Geography Commons^™

Between Borders And Belief: Perspectives Of Aid Workers On Religion In A Migrant Shelter In Mexico, Kendall O. Roy

Senior Theses

This thesis seeks to understand the significance of religion in the Central American migration context through the eyes of humanitarian aid workers. It is based on interviews that I conducted in May of 2024 with staff members at a migrant shelter in Mexico, analysis of prior scholarship, and building upon an understanding of relevant religious history in Latin America. I will delve into trends that the aid workers observed in areas such as religious practices and beliefs of migrants, shelter functions that addressed and nurtured spiritual well-being, and the influence of the Church as an institution on humanitarian aid work. …

Woven By Culture: A Comparative Study Of Traditional Dress Across Regions And The Societal Forces Behind Fashion, James T. Granger

Senior Theses

This study attempts to examine how societal influences that different countries have obtained from years past affect their traditional fashion. By sketching 200 traditional female dresses from every sovereign country in the world, I have taken the time to analyze and create depictions of their sociological and stylistic choices. I have chosen to examine the countries of Cambodia, Republic of Congo, Croatia, Cuba, Finland, Iran, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Panama, and Tonga as they all represent different regions of the globe. Breaking down each of their dresses into their specific garments and accessories is essential to better understand the culture and the …

Exploring Heat Variations In Columbia, South Carolina, Michael Graeme Hohlfeld

Theses and Dissertations

As the leading cause of weather-related fatalities in the United States, the concept of heat as a hazard has been studied for decades, especially in the urban environment. Urban heat island research is limited by the fact that most investigate land surface temperature rather than air temperature and other variables that affect human comfort including humidity. This thesis utilizes a public network of weather stations in Richland County, South Carolina to investigate differences in heat between the city of Columbia, and more rural parts of the county. The study period was June, July, and August of 2022. Results indicate that …

A Sensor-Based Simulation Method For Spatiotemporal Event Detection, Yuqin Jiang, Andrey A. Popov, Zhenlong Li, Michael E. Hodgson, Binghu Huang

Faculty Publications

Human movements in urban areas are essential to understand human–environment interactions. However, activities and associated movements are full of uncertainties due to the complexity of a city. In this paper, we propose a novel sensor-based approach for spatiotemporal event detection based on the Discrete Empirical Interpolation Method. Specifically, we first identify the key locations, defined as “sensors”, which have the strongest correlation with the whole dataset. We then simulate a regular uneventful scenario with the observation data points from those key locations. By comparing the simulated and observation scenarios, events are extracted both spatially and temporally. We apply this method …

Terror And Time: Analyzing Homegrown Terrorism In The United States, Kyser Daniels-Baessler

Theses and Dissertations

The events of September 11th, 2001, prompted a global reckoning with the threat of international terrorism, leading to intensified awareness and policy responses worldwide. However, amidst this heightened global focus, the United States has faced a concerning rise in politically motivated violence on its soil. Against this backdrop, this thesis delves into the phenomenon of homegrown terrorism within the United States from 2000 to 2020. By employing advanced geospatial techniques, this study seeks to pinpoint areas nationwide with elevated rates of homegrown terrorist incidents. Moreover, it endeavors to uncover potential temporal correlations between these acts of violence and significant events, …

Historical Archives Reveal Record Rainfall And Severe Flooding In December 1867 Resulting From An Atmospheric River And Snowmelt, Western Washington, Usa, Daniel G. Gavin, Patrick J. Bartlein, Cary J. Mock

Faculty Publications

The flooding of 1861-1862 in California and Oregon is the most severe flood event documented in the far western USA and stands as a benchmark for a worst-case atmospheric-river flooding event. In western Washington, historical data are sparser, and 19th-century flood events have consequently not been well documented. We found that rainfall observations from five locations spanning western Washington had no detectable bias when compared to nearby 20th and 21st-century comparator stations. Time series of the four-day precipitation sum revealed an event in December 1867 that was greater than any of the last century at three locations, and in the …

Adapting Deep Learning Techniques For Geologic Investigations Of Hydrothermal Venting At Seafloor Spreading Ridges Using Auv Surveys, Isaac Keohane

Theses and Dissertations

Locating hydrothermal chimney sites unlocks research into their correlations with geology, lithospheric cooling, and deep-sea biogeography at seafloor spreading ridges. High-resolution bathymetry and sidescan sonar collected by Automated Underwater Vehicles allows for chimneys, only a few meters wide and tall, and fissures, only a few meters wide, to be resolved across large areas (>100 km2). We developed a Chimney Identification Tool (CIT) that utilizes a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a Machine-Learning model able to classify based on shapes and textures, to identify chimneys in 1m-gridded bathymetry. We then utilized the CIT to identify many potential off-axis chimney structures at …

The Dynamic Nature Of Wrack: An Investigation Into Wrack Movement And Impacts On Coastal Marshes Using Suas, Grayson R. Morgan, Daniel R. Morgan, Cuizhen Wang, Michael E. Hodgson, Steven R. Schill

Faculty Publications

This study investigates the use of small unoccupied aerial systems (sUAS) as a new remote sensing tool to identify and track the spatial distribution of wrack on coastal tidal marsh systems. We used sUAS to map the wrack movement in a Spartina alterniflora-dominated salt marsh monthly for one year including before and after Hurricane Isaias that brought strong winds, rain, and storm surge to the area of interest in August 2020. Flight parameters for each data collection mission were held constant including collection only during low tide. Wrack was visually identified and digitized in a GIS using every mission orthomosaic …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Lidar-Change-Based Mapping Of Sediment Movement From An Extreme Rainfall Event, Silvia E. Piovan, Michael E. Hodgson, Paolo Mozzi, Dwayne E. Porter, Bryan Hall

Faculty Publications

Mapping landscape change at fine scales (e.g. < 1.0 m resolution) using airborne LiDAR data from manned aircraft is a significant challenge. This challenge is magnified in disaster response contexts. A combination of collection and processing factors contributes to horizontal and vertical errors (and resulting uncertainty) in each pre- and post-LiDAR derived digital elevation model (DEM). Subsequently, the errors in the change surface from the two (or more) DEMs are an accumulation of the errors in the individual DEMs. Thus, reliable mapping erosion/deposition changes at sub-meter precision in change detection studies using LiDAR data is largely the domain of terrestrial LiDAR or sUAS with LiDAR scanners rather than manned aircraft. Unfortunately, terrestrial and sUAS LiDAR scanners are not well suited for mapping large areas and sUAS collections are subject to additional airspace constraints compared to manned aircraft. In this study, we probed one of the significant issues in airborne LiDAR change projects–vertical height errors from sequential flight lines. A simplified solution for determining flight line vertical biases in areas of low topographic relief with natural cover types was developed and tested for normalizing point clouds. The approach was tested in a fine-scale erosion/deposition study from an extreme rainfall event that eroded and deposited sand at depths of about 1.0 m. Airborne LiDAR had been collected prior to the rainfall event, and another airborne LiDAR collection was made 1 month after the event. Eleven field campaigns to collect reference data and visit anomalies in the change surface were conducted in a 15-month period after the event, beginning 25 February 2016 and ending 8 May 2017. The validation results indicate accuracies for the pre-event and post-event LiDAR derived DEMs were 7.8 cm and 13.0 cm RMSE, respectively. After modeling vertical errors and corrections applied to the post-event point clouds, the RMSE for the post-event DEM was 8.3 cm. In the depositional use case, 27 locations were sampled with auger boreholes/sand pits and compared with LiDAR-based change. The LiDAR-based change detection analysis resulted in predicted sand depth accuracies of 94% with a mean error of 4.7 cm.

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 …

The Role Of A Green Bank In South Carolina: A Market & Feasibility Assessment, Jory Fleming, Claire Windsor

Faculty Publications

A market and feasibility report that explores the role of a green bank in South Carolina. This report is the culmination of a multi-year process that included a comprehensive market assessment and interviews with over 60 organizations across South Carolina. It demonstrates that a green bank could play a vital role in South Carolina by creating a dedicated institution working to accelerate the flow of capital to projects that seek to reduce carbon pollution and increase resilience to climate impacts.

Mission Planning For Low Altitude Aerial Drones During Water Sampling, Michael E. Hodgson, Nikolaos I. Vitzilaios, Michael L. Myrick, Tammi L. Richardson, Matt Duggan, Kazi Ragib I. Sanim, Michail Kalaitzakis, Bhanuprakash Kosaraju, Caitlyn English, Zechariah Kitzhaber

Faculty Publications

Mission planning for small uncrewed aerial systems (sUAS) as a platform for remote sensors goes beyond the traditional issues of selecting a sensor, flying altitude/speed, spatial resolution, and the date/time of operation. Unlike purchasing or contracting imagery collections from traditional satellite or manned airborne systems, the sUAS operator must carefully select launching, landing, and flight paths that meet both the needs of the remote sensing collection and the regulatory requirements of federal, state, and local regulations. Mission planning for aerial drones must consider temporal and geographic changes in the environment, such as local weather conditions or changing tidal height. One …

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 …

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. …

Prisoners Of Scale: Downscaling Community Resilience Measurements For Enhanced Use, Sahar Derakshan, Leah Blackwood, Margot Habets, Julia F. Effgen, Susan L. Cutter

Faculty Publications

As improved data availability and disaster resilience knowledge help progress community resilience quantification schemes, spatial refinements of the associated empirical methods become increasingly crucial. Most existing empirically based indicators in the U.S. use county-level data, while qualitatively based schemes are more locally focused. The process of replicating resilience indices at a sub-county level includes a comprehensive study of existing databases, an evaluation of their conceptual relevance in the framework of resilience capitals, and finally, an analysis of the statistical significance and internal consistency of the developed metrics. Using the U.S. Gulf Coast region as a test case, this paper demonstrates …

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. …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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). …

Off-Peak Ndvi Correction To Reconstruct Landsat Time Series For Post-Fire Recovery In High-Latitude Forests, Cuizhen Wang, Aiai Wang, Dianfan Guo, Haibo Li, Shuying Zang

Faculty Publications

Collecting long-term satellite image series in high latitudes has been challenging due to its short growing season. For off-peak imagery, its reflective properties need to be corrected to maintain the spectral consistency. This study compares three statistical approaches to reconstructing a 30-year normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) series for forest recovery assessment after the 1987 Black Dragon Fire in the Greater Hinggan Mountains Forest, Northeast China. To correct the off-peak NDVI to peak NDVI, the Landsat paired regression takes advantage of the scene-to-scene linear relationship between the two images, the GIMMS booster approach compensates the NDVI increment rate based on …

Teaching The “Wicked” In Geography: Educational Structure, Standards, And Teacher Training As Obstacles To Teaching About Climate Change, Jerry T. Mitchell

Journal of the South Carolina Academy of Science

No abstract provided.

Deep Learning Of High-Resolution Aerial Imagery For Coastal Marsh Change Detection: A Comparative Study, Grayson R. Morgan, Cuizhen Wang, Zhenlong Li, Steven R. Schill, Daniel R. Morgan

Faculty Publications

Deep learning techniques are increasingly being recognized as effective image classifiers. Aside from their successful performance in past studies, the accuracies have varied in complex environments, in comparison with the popularly of applied machine learning classifiers. This study seeks to explore the feasibility of using a U-Net deep learning architecture to classify bi-temporal, high-resolution, county-scale aerial images to determine the spatial extent and changes of land cover classes that directly or indirectly impact tidal marsh. The image set used in the analysis is a collection of a 1-m resolution collection of National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) tiles from 2009 and …

The Times, They Are A-Changin’: Tracking Shifts In Mental Health Signals From Early Phase To Later Phase Of The Covid-19 Pandemic In Australia, Siqin Wang, Xiao Huang, Tao Hu, Mengxi Zhang, Zhenlong Li, Huan Ning, Jonathan Corcoran, Asaduzzaman Khan, Yan Liu, Jiajia Zhang Ph.D., Xiaoming Li Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

Introduction Widespread problems of psychological distress have been observed in many countries following the outbreak of COVID-19, including Australia. What is lacking from current scholarship is a national-scale assessment that tracks the shifts in mental health during the pandemic timeline and across geographic contexts.

Methods Drawing on 244 406 geotagged tweets in Australia from 1 January 2020 to 31 May 2021, we employed machine learning and spatial mapping techniques to classify, measure and map changes in the Australian public’s mental health signals, and track their change across the different phases of the pandemic in eight Australian capital cities.

Results Australians’ …