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Articles 151 - 180 of 290

Full-Text Articles in Geography

Assessment Of Barrier Island Restoration Planning And Management In The Terrebonne Basin, Louisiana, Sean Russell Williams Apr 2019

Assessment Of Barrier Island Restoration Planning And Management In The Terrebonne Basin, Louisiana, Sean Russell Williams

LSU Master's Theses

Louisiana holds the majority of the contiguous United States’ coastal wetlands by area, providing significant benefits to users in the form of ecosystem services. Climate change, relative sea level rise, and coastal sediment budget deficits among other anthropogenic processes impact the resilience and sustainability of Louisiana’s coastal systems. Since the implementation of the Coastal Wetland Planning, Protection and Restoration Act (CWPPRA) to restore coastal wetlands in the United States, multiple barrier island restoration projects have taken place in the greater Terrebonne Basin. Amassing a catalog of case studies elucidates the social, ecological, and economic frameworks behind barrier island restoration and …


The Social Logic Of Space In Early Horizon Peru: 3d Reconstructions Of Residential Compounds At Caylán, Nepeña Valley, Ashleigh V. Passafume Apr 2019

The Social Logic Of Space In Early Horizon Peru: 3d Reconstructions Of Residential Compounds At Caylán, Nepeña Valley, Ashleigh V. Passafume

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


Demystifying Jadeite: An Underwater Maya Discovery At Ek Way Nal, Belize, Heather Mckillop, George Harlow, April Sievert, C. Wayne Smith, Michael C. Wiemann Apr 2019

Demystifying Jadeite: An Underwater Maya Discovery At Ek Way Nal, Belize, Heather Mckillop, George Harlow, April Sievert, C. Wayne Smith, Michael C. Wiemann

Faculty Publications

Jadeite artefacts at Maya sites are normally associated with ritual and ceremonial locations, with high-quality jadeite reserved for elite objects. The discovery of a jadeite gouge with a wooden handle at a Classic Maya salt-working site submerged by sea-level rise - Ek Way Nal, Belize - is therefore unexpected and provides new information about the utilitarian use of this stone. The extremely high quality of this jadeite tool is particularly surprising, offering new insight into the Classic Maya exchange systems and the role of salt makers such as those based at Ek Way Nal.


"La Llorona": Evolución, Ideología Y Uso En El Mundo Hispano, Raquel Sáenz-Llano Mar 2019

"La Llorona": Evolución, Ideología Y Uso En El Mundo Hispano, Raquel Sáenz-Llano

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis studies the evolution, ideology and use of the myth of La Llorona through time in the Hispanic World. Considering this myth as one of the most known traditional narratives of the American continent, I begin by providing visual, ethnohistorical and ethnographical insights of weeping in Mesoamerica and South America and the specific mention of a weeping woman in some Spanish chronicles to say how western values were stablished in “the new continent” through this legend. I suggest that during the postcolonialism the legend did not tell anymore about a mother that cries and search a place for their …


Twitter Use In Hurricane Isaac And Its Implications To Disaster Resilience, Kejin Wang Mar 2019

Twitter Use In Hurricane Isaac And Its Implications To Disaster Resilience, Kejin Wang

LSU Master's Theses

Disaster Resilience is the capacity of a community to ‘bounce back’ from disastrous events. Most studies rely on traditional data such as census data to study community resilience. With the advent of social media era, the new data source gives us an opportunity to explore the application of Twitter data to better understand disaster resilience. A research question is: does Twitter use correlate with disaster resilience? In other words, will communities with more Twitter users be more resilient to disasters, presumably because they are more likely to be better informed? The underlying issue is that if there are social and …


Flood Resilience Assessment Of New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina Based On Thermal And Vegetation Index Image Time Series, Yirui Deng Mar 2019

Flood Resilience Assessment Of New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina Based On Thermal And Vegetation Index Image Time Series, Yirui Deng

LSU Master's Theses

Resilience is a concept with increasing importance in modern risk management because of its role in reducing risks of unpreventable disasters. Previous resilience assessment studies often require extensive surveys of various social, economic, and psychological data or incorporate remote sensing data as one of the complicated physical and social parameters for assessment models. Limited data accessibility to such data due to funding, time, and labor intensity is a major challenge for their wider applications. Therefore, this study proposes the hypothesis that the overall resilience of an urban area to disturbances of natural disasters can be reflected through the time series …


Climatology, Variability, And Return Periods Of Tropical Cyclone Strikes In The Northeastern And Central Pacific Basins, Nicholas S. Grondin Mar 2019

Climatology, Variability, And Return Periods Of Tropical Cyclone Strikes In The Northeastern And Central Pacific Basins, Nicholas S. Grondin

LSU Master's Theses

Tropical cyclones (TCs) are among the most destructive meteorological phenomena and impact the lives of people who reside along the coast. The American Pacific Coastline borders the second most active TC development region in the world, the northeastern Pacific (NE Pac) basin. This region, along with the Central Pacific (C Pac)-bordering Hawaii is home to a growing population and cities engaged in a variety of economic activities, most prominently agriculture, fishing, and tourism. This study analyzes fifty-two (1966-2017) years of NE Pac and C Pac TCs through applying track data from the National Hurricane Center’s HURDAT2 and a TC size …


Vulnerability Of Industrial Facilities In The Lower Mississippi River Industrial Corridor To Relative Sea Level Rise And Tropical Cyclone Storm Surge, Joseph Blake Harris Mar 2019

Vulnerability Of Industrial Facilities In The Lower Mississippi River Industrial Corridor To Relative Sea Level Rise And Tropical Cyclone Storm Surge, Joseph Blake Harris

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Relative sea level rise (RSLR) and tropical cyclone-induced storm surge are major threats to the Lower Mississippi River Industrial Corridor (LMRIC) which has approximately 120 industrial complexes located within the corridor. Spatial interpolation methods were applied to the 2004 National Oceanic and Atmospheric published Technical Report #50 subsidence dataset and cross-validation techniques were used to determine the accuracy of each method. Digital elevation models (DEMs) were created for the years 2025, 2050, and 2075, based on these predictive surface of subsidence rates. Future DEMs were utilized to model RSLR and determine the extent of storm surge on the LMRIC by …


Use Of A Behavioral Health Framework To Assess Perceptions Of Hurricane Evacuation Support Services In New Orleans, Louisiana, Aubry Kyle Mar 2019

Use Of A Behavioral Health Framework To Assess Perceptions Of Hurricane Evacuation Support Services In New Orleans, Louisiana, Aubry Kyle

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation presents research conducted during the hurricane seasons of 2017 and 2018 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The research’s purpose was to assess citizen perceptions of evacuation support services offered during mandatory evacuation events. A prospective quantitative survey and qualitative, open-ended, semi-structured interview assessed perceptions. Both research methods were designed and assessed using the constructs of the Health Belief Model, a public health model created to assess perceived barriers, benefits, risks, severity, self-efficacy, and cues to action regarding health programming. Quantitative research yielded 211 surveys, representing opinions of New Orleans residents within 1-km Euclidian distance of an evacuation pick-up marker. …


The Garbage That We Eat: Metabolizing Food-Waste In New Orleans, Louisiana, Kelly L. Haggerty Mar 2019

The Garbage That We Eat: Metabolizing Food-Waste In New Orleans, Louisiana, Kelly L. Haggerty

LSU Master's Theses

The 2017 Climate Action for a Resilient New Orleans report strives to divert 50 percent of waste by 2030. In the same year, waste companies had only managed to divert 5 percent of the total annual waste in Orleans Parish. Nearly a decade away from 2030, city officials have not even tested or implemented strategies to reach this goal. While city officials scramble to launch pilot projects, community and grassroots organizations center around recovering and transforming garbage and food waste. Using interviews and surveys with food-waste organizers from May to August 2018, this paper reveals that managing food-waste on a …


Downscaling Smap Soil Moisture Data Using Modis Data, Le Tu Jan 2019

Downscaling Smap Soil Moisture Data Using Modis Data, Le Tu

LSU Master's Theses

Soil moisture level is an important index in studying environmental changes. High resolution soil moisture data is in high demand for agricultural and weather forecasting purpose. Current daily large-scale soil moisture projects fail to provide sufficient resolution for medium or small region research. To acquire high-resolution soil moisture data, different kinds of methods are put into practice, including multivariate statistical regression, weight aggregation and so on. In this research, SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive) level 3 data with 36-km resolution are successfully downscaled by MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) 1-km LST (Land Surface Temperature) product, NDVI (Difference Vegetation Index) product, …


Review Of The Herds Shot Round The World: Native Breeds And The British Empire, 1800—1900, By Rebecca Woods, Andrew Sluyter Jan 2019

Review Of The Herds Shot Round The World: Native Breeds And The British Empire, 1800—1900, By Rebecca Woods, Andrew Sluyter

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


An Analysis Of The Effect Of Tooth Wear On Bovid Identification, Juliet K. Brophy, Gregory J. Matthews, George K. Thiruvathukal Jan 2019

An Analysis Of The Effect Of Tooth Wear On Bovid Identification, Juliet K. Brophy, Gregory J. Matthews, George K. Thiruvathukal

Faculty Publications

Previous research provides a method for reducing the subjectivity in taxonomic identification of species in the family Bovidae by quantifying the occlusal surface of molar teeth using elliptical Fourier analysis. In this current study, we specifically test what effect medium to late tooth wear has on the identification of bovids when using the form (size and shape) of the occlusal surface to classify specimens. To achieve this, the classification results of teeth with ≥85% of their occlusal surface (training data set) were compared with the results of teeth with 87% of the time with both Alcelaphini and Reduncini classifying correctly …


Identification Of Experimental And Control Areas For Cctv Effectiveness Assessment—The Issue Of Spatially Aggregated Data, Adam Dabrowski, Piotr Matczak, Andrzej Wójtowicz, Michael Leitner Dec 2018

Identification Of Experimental And Control Areas For Cctv Effectiveness Assessment—The Issue Of Spatially Aggregated Data, Adam Dabrowski, Piotr Matczak, Andrzej Wójtowicz, Michael Leitner

Faculty Publications

Progress in surveillance technology has led to the development of Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) systems in cities around the world. Cameras are considered instrumental in crime reduction, yet existing research does not unambiguously answer the question whether installing them affects the number of crimes committed. The quasi-experimental method usually applied to evaluate CCTV systems’ effectiveness faces difficulties with data quantity and quality. Data quantity has a bearing on the number of crimes that can be conclusively inferred using the experimental procedure. Data quality affects the level of crime data aggregation. The lack of the exact location of a crime incident in …


Using Deep Learning To Forecast Spatiotemporal Crime Patterns, Shuzhan Fan Dec 2018

Using Deep Learning To Forecast Spatiotemporal Crime Patterns, Shuzhan Fan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The distributional patterns of crime occurrences are closely related to their spatial, temporal, and environmental contexts. It has been a hot topic for researchers and crime analysts to discover such complex relationships in order to forecast crime, both spatially and temporally. Many factors play a role in the occurrences of crimes. Conventional crime forecasting research has primarily relied on historical crime records and socioeconomic data, while ignoring the rich social media and other environmental context data. The large volume of data requires a more appropriate forecasting framework with the ability to take in massive multimodal data and possibly achieve better …


A Comparison Of Machine Learning Techniques For Taxonomic Classification Of Teeth From The Family Bovidae, Gregory J. Matthews, Juliet K. Brophy, Maxwell Luetkemeier, Hongie Gu, George K. Thiruvathukal Nov 2018

A Comparison Of Machine Learning Techniques For Taxonomic Classification Of Teeth From The Family Bovidae, Gregory J. Matthews, Juliet K. Brophy, Maxwell Luetkemeier, Hongie Gu, George K. Thiruvathukal

Faculty Publications

This study explores the performance of machine learning algorithms on the classification of fossil teeth in the Family Bovidae. Isolated bovid teeth are typically the most common fossils found in southern Africa and they often constitute the basis for paleoenvironmental reconstructions. Taxonomic identification of fossil bovid teeth, however, is often imprecise and subjective. Using modern teeth with known taxons, machine learning algorithms can be trained to classify fossils. Previous work by Brophy et al. [Quantitative morphological analysis of bovid teeth and implications for paleoenvironmental reconstruction of plovers lake, Gauteng Province, South Africa, J. Archaeol. Sci. 41 (2014), pp. 376–388] uses …


Natural Resources-Based Conflicts In Coastal Louisiana: A Multi-Faceted Social And Ecological Setting, Audrey Grismore Oct 2018

Natural Resources-Based Conflicts In Coastal Louisiana: A Multi-Faceted Social And Ecological Setting, Audrey Grismore

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Louisiana coastal zone supports numerous natural resource-based economies and due to overlapping demands on the same territory, conflicts among users and resource managers have emerged. When the state recognized serious depletion of oysters in the late nineteenth century, it intervened with a set of conservation polices to try to establish sustained yields that produced one set of conflicts. When the oil industry began operating in the coastal estuaries and wetlands in the 1930s, it produced additional conflicts with fishing folk. The zone of conflict gave rise to cyclic adaptations as each group struggled to sustain its environmentally based economic …


Measurement And Modeling Of The Spatiotemporal Dynamics Of Beach Surface Moisture Content, Phillip P. Schmutz, Steven L. Namikas Oct 2018

Measurement And Modeling Of The Spatiotemporal Dynamics Of Beach Surface Moisture Content, Phillip P. Schmutz, Steven L. Namikas

Faculty Publications

The spatiotemporal dynamics of surface moisture exert a significant influence on the operation of aeolian transport systems at many beaches. However, we currently lack the detailed understanding of variability in surface moisture required to incorporate it into aeolian models. This problem is addressed here through direct measurements and simulation modeling of beach surface moisture over a twelve-day period, and through quantification of the relative contributions of evaporation, condensation and groundwater inputs to surface moisture. It was found that the beach surface can be characterized spatially in terms of three moisture zones: a consistently dry zone (40%). The relative influence of …


"If You Stand On This Corner, People Know What You're About": Powerful Geographies Of Airline & Goodwood In #Justiceforalton, Shannon Kathleen Groll Jun 2018

"If You Stand On This Corner, People Know What You're About": Powerful Geographies Of Airline & Goodwood In #Justiceforalton, Shannon Kathleen Groll

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis seeks to understand the multiple geographies of Airline & Goodwood, a site of protest occupied nightly during a part of summer 2016 in response to the police shooting of Alton Sterling. Through a methodology of observant-participation, interviews, and oral histories, I make the case that the politics of this site differed from other contemporaneous protest sites in the city through specific place-making activity which highlighted the site’s powerful contemporary and historical geographies. I connect protest at this site to the precarity of Black life and death in Baton Rouge through interviews and oral histories which discuss the historical …


Construction Of A Tropical Cyclone Size Dataset Using Retroactive Analysis Data With A Damage Application, Derek Trent Thompson Jun 2018

Construction Of A Tropical Cyclone Size Dataset Using Retroactive Analysis Data With A Damage Application, Derek Trent Thompson

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis introduces a new tropical cyclone (TC) size dataset. Using the radius of the outermost closed isobar (ROCI) as the size metric of focus, a comprehensive record of TC size at landfall was constructed for tropical storms and hurricanes that made landfall in the United States along the East Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico. The ROCI information was derived from mean sea level pressure maps generated using the NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis I dataset over a 69-year period (1948 – 2016). Construction of the dataset involved using two methodologies, one based on hourly interpolated HURDAT2 best tracks and the …


A Climatology Of Precipitation Days Throughout The Continguous United States, Rudy J. Bartels May 2018

A Climatology Of Precipitation Days Throughout The Continguous United States, Rudy J. Bartels

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Over the last century, scientists have raised questions about climate change and one of the more important variables that may undergo change is precipitation. Precipitation can affect many sectors including agriculture, socio-economic activities and hazard management. This dissertation addresses the temporal aspect of precipitation using 167 first order stations in the contiguous United States from 1951-2015. The three objectives of this dissertation are to perform (1) an annual analysis of the frequency of rain days in the United States and changing magnitudes of daily rainfall, (2) seasonal rain day frequency in the United States, and (3) use an artificial neural …


Event-Based Climatology Of Tropical Cyclone Rainfall In Houston, Texas And Miami, Florida, Jill C. Trepanier, Clay S. Tucker May 2018

Event-Based Climatology Of Tropical Cyclone Rainfall In Houston, Texas And Miami, Florida, Jill C. Trepanier, Clay S. Tucker

Faculty Publications

Tropical cyclone (TC) rainfall amounts are compared from 1950-2017 for Houston, Texas and Miami, Florida to estimate the risk of TC rain in both cities. Following the wake of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in 2017, concern has risen over the future of raininess in these locations. Per-event rainfall amounts are aggregated using tracks taken from HURDAT, time-of-rain gathered from National Weather Service daily weather maps, and rainfall totals taken from airport monitoring stations. Risk analysis tools include descriptive statistics, time series, and return frequencies for Houston and Miami, and spatially interpolated surfaces for Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. The season duration …


Effects Of Sea Level Rise, Land Subsidence, Bathymetric Change And Typhoon Tracks On Storm Flooding In The Coastal Areas Of Shanghai, Jun Wang, Si Yi, Mengya Li, Lei Wang, Chengcheng Song Apr 2018

Effects Of Sea Level Rise, Land Subsidence, Bathymetric Change And Typhoon Tracks On Storm Flooding In The Coastal Areas Of Shanghai, Jun Wang, Si Yi, Mengya Li, Lei Wang, Chengcheng Song

Faculty Publications

We compared the effects of three key environmental factors of coastal flooding: sea level rise (SLR), land subsidence (LS) and bathymetric change (BC) in the coastal areas of Shanghai. We use the hydrological simulation model MIKE 21 to simulate flood magnitudes under multiple scenarios created from combinations of the key environmental factors projected to year 2030 and 2050. Historical typhoons (TC9711, TC8114, TC0012, TC0205 and TC1109), which caused extremely high surges and considerable losses, were selected as reference tracks to generate potential typhoon events that would make landfalls in Shanghai (SHLD), in the north of Zhejiang (ZNLD) and moving northwards …


Serving A Segregated City: Primary Medical Care Access Disparities In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Michael Vingiello Apr 2018

Serving A Segregated City: Primary Medical Care Access Disparities In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Michael Vingiello

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


Linguistic Political Ecology With The Ngäbe Indigenous People Of Panama, Ginés A. Sánchez Arias Apr 2018

Linguistic Political Ecology With The Ngäbe Indigenous People Of Panama, Ginés A. Sánchez Arias

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Indigenous communities from all corners of the globe live in uncertain times. From the vantage point of their “remote" lands, they undergo some of globalization’s most harmful externalities. Their homes become increasingly harder to maintain as extractive industries, development schemes, clandestine land grabs, and national bureaucracies encroach creating new colonial lands. First by assimilation, and then integration, these processes systematically undermine indigenous culture and autonomy. In place of such destructive coloniality, indigenous societies shelter unique ecological and linguistic knowledge that continues to serve their progress. This research applies lessons learned from studying with Ngäbe communities of western Panama, towards a …


Reconstructing Ancient Lives Using 3d Technology: A Case Study Of Pork And Doughboy Point, Belize, Jane Fiegel Apr 2018

Reconstructing Ancient Lives Using 3d Technology: A Case Study Of Pork And Doughboy Point, Belize, Jane Fiegel

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


In Search Of Ritualistic Practice In Louisiana’S Labor Rooms, Carly Wayt Apr 2018

In Search Of Ritualistic Practice In Louisiana’S Labor Rooms, Carly Wayt

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


A Comparative Study Of Tooth Wear In Contemporary Us And Non-Us Populations To Evaluate The Validity Of Use In Estimating Region Of Origin, Amelie Marie Juneau Apr 2018

A Comparative Study Of Tooth Wear In Contemporary Us And Non-Us Populations To Evaluate The Validity Of Use In Estimating Region Of Origin, Amelie Marie Juneau

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.


Ethnicity, Climate, And House Types As Mortality Factors In The New Orleans' 1878 Yellow Fever Outbreak, Gabriele Richardson Mar 2018

Ethnicity, Climate, And House Types As Mortality Factors In The New Orleans' 1878 Yellow Fever Outbreak, Gabriele Richardson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The following study is first a demonstration that even incomplete health data from 1878 New Orleans’ yellow fever outbreak can be used with modern epidemiological methods and achieve useful and revealing results. Accordingly, this research examines three possible associations between New Orleans’ population exposed to yellow fever and the environment they lived in, using 4,755 yellow fever cases, derived from the New Orleans Board of Health report, Cemetery Burial records, Hospital, Asylum, and prison registers, and New Orleans obituaries. The first relationship addresses the vulnerability to yellow fever for people born in Italy, France, Great Britain, and the German Empire, …


Trade-Offs And Synergies Of Ecosystem Services In The Taihu Lake Basin Of China, Xuning Qiao, Yangyang Gu, Changxin Zou, Lei Wang, Juhua Luo, Xianfeng Huang Feb 2018

Trade-Offs And Synergies Of Ecosystem Services In The Taihu Lake Basin Of China, Xuning Qiao, Yangyang Gu, Changxin Zou, Lei Wang, Juhua Luo, Xianfeng Huang

Faculty Publications

Understanding the spatial interactions among multiple ecosystem services is crucial for ecosystem services management. Ecosystem services, including crop production, freshwater supply, aquatic production, net primary production, soil conservation, water conservation, flood regulation, forest recreation, were measured at 1-km grid scale covering the Taihu Lake Basin (TLB) of China. Our objective is to get a comprehensive understanding of the spatial distributions, trade-offs, synergies of multiple ecosystem services across the TLB. Our results found that: 1) majority of ecosystem services were clustered in space and had a similar spatial distribution pattern with the geographical resource endowment. Most of the landscape contributed a …