, and stressed trees are ideal for studying changes in the environment through time. Dendrochronology has been used for more than a century to explain changes in past environments using tree rings. Using ring widths and stable isotopes from coastal trees, the effects of tropical cyclones and freshwater moisture availability are shown in regard to tree growth and ultimately are discussed in terms of change to the environment as a whole. Changes in tree growth as they relate to various climate parameters are measured using superposed epoch analysis, moving-window …

Automatic Features Extraction From Time Series Of Passive Microwave Images For Snowmelt Detection Using Deep-Learning – A Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory Autoencoder (Bi-Lstm-Ae) Approach., Bienvenu Sedin Massamba

LSU Master's Theses

The Antarctic surface snowmelt is prone to the polar climate and is common in its coastal regions. With about 90 percent of the planet's glaciers, if all of the Antarctica glaciers melted, sea levels will rise about 58 meters around the planet. The development of an effective automated ice-sheet snowmelt monitoring system is therefore crucial.

Microwave remote sensing instruments, on the one hand, are very sensitive to snowmelt and can see day and night through clouds, allowing us to distinguish melting from dry snow and to better understand when, where, and for how long melting has taken place. On the …

An Atmospheric And Spatiotemporal Examination Of Lightning-Initiated Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes Detected By The Fermi Satellite And Tetra Ii, Deirdre Colleen Smith

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGFs) are sub-millisecond bursts of the highest naturally occurring light-energy found within Earth’s atmosphere. TGFs are associated with the electric fields produced in thunderstorms and are geolocated by coincident sferics from lightning strokes. Though billions of lightning strokes occur globally each year, fewer than 1,000 TGFs are detected via satellite and ground-based sensors and only a small fraction are geolocated via sferics.

To date, few studies have focused on individual thunderstorms and climates that produce TGFs. This dissertation examines TGFs from two differing data samples: 1) NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Burst Monitor (2013-2018) and 2) The TGF and …

Accessibility Of Hiv Testing In Baton Rouge Metropolitan Statistical Area, Alina Prigozhina

LSU Master's Theses

This study examines HIV testing accessibility in the Baton Rouge Metropolitan Statistical Area (BR MSA) using the two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method to calculate accessibility scores for free, low-cost and all other HIV testing facilities. The two goals of this research are to apply accessibility estimation methods to HIV testing facilities, and to examine the accessibility of HIV testing facilities in the BR MSA. To achieve these goals, this study uses several research methods. The data about HIV testing providers and their locations were collected through Internet searches. By means of a fieldwork, the data were checked, revealing that …

How Rare Was The August 2016 South-Central Louisiana Heavy Rainfall Event?, Vincent M. Brown, Barry D. Keim, William D. Kappel, Douglas M. Hultstrand, Ashton G. Peyrefitte, Alan W. Black, Kristi M. Steinhilber, Geoffrey A. Muhlestein

Faculty Publications

This study examines the spatiotemporal characteristics of the historic 10-14 August 2016 south-central Louisiana precipitation event. The storm was the result of a moisture-rich, tropical low pressure system, also known as a tropical easterly wave, that slowly tracked westward along the Gulf Coast from Florida to Texas. Once over south-central Louisiana, the storm was able to take advantage of anomalously high precipitable water, broad low-level instability, and continuous moisture inflow from the Gulf of Mexico to produce historic rainfall. Totals exceeded 254mm (10 in.) for much of southern Louisiana, while locations adjacent to Baton Rouge and Lafayette received upward of …

Changing Geographies Of Flood Mitigation Policies: A Case Study Of Central, Louisiana, Ria Mukerji

LSU Master's Theses

In 2016, the Baton Rouge region experienced what would come to be record-setting precipitation levels. The 1,000 year rainfall event dumped almost triple the amount of water on Louisiana than was seen during Hurricane Katrina (some areas received over 10 inches of rain in a matter of hours), with rain persisting from August 12^th until the 17^th. Previously a part of Baton Rouge, Central is a relatively new development that expanded into the 100 year floodplain in 2005. This thesis will present the changing geographies of flood mitigation policies since a major flood in 1983 to the …

North Atlantic Hurricane Winds In Warmer Than Normal Seas, Jill C. Trepanier

Faculty Publications

Tropical cyclones devastate coastlines around the world. The United States and surrounding areas experienced catastrophic extreme events in recent hurricane seasons. Understanding extreme hurricanes and how they change in a warming ocean environment is of the utmost importance. This study makes use of the historical, positive relationship between average summer sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and maximum hurricane wind speeds across the North Atlantic Basin from 1854-2018. Geographically weighted regression shows how the relationship between hurricane winds and SSTs varies across space. Each localized slope is used to increase historical wind speeds to represent winds in a three-degree Celsius warmer-than-average sea …

Climatology And Spatiotemporal Analysis Of North Atlantic Rapidly Intensifying Hurricanes (1851-2017), Kathleen M. Benedetto, Jill C. Trepanier

Faculty Publications

In recent decades, the scientific ability to project tropical cyclone (TC) intensities and tracks has improved. Hurricanes undergoing the process of rapid intensification (RI) have created new barriers in formulating predictions of TC paths and peak velocities. Current research suggests the warming climate may produce more intense TCs with a higher probability of undergoing RI during their life cycle. The increased likelihood of rapidly intensifying TCs necessitates the development of an RI climatology spanning the current North Atlantic record. A time series count analysis suggests a significant increasing trend of RI events in the Atlantic basin by 29.1% (17%-45%) from …

Trend Analysis Of Multiple Extreme Hourly Precipitation Time Series In The Southeastern United States, Vincent M. Brown, Barry D. Keim, Alan W. Black

Faculty Publications

Annual trends in extreme hourly precipitation time series were examined at 50 first-order weather stations across the southeastern United States from 1960 to 2017. Results indicated that the magnitude of annual maximum 1-, 3-, 6-, 12-, and 18-h periods did not broadly change at the sites analyzed; however, the numerical value that defines a (station specific) 90th-percentile hourly accumulation significantly (p ≤ 0.05) increased at 36% (18/50) of the stations. No station had a significant decreasing trend in annual 90th-percentile hourly event magnitude. Stations in Texas observed the largest increase in annual 90th-percentile hourly event magnitude, where parameter estimates showed …

Spatial And Topological Analysis Of Urban Land Cover Structure In New Orleans Using Multispectral Aerial Image And Lidar Data, Shuxian Liu

LSU Master's Theses

Urban land use and land cover (LULC) mapping has been one of the major applications in remote sensing of the urban environment. Land cover refers to the biophysical materials at the surface of the earth (i.e. grass, trees, soils, concrete, water), while land use indicates the socio-economic function of the land (i.e., residential, industrial, commercial land uses). This study addresses the technical issue of how to computationally infer urban land use types based on the urban land cover structures from remote sensing data. In this research, a multispectral aerial image and high-resolution LiDAR topographic data have been integrated to investigate …

Charros: How Mexican Cowboys Are Remapping Race And American Identity, Andrew Sluyter

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Informe Tecnico De Los Trabajos De Campo Del Proyecto De Investigación Arqueológica Cerro San Isidro, Valle De Nepeña, Costa De Ancash -- Temporada 2019, David Chicoine, Jeisen Navarro

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Morphologic Adjustments Of Actively Evolving Highly Curved Neck Cutoffs, Derek Richards, Kory Konsoer

Faculty Publications

Neck cutoffs and their resultant oxbow lakes are important and prominent features of riverine landscapes. Detailed field-based research focusing on the morphologic evolution of neck cutoffs is currently insufficient to fully characterize cutoff evolution. High-resolution bathymetric data were collected over 3 years for the purpose of determining channel morphology and morphologic change on three actively evolving neck cutoffs. Results indicate the following general trends in morphologic adjustment: (1) a longitudinal bar in the upstream meander limb that develops near the entrance to the abandoned bend; (2) a deep scour hole in the downstream meander limb immediately downstream of the cutoff …

The Future Of Reef Ecosystems In The Gulf Of Mexico: Insights From Coupled Climate Model Simulations And Ancient Hot-House Reefs, Kristine L. Delong

Faculty Publications

emperatures (SST), salinity, carbonate chemistry, and acidity. Over the last half-century, some reef communities have been disappearing at an alarming pace. This study focuses on the Gulf of Mexico, where the majority of shallow coral reefs are reported to be in poor or fair condition. We analyze the RCP8.5 ensemble of the Community Earth System Model v1.2 to identify monthly-to-decadal trends in Gulf of Mexico SST. Secondly, we examine projected changes in ocean pH, carbonate saturation state, and salinity in the same coupled model simulations. We find that the joint impacts of predicted higher temperatures and changes in ocean acidification …

Pacts 1.0: A Crowdsourced Reporting Standard For Paleoclimate Data, Kristine Delong

Faculty Publications

The progress of science is tied to the standardization of measurements, instruments, and data. This is especially true in the Big Data age, where analyzing large data volumes critically hinges on the data being standardized. Accordingly, the lack of community-sanctioned data standards in paleoclimatology has largely precluded the benefits of Big Data advances in the field. Building upon recent efforts to standardize the format and terminology of paleoclimate data, this article describes the Paleoclimate Community reporTing Standard (PaCTS), a crowdsourced reporting standard for such data. PaCTS captures which information should be included when reporting paleoclimate data, with the goal of …

Crafting Identity: Language, Gender, And The Internet In The Arab World, Connor C. Rouillier

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Wetland Biomass And Productivity In Coastal Louisiana: Base Line Data (1976-2015) And Knowledge Gaps For The Development Of Spatially Explicit Models For Ecosystem Restoration And Rehabilitation Initiatives, Victor H. Rivera-Monroy, Courtney Elliton, Siddhartha Narra, Ehab Meselhe, Xiaochen Zhao, Eric White, Charles E. Sasser, Jenneke M. Visser, Xuelian Meng, Hongqing Wang, Zuo Xue, Fernando Jaramillo

Faculty Publications

Coastal Louisiana hosts 37% of the coastal wetland area in the conterminous US, including one of the deltaic coastal regions more susceptible to the synergy of human and natural impacts causing wetland loss. As a result of the construction of flood protection infrastructure, dredging of channels across wetlands for oil/gas exploration and maritime transport activities, coastal Louisiana has lost approximately 4900 km2 of wetland area since the early 1930s. Despite the economic relevance of both wetland biomass and net primary productivity (NPP) as ecosystem services, there is a lack of vegetation simulation models to forecast the trends of those functional …

Deciphering Public Transit Ridership In Baton Rouge: Spatial Disaggregation Approaches, Xuan Kuai

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Background: Surveys across the U.S. reveal that commuters driving personal vehicles spend a significant amount of time in traffic, while public transit, as an efficient commuting mode, has been largely underutilized.

Purpose: What causes a low public transit ridership? How could public transit ridership be explained by demographic, socio-economic and spatial characteristics of neighborhood? This study answers these questions by deciphering the relationships between public transit ridership and various factors in a medium-size city in southern U.S. – Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Methods: Non-spatial and spatial data in a larger areal unit (e.g., block group) are used to infer demographic, socio-economic …

The Importance Of Landscape Position Information And Elevation Uncertainty For Barrier Island Habitat Mapping And Modeling, Nicholas Matthew Enwright

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Barrier islands provide important ecosystem services, including storm protection and erosion control to the mainland, habitat for fish and wildlife, and tourism. As a result, natural resource managers are concerned with monitoring changes to these islands and modeling future states of these environments. Landscape position, such as elevation and distance from shore, influences habitat coverage on barrier islands by regulating exposure to abiotic factors, including waves, tides, and salt spray. Geographers commonly use aerial topographic lidar data for extracting landscape position information. However, researchers rarely consider lidar elevation uncertainty when using automated processes for extracting elevation-dependent habitats from lidar data. …

Climatology And Trends In Hourly Precipitation For The Southeast United States, Vincent M. Brown, Barry D. Keim, Alan W. Black

Faculty Publications

This research introduces a climatology of hourly precipitation characteristics, investigates trends in precipitation hours (PH) and hourly accumulation, and uses four different time series to determine if precipitation intensity is changing across the southeastern United States from 1960 to 2017. Results indicate hourly intensity significantly increased at 44% (22/50) of the stations, accompanied by an increase in average hourly accumulation at 40% of the sites analyzed (20/50). The average duration of precipitation events decreased at 82% (41/50) of the stations. However, the frequency of 90th percentile hourly events and events above station-specific average hourly totals did not show a broad …

Investigation Of Spectral Variation Of Pine Needles As An Indicator Of Arsenic Content In Soils, Ji Hye Shin, Jaehyung Yu, Lei Wang, Jieun Kim, Sang Mo Koh

Faculty Publications

The spectral response to arsenic (As) stress of pine needles (Pinus densiflora Siebold and Zucc.) from an abandoned lead (Pb)–zinc (Zn) mine was investigated based on chemical and spectroscopic analyses. The correlation analysis between the content of As in needle samples and that of soils and spectral parameters of the needle samples were conducted. The results showed very high correlation between As content in pine needles and soils. The major spectral response of pine needles to the As stress were characterized by the increase in the green and red color reflectance, the decrease in the first derivatives at 1648 nm, …

Mapping Soil Moisture From Remotely Sensed And In-Situ Data With Statistical Methods, Yaping Xu

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Soil moisture is an important factor for accurate prediction of agricultural productivity and rainfall runoff with hydrological models. Remote sensing satellites such as Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) offer synoptic views of soil moisture distribution at a regional-to-global scale. To use the soil moisture product from these satellites, however, requires a downscaling of the data from an usually large instantaneous field of view (i.e. 36 km) to the watershed analysis scales ranging from 30 m to 1 km. In addition, validation of the soil moisture products using the ground station observations without an upscaling treatment would lead to cross-level fallacy. …

The Use Of Geospatial Modeling And Novel Diagnostics To Detect And Map Risk Factors Of Soil-Transmitted Helminths In Feira De Santana, Brazil, Ryan Harry Avery

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Soil-transmitted helminth (STH) infections impact billions of people worldwide. The traditional STH control approach is a morbidity control strategy implementing mass drug administration (MDA) programs targeting school-aged children (SAC). In Brazil, this control strategy has decreased STH prevalence to less than 20% in most of the country and providing an opportunity to transition from the morbidity control program and towards a surveillance and response system geared towards STH elimination. Surveillance and response systems geared towards elimination require the implementation higher accuracy diagnostics to detect infection in low-transmission communities, surveillance of entire households, high-resolution modeling at the household-habitat scale, and targeted …

Ancient Maya Obsidian Trade: Frenchman’S Cay, Belize, Emily Cook

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

A Comparison Of Hominin Teeth From Lincoln Cave, Sterkfontein L/63, And The Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa, Juliet K. Brophy, Joel Irish, Steve E. Churchill, Darryl J. De Ruiter, John Hawks, Lee R. Berger

Faculty Publications

Prior to the recovery of Homo naledi from the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star Cave system, the Middle Pleistocene fossil record in Africa was particularly sparse. With the large sample size now available from Dinaledi, the opportunity exists to reassess taxonomically ambiguous teeth unearthed at the nearby site of Sterkfontein. Teeth recovered from Lincoln Cave South and area L/63 at Sterkfontein have been considered ‘most probably Homo ergaster’ and ‘perhaps Archaic Homo sapiens’, respectively. Given the similarities shared between Lincoln Cave, area L/63, and the Dinaledi Chamber with regard to climatic/geologic depositional context and age, two teeth from the …