Geography Commons^™

Mapping Meaningful Places On Washington’S Olympic Peninsula: Toward A Deeper Understanding Of Landscape Values, Lee Cerveny, Kelly Biedenweg, Rebecca J. Mclain

Institute for Sustainable Solutions Publications and Presentations

Landscape values mapping has been widely employed as a form of public participation GIS (PPGIS) in natural resource planning and decision-making to capture the complex array of values, uses, and interactions between people and landscapes. A landscape values typology has been commonly employed in the mapping of social and environmental values in a variety of management settings and scales. We explore how people attribute meanings and assign values to special places on the Olympic Peninsula (Washington, USA) using both a landscape values typology and qualitative responses about residents’ placerelationships. Using geographically referenced social values data collected in community meetings (n …

Participation Is Not A Panacea, Britta Ricker

Resistance GIS

Britta Ricker is an Assistant Professor in the Urban Studies program at the University Washington Tacoma. Ricker teaches a wide variety of courses related to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Science and Urban Research Methods. Her research interests convergence around spatial information collection and dissemination opportunities afforded by mobile computers. She is interested in applying these tools for spatial learning related to emergency preparedness and environmental communication initiatives. Her professional experience includes acting as a Hazard Mapping Analyst for Dewberry and Davis, a consultant for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). She has also acted as a cartographic consultation for …

Gis As A Tool For Neighborhood, Adam Brunelle

Resistance GIS

Adam Brunelle is a community organizer and advocacy planner with experience incubating communityprojects and programs at the grassroots level, including his work on climate change as a co-founder of nonprofit 350PDX and more recently engage Portland’s Lents community on livability issues through local nonprofit Green Lents. Brunelle is committed to bottom-up change and community-led advocacy, focusing his work on improving livability, preserving affordability, and fostering community control in the Lents area. He received his Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning from Portland State University in 2016, and was awarded the Excellence in Sustainability: Inspiring Student Award in 2016 by the …

Ground-Truthing: Geographic Information Systems (Gis) As Community-Based And Anti-Racist Praxis, Verónica N. Vélez

Resistance GIS

Dr. Verónica Nelly Vélez is an Assistant Professor and the Director of the Education and Social Justice Minor at Western Washington University (WWU). Before joining WWU, Verónica worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and the Director of Public Programming at the Center for Latino Policy Research at UC Berkeley. Her research interests include Critical Race Theory and Latina/o Critical Theory in Education, the politics of parent engagement in educational reform, particularly for Latina/o (im)migrant families, participatory action and community-based models of research, and the use of GIS technologies to further a critical race research agenda on the study of space …

Spatial Narratives In A Post-Truth World, Dillon Mahmoudi

Resistance GIS

Dillon Mahmoudi will graduate in June 2017 with a PhD in Urban Studies
at Portland State University. He also received his Graduate Certificate in GIS from the Geography department. In the fall of 2017, he will be moving to Baltimore to be Assistant Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland Baltimore County where he will teach courses in advanced GIS methods and economic geography. His research and community engagement focuses on critical methods for GIS, bifurcation and deskilling in tech work (software and cartography), geographies of urban inequity, and the intersections of cities and digital technologies.

Resistance (?) Gis (?), Jim Thatcher

Resistance GIS

Jim Thatcher is an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Washington Tacoma. His research examines relationships between extremely large geospatial data sets and the creation and analysis of those data sets and society, with a focus on how data has come to mediate, saturate, and sustain modern urban environments. Often referred to as Critical Data Studies or Digital Political Ecologies, Jim’s work has been featured in media outlets including NPR and The Atlantic. His first edited volume, Thinking Big Data In Geography: New Regimes, New Research, is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press.

Federal Data: Strategies For Maintaining Access And Availability, Elizabeth F. Pickard

Resistance GIS

Beth Pickard is a librarian and assistant professor at Portland State University where she works with geographers and other scientists. She earned her BA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and her MSI in Information Science from the University of Michigan. In addition to her work in academia, she writes poetry, fiction and other genre-resistant pieces. Her work has appeared in Underwater New York, the Portland Review and elsewhere.

Before coming to PSU, Beth served as Interim Engineering Librarian at the University of Illinois at Chicago and as University Library Associate at the Art, Architecture and Engineering Library …

In Support Of “Difficult Data”, Jamaal Green

Resistance GIS

Jamaal Green is a doctoral candidate in the Urban Studies and Planning Department at PSU. He is an economic development planners, and a sometimes economic geographer, interested in the intersections of land-use and labor market outcomes. Specifically, his dissertation will be studying the conversion of industrial land to non-industrial uses in the country’s fifty largest cities and the politics therein. He cares passionately about the potential for planning to be a progressive force in the development of our cities. He uses GIS as a way to explore questions about the socio-spatial and socio-economic relations of city-regions from the locations of …

Introductory Statement By The Organizers, Resistance Gis Conference

Resistance GIS

Introductory statement by the organizers of the Resistance GIS 2017 Conference, entitled "From our Perspective: What is Resistance GIS?"

An Operational Drought Prediction Framework With Application Of Vine Copula Functions, Mahkameh Zarekarizi

Student Research Symposium

Early and accurate drought predictions can benefit water resources and emergency managers by enhancing drought preparedness. Soil moisture memory is shown to contain helpful information for prediction of future values. This study uses the soil moisture memory to predict their future states via multivariate statistical modeling. We present a drought forecasting framework which issues monthly and seasonal drought forecasts. This framework estimates droughts with different lead times and updates the forecasts when more data become available. Forecasts are generated by conditioning future soil moisture values on antecedent drought status. The statistical model is initialized by soil moisture simulations retrieved from …

Stream Sedimentation Patterns In An Urban Beaver System: Fanno Creek, Oregon, Alexandra Joan Santora

Geography Masters Research Papers

Beaver activities can cause drastic changes to hydrogeomorphic processes by impounding waterways through the construction of dams, trapping sediments and reducing the downstream sediment load. The presence of beaver is increasing in urban areas. Urban streams exhibit hydrogeomorphic processes distinct from natural systems because of changes in land cover that alter hydrology. This case study was developed as part of an effort to understand the sedimentation patterns of a beaver impounded urban stream in Beaverton, Oregon. Twelve sediment samples were collected and processed for organic matter content and particle size and sediment depths were calculated using GIS software from data …

Environmental Justice And Gis: A Comparison Of Three Gis Methods For Estimating Vulnerable Population Exposed To Brownfield Pollution In Portland, Oregon, Kyle Goodman

Geography Masters Research Papers

This project compares three GIS techniques that estimate populations who are potentially affected by environmental contamination in Portland, Oregon. All three GIS techniques utilize polygon containment to estimate populations potentially exposed to pollutants based on block level census data. In this study, multiple buffer distances at half-mile increments were used across all three techniques. Circular Euclidean distance buffers surrounding a known contaminated property, such as documented brownfields, approximate the contamination zone. Accurate estimates for populations exposed to harmful environmental conditions could provide a better understanding of environmental justice issues. The specific research questions were: 1) Are the population estimates sensitive …

Characterizing Large-Scale Meteorological Patterns And Associated Temperature And Precipitation Extremes Over The Northwestern United States Using Self-Organizing Maps, Paul C. Loikith, Benjamin R. Lintner, Alex Sweeney

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

The self-organizing maps (SOMs) approach is demonstrated as a way to identify a range of archetypal large-scale meteorological patterns (LSMPs) over the northwestern United States and connect these patterns with local-scale temperature and precipitation extremes. SOMs are used to construct a set of 12 characteristic LSMPs (nodes) based on daily reanalysis circulation fields spanning the range of observed synoptic-scale variability for the summer and winter seasons for the period 1979–2013. Composites of surface variables are constructed for subsets of days assigned to each node to explore relationships between temperature, precipitation, and the node patterns. The SOMs approach also captures interannual …

Stacking Functions: Identifying Motivational Frames Guiding Urban Agriculture Organizations And Businesses In The United States And Canada, Nathan Mcclintock, Michael Simpson

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

While a growing body of scholarship identifies urban agriculture's broad suite of benefits and drivers, it remains unclear how motivations to engage in urban agriculture (UA) interrelate or how they differ across cities and types of organizations. In this paper, we draw on survey responses collected from more than 250 UA organizations and businesses from 84 cities across the United States and Canada. Synthesizing the results of our quantitative analysis of responses (including principal components analysis), qualitative analysis of textual data excerpted from open-ended responses, and a review of existing literature, we describe six motivational frames that appear to guide …

Precipitation Intensity Trend Detection Using Hourly And Daily Observations In Portland, Oregon, Alexis Cooley, Heejun Chang

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

The intensity of precipitation is expected to increase in response to climate change, but the regions where this may occur are unclear. The lack of certainty from climate models warrants an examination of trends in observational records. However, the temporal resolution of records may affect the success of trend detection. Daily observations are often used, but may be too coarse to detect changes. Sub-daily records may improve detection, but their value is not yet quantified. Using daily and hourly records from 24 rain gages in Portland, Oregon (OR), trends in precipitation intensity and volume are examined for the period of …

Individual Decision Making In Online Public-Participation Transportation Planning, Martin Swobodzinski

PSU Transportation Seminars

The empirical evaluation of complex decision support systems is often limited to the self-reported satisfaction of the systems’ users.

Such an approach is problematic due to the conflation of the user's satisfaction related to the decision support system and the decision making process and its outcomes.

In addition, it bears limitations that are common among most techniques that solicit participant-stated feedback.

In this talk, based on data that was gathered by a web-based participatory system for transportation planning in the Puget Sound region, I present analytical methods for the empirical evaluation of decision support systems based on human-computer interaction. In …

Effects Of Spatially Distributed Stream Power On Check Dam Function In Small Upland Watersheds: A Case Study Of The Upper Laja Watershed, Guanajuato, Mexico, Zachary Andrew Herzfeld

Dissertations and Theses

Watershed restoration comes in a variety of forms depending on which set of problems are sought to be remedied. Severe soil erosion, in the form of gullying and/or headcutting, can be mitigated through constructing check dams in well-selected locations. This practice has been used throughout the upland subwatersheds within the Upper Laja River watershed in Guanajuato, México. The present study employed Wolman pebble counts to systematically assess the effectiveness of 21 check dams located near the city of San Miguel de Allende. Particle size distributions taken directly downstream and upstream of each check dam were differentiated, aggregated and compared--with the …

Out In "The Numbers": Youth And Gang Violence Initiatives And Uneven Development In Portland's Periphery, Dirk Kinsey

Dissertations and Theses

Incidence of youth and gang violence in the Portland, Oregon metro area has increased dramatically over the past five years. This violence has recently become more spatially diffuse, shifting outwards from gentrified, inner city neighborhoods, towards the city's periphery. These incidents exist within the context of a shifting regional political economy, characterized by a process of gentrification associated displacement and growing, and distinctly racialized and spatialized, inequalities. While gang researchers have long argued a corollary between the emergence of gangs and economically and culturally polarized urban landscapes, the ongoing suburbanization of poverty in American cities suggests a new landscape of …

Shifting Wetland Policy And Perception In The Columbia Slough, Ryan Pemberton

Geography Masters Research Papers

On the periphery of Portland, Oregon, at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers lies an expansive wetland, the Columbia Slough. Once a thriving wetland ecosystem nineteen miles long by three miles wide, the Slough has been drained, filled, and developed into a humanized landscape. The human experience of this landscape has always been about use: people make, move, and exchange things here. Few people actually live and play in this transformed wetland, and most would consider it a featureless, polluted, and otherwise valueless landscape save for the money to be made here. Yet remnants of the old, wild …

Evaluating Hourly Rainfall Characteristics Over The U.S. Great Plains In Dynamically Downscaled Climate Model Simulations Using Nasa-Unified Wrf, Huikyo Lee, Duane E. Waliser, Robert Ferraro, Takamichi Iguchi, Christa D. Peters-Lidard, Baijun Tian, Paul C. Loikith, Daniel B. Wright

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Accurate simulation of extreme precipitation events remains a challenge in climate models. This study utilizes hourly precipitation data from ground stations and satellite instruments to evaluate rainfall characteristics simulated by the NASA-Unified Weather Research and Forecasting (NU-WRF) regional climate model at horizontal resolutions of 4, 12, and 24 km over the Great Plains of the United States. We also examined the sensitivity of the simulated precipitation to different spectral nudging approaches and the cumulus parameterizations. The rainfall characteristics in the observations and simulations were defined as an hourly diurnal cycle of precipitation and a joint probability distribution function (JPDF) between …

Urban Non-Timber Forest Products Stewardship Practices Among Foragers In Seattle, Washington (Usa), Rebecca J. Mclain, Melissa R. Poe, Lauren S. Urgenson, Dale Blahna, Lita P. Buttolph

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Our research seeks to expand the concept of urban environmental stewardship to include the everyday stewardship practices of urban nontimber forest products foragers. Ethnographic data from 58 urban foragers and 18 land stewards in the city of Seattle (USA) revealed that foragers reported using a variety of practices to enhance and minimize negative desirable species and their habitats. Many of these practices were identical to those practiced by restoration volunteers in formal programs and align with Seattle Parks Department management objectives. Foragers actively sought to learn more about what practices are sustainable; many mentored others in sustainable harvesting practices. Most …

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Based Structure From Motion Biomass Inventory Estimates, Emily Jane Bedell

Dissertations and Theses

Riparian vegetation restoration efforts demand cost effective, accurate, and replicable impact assessments. In this thesis a method is presented using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) equipped with a GoPro digital camera to collect photogrammetric data of a 2.02-acre riparian restoration. A three-dimensional point cloud was created from the photos using Structure from Motion (SfM) techniques. The point cloud was analyzed and compared to traditional, ground-based monitoring techniques. Ground truth data collected using the status-quo approach was collected on 6.3% of the study site and averaged across the entire site to report stem heights in stems/acre in three height classes, 0-3 …

Enso Controls Interannual Fire Activity In Southeast Australia, Michela Mariani, Michael-Shawn Fletcher, Andrés Holz, Petter Nyman

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the main mode controlling the variability in the ocean-atmosphere system in the South Pacific. While the ENSO influence on rainfall regimes in the South Pacific is well documented, its role in driving spatiotemporal trends in fire activity in this region has not been rigorously investigated. This is particularly the case for the highly flammable and densely populated southeast Australian sector, where ENSO is a major control over climatic variability. Here we conduct the first region-wide analysis of how ENSO controls fire activity in southeast Australia. We identify a significant relationship between ENSO and both fire …

Use Of Water Indices Derived From Landsat Oli Imagery And Gis To Estimate The Hydrologic Connectivity Of Wetlands In The Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge, Debra Sue Blackmore

Dissertations and Theses

This study compared two remote sensing water indices: the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) and the Modified NDWI (MNDWI). Both indices were calculated using publically-available data from the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI). The research goal was to determine whether the indices are effective in locating open water and measuring surface soil moisture. To demonstrate the application of water indices, analysis was conducted for freshwater wetlands in the Tualatin River Basin in northwestern Oregon to estimate hydrologic connectivity and hydrological permanence between these wetlands and nearby water bodies. Remote sensing techniques have been used to study wetlands in recent …

Use Of Distance Weighted Metrics To Investigate Landscape-Stream Temperature Relationships Across Different Temporal Scales, Eric Craig Watson

Dissertations and Theses

Stream ecosystems have experienced significant negative impacts from land use, resource exploitation, and urban development. Statistical models allow researchers to explore the relationships between these landscape variables and stream conditions. Weighting the relevant landscape variables based on hydrologically defined distances offers a potential method of increasing the predictive capacity of statistical models. Using observations from three grouped watersheds in the Portland Metro Area (n=66), I have explored the use of three different weighting schemes against the standard method of taking an areal average. These four different model groups were applied to four stream temperature metrics: mean seven-day moving average maximum …

Assessment Of A Mycorrhizal Fungi Application To Treat Stormwater In An Urban Bioswale, Alaina Diane Melville

Dissertations and Theses

This study assessed the effect of an application of mycorrhizal fungi to stormwater filter media on urban bioswale soil and stormwater in an infiltration-based bioswale aged 20 years with established vegetation. The study tested the use of commercially available general purpose biotic soil blend PermaMatrix^® BSP Foundation as a treatment to enhance Earthlite^™ stormwater filter media amelioration of zinc, copper, and phosphorus in an ecologically engineered structure designed to collect and infiltrate urban stormwater runoff before it entered the nearby Willamette River.

These results show that the application of PermaMatrix^® BSP Foundation biotic soil amendment to Earthlite …

The Influence Of Floodplain Restoration On Flow And Sediment Dynamics In An Urban River, Sangaralingam Ahilan, Mingfu Guan, Andrew Sleigh, Nigel G. Wright, Heejun Chang

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

A study of floodplain sedimentation on a recently restored floodplain is presented. This study uses a two-dimensional hydro-morphodynamic model for predicting flow and suspended-sediment dynamics in the downstream of Johnson Creek, the East Lents reach, where the bank of the river has been reconfigured to reconnect to a restored floodplain on a 0.26 km² (26-ha) site. The simulation scenarios include 10-, 50-, 100- and 500-year event-based deposition modelling of flood events and long-term modelling using the 64 historical flood events between 1941 and 2014. Simulation results showed that the restored floodplain significantly attenuates the upstream flood peak by up …

Can Significant Trends Be Detected In Surface Air Temperature And Precipitation Over South America In Recent Decades?, Daniel De Barros Soares, Huikyo Lee, Paul C. Loikith, Armineh Barkhordarian, Carlos R. Mechoso

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Trends in near-surface air temperature and precipitation over South America are examined for the periods 1975–2004 and 1955–2004, respectively, using multiple observational and climate model data sets. The results for observed near-surface air temperature show an overall warming trend over much of the continent, with the largest magnitudes over central Brazil. These observed trends are found to be statistically significant using pre-industrial control simulations from the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) as the baseline to estimate natural climate variability. The observed trends are compared with those obtained in natural-only CMIP5 simulations, in which only natural forcings …

Wildfire Risk As A Socioecological Pathology, A. Paige Fischer, Thomas A. Spies, Toddi A. Steelman, Cassandra Moseley, Bart R. Johnson, John D. Bailey, Alan A. Ager, Patrick Bourgeron, Susan Charnley, Brandon M. Collins, Jeffrey D. Kline, Jessica E. Leahy, Jeremy S. Littell, James D. A. Millington, Max Nielsen-Pincus, Christine S. Olsen, Travis B. Paveglio, Christopher I. Roos, Michelle M. Steen-Adams, Forrest R. Stevens, Jelena Vukomanovic, Eric M. White, David Bowman

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Wildfire risk in temperate forests has become a nearly intractable problem that can be characterized as a socioecological “pathology”: that is, a set of complex and problematic interactions among social and ecological systems across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Assessments of wildfire risk could benefit from recognizing and accounting for these interactions in terms of socioecological systems, also known as coupled natural and human systems (CNHS). We characterize the primary social and ecological dimensions of the wildfire risk pathology, paying particular attention to the governance system around wildfire risk, and suggest strategies to mitigate the pathology through innovative planning approaches, …

Factors Driving The Concentration Of Ephemeral Flow, Gretchen Anne Guyer

Dissertations and Theses

In spite of decades of related research, stream channel initiation is still not well understood. Current theories of channel initiation are grounded in research conducted by Montgomery and Dietrich, largely in the transport limited, temperate, humid climate of the Pacific Northwest, USA. This field data driven work concluded that the drainage area required for channel initiation is directly correlated to the slope of the contributing area. However, there are a host of related variables that have yet to be examined in the field. This study revisits the slope-area relationship focusing on ephemeral overland flow in headwaters of both the Pacific …