Geography Commons^™

An Evaluation Of Data Collected By Middle School And College-Level Students In Stream Channel Geomorphic Assessment, Martin D. Lafrenz

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

This project tested the accuracy and repeatability of geomorphic stream channel assessments conducted by two different middle school classes from the Walt Morey Middle School in Troutdale, OR and college students from Portland State University in Portland, OR. Each group surveyed the same three cross-sections in Fairview Creek, a tributary to the Lower Columbia River, in order to assess stream channel geometry, discharge, composition of the bed material, and water quality. The three student groups were all able to accurately document the stream channel geometry, including stream width and mean depth, indicating that these data can be successfully collected by …

The Elwha River Restoration: Landscape Change, Salmon, And Sense Of Place, Kelseyanne Johnson

All Master's Theses

Removal of the Elwha River dams to restore the ecosystem and salmon fisheries is the largest project of its kind in the history of the United States. Spanning decades and affecting generations, this project has changed and will continue to change the landscape. This research examined the influence of the anticipated return of salmon on 18 key stakeholders' sense of place of the Elwha River. For almost all stakeholders, changes to the Elwha landscape are welcomed as they expect that salmon will restore the ecosystem to its natural state. Narrative data revealed dominant themes in participants' sense of place expressed …

Applying The Principles Of Spatial Modelling To The Management Of Biodiversity In The Fragmented Landscapes Of South-Western Australia, Shaun Molloy

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Biodiversity conservation throughout the world is challenged by the impacts of a changing climate on fragmented landscapes. To mitigate these threats, conservation managers require models which can demonstrate the consequences of both negative impacts and management actions. This need can be addressed through spatial modelling applications. Unfortunately, throughout much of the world, spatial modelling is forgone, being seen as requiring skills and resources beyond the means of many conservation planners and managers. This thesis seeks to address this dilemma by delivering criteria for a successful modelling application and by providing case studies which demonstrate how appropriate modelling can be undertaken …

Men's Modesty, Religion, And The State: Spaces Of Collision, Karen M. Morin

Faculty Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Determinants Of Neighborhood Exposure To Extreme Heat: A Spatial Examination Of El Paso And Juárez, 2010, Faraj Mohamad Aboargob

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Numerous studies have been conducted on the modification of local weather by the urban environment. In studying urban environmental effects on the urban heat island (UHI), researchers have investigated influences such as land use, vegetation density, topography, population density, and neighborhood socioeconomic status. Many studies have used data collected from field observations, while other studies relied solely on computer modeling. This Dissertation research used a spatial analysis approach, which has been less widely employed, to investigate neighborhood level biophysical, built environmental and socio-demographic determinants of the El Paso and Juárez UHI. The research utilized inexpensive data obtained from US and …

Summer Land Surface Temperature: Small-Local Variation In Intro-Urban Environment In El Paso, Tx, Mactar Mohamed

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

ABSTRACT

It has been well documented that rapid urbanization and population growth have led to the transformation of the natural landscape into anthropogenic urban land and changed such surface physical properties as albedo, energy balance, and surface roughness. Cities, therefore, will be warmer at the urban areas than the rural lands; this situation creates a phenomenon called Urban Heat Island (UHI).

In the recent decades, numerous approaches to study the variation of land surface temperature during daytime have emerged; however, little is known about the variation during nighttime. This study addressed the spatial variation of Summer Nighttime Land Surface Temperature …

Lamar, Mirabeau Buonaparte, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Provides a biographical portrait and career overview of Mirabeau Lamar (1798-1859) who served as the second President of the Republic of Texas from 1838-1841.

Identifying Ditch Geometry And Top Of The Bank Location Using Airborne Lidar Point Cloud, Naime Celik

Open Access Theses

The geometry of agricultural drainage ditches is very important in crop production as it impacts drainage of cropland and affects vegetation and soil erosion along the banks of the ditches. Thus, implementation of water conservation and management practices in engineered and natural ditches necessitates determination of ditch geometry along the reach of the ditch. This study explores the use of airborne commercial Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology to identify the top of the ditch banks. The method was developed to obtain the normalized cross sectional shape of the ditch using one-dimensional spline fits to ground classified points from the …

Disinvestment And Suburban Decline, Robert Streetar

School of Business Student Theses and Dissertations

Beginning in the mid-1970s, U.S. suburbs started to experience many of the same problems typically associated with earlier inner-city decline including accelerating income decline, increasing family poverty, falling housing prices, growing income polarization, escalating crime, and increasing racial and ethnic diversity.

Conventional wisdom often lays the blame for neighborhood decline on who moves in and who moves out. This is understandable, as neighborhood migration is easily observable. It is the hypothesis of this research, though, that the less visible disinvestment of capital from suburban neighborhoods is an initial cause of suburban decline that precedes and coincides with the more observable …

Hunger Strike: The Body As Resource, Reecia Orzeck

Faculty Publications - Geography, Geology, and the Environment

[In the absence of an abstract the beginning of the Introduction is provided.] The first coordinated hunger strike at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility began in February of 2002, and the last of these strikers were the first to be fed against their will by the United States Department of Defense (Dao 2002). During the June/ July 2005 strike, approximately 50 of the 52 to 200 detainees on strike were fed intravenously (Gutierrez 2005: 9, 11). When the strike recommenced in August as many as 20 of its 76 to 210 participants were being kept at the camp hospital and …

Rice, Tobacco, And Agricultural Globalization: Exploring The Narrative Of The Chinese Agricultural Colony In Sub-Saharan Africa, Hunter Bradley

Geography Honors Projects

According to media outlets, China's involvement in the Sub-Saharan African agricultural sector is part of a colonial land grab to meet the needs of a modernizing China. This paper challenges this narrative by examining the two constituent narrative elements: 1) China actively purchases land or land rights to meet the food needs at home and 2) that this process has led to decreased food security for African states. Using Zimbabwe and Mozambique as cases, this paper demonstrates China's participation is not part of a long-term food security strategy and is better understood in light of the "Go Out Policy." However, …

Scaling Food Security: A Political Ecology Of Agricultural Policies And Practices In Bukidnon, Philippines, Ryan Ehrhart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Debates over food security strategies in the Philippines have pitted the neoliberal paradigm of trade liberalization, export cropping, and chemical and biotech agricultural methods against the food sovereignty paradigm of protectionism, staple cropping, and sustainable agriculture methods.

The Philippine government has long pushed for yield increases of staples. However, there has been dissonance between governmental desires for rice self-sufficiency and pursuit of a more export-oriented agricultural economy. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Trade Organization have pressured the government of the Philippines to adopt various tenets of neoliberalism (trade liberalization, privatization, deregulation, …

From Property Abandonment To Predatory Equity: Writings On Financialization And Urban Space In New York City, Desiree Justina Fields

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Financial markets, actors and imperatives are increasingly central to today's global capitalism, even in areas of the economy traditionally distinct from finance, such as real estate. This financialization changes the role of mortgage capital in urban space from building place-bound wealth to facilitating the extraction of value from place. This dissertation addresses questions about how financialization operates in the rental market, specifically its relation to: earlier processes of urban disinvestment, ongoing social and political struggles around urban space, the meaning of home and social reproduction. These questions correspond to broader theoretical debates about the contingent relationship between today's urban context …

Claiming Space, Redefining Politics: Urban Protest And Grassroots Power In Bolivia, Carwil Bjork-James

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the role of space-claiming protests by primarily left grassroots social movements in Bolivia's current political transformation. Space claiming includes mass protests that physically control or symbolically claim urban space through occupations of plazas and roads, sit-ins, blockades, and other measures. As a theoretical construct, space claiming brings together tactics of collective action and meanings of public spaces, and looks at the consequences of their interaction. This dissertation is based on ethnographic engagement and oral interviews with protest participants and their state interlocutors during twelve months of fieldwork and archival research. By using detailed ethnographic evidence--of social life …

Factors Influencing The Capacity Of Communities To Respond To Coastal Erosion In The Upper Gulf Of Thailand, Chatchai Intatha

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Local communities must have a capacity to ameliorate coastal erosion impacts. Since coastal erosion operates over long time frames, understanding this capacity, or the abilities of communities to respond to the impacts and recover to maintain community functions, requires analysis of the past and the present. This study explores factors which influence the capacity of communities to respond to coastal erosion and conversely how exposure to coastal erosion itself affects community capacity.

Mixed methods research was used to investigate the views of respondents in seven coastal villages in the upper Gulf of Thailand, three from an area that has experienced …

Distinguished Historical Geography Lecture: Carceral Space And The Usable Past, Karen M. Morin

Faculty Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Geographical Literacies And Their Publics: Reflections On The American Scene, Karen M. Morin

Faculty Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Gis Prototype Modeling Of Landslide Susceptibility And Risk Perception - Aguas Calientes (Machu Picchu Pueblo), Peru: An Exploratory Approach, Alicia Felice Tyson

Geography and the Environment: Graduate Student Capstones

Tourism is an increasingly important and developing sector of the Peruvian economy and the country is fast-tracking development to accommodate an influx of tourists, reportedly over 1.8 million/year. Situated in the southwest region of Peru, Aguas Calientes (Machu Picchu Pueblo) continues to develop infrastructure to keep pace with this burgeoning tourism industry. Regional geology and hydrology are importation factors influencing the ability to accommodate tourism in Aguas Calientes. Located at the confluence of three rivers, the town is also situated in a watershed with high return intervals for flooding and mass wasting triggered by the sudden, intense rainfall characterizing the …

Community Loss: A New Social Indicator, Jochen Albrecht, Mimi Abramovitz

Publications and Research

The Community Loss Index ðCLIÞ, a new social indicator, focuses on the understudied role of place as a source of stress and an aggregator of individual experiences. Building on the relationship between loss and stress, the index attempts to capture collective loss, defined as the chronic exposure by neighborhood residents to multiple resource losses at the same time. Using maps, the article analyzes the spatial distribution of six types of loss in New York City and the characteristics of people who live in high- and low-loss neighborhoods. Regionalization reveals a neighborhood-based concentration of loss, patterns of loss that are both …

The Educational Training Of Storm Chasers And Storm Spotters In Relation To Geographical Dispersion Across The United States, Paul R. Zunkel

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

When severe weather strikes, storm chasers and storm spotters confirm that what forecasters and meteorologists are seeing on a radar screen is actually occurring in the field. While some documenters are classically trained (i.e. they have a background in atmospheric science and or meteorology attained from a 4 year university) many others are not. There are currently two organizations available for the weather enthusiast to be a part of, SKYWARN and SpotterNetwork. These organizations give weather enthusiasts a background knowledge into severe weather; however, many weather enthusiasts are not classically trained and most have not taken any formal education in …

Complexity And Salience: Evaluating The Inter-Scene Variability Of Animated Choropleth Maps, Michael Dubois

Theses and Dissertations

Animated choropleth maps allow for the compilation of potentially massive time-series datasets which can portray space-time change in a congruent manner. They are also becoming increasingly common for data visualization. When users view and interact with these maps, however, there is the likelihood that the human cognitive-perceptual system may be overwhelmed by a large number of simultaneous changes in each scene: this so-called `change blindness' is a common malady when viewing successive scenes, unless scene-to-scene graphical changes are salient enough to attract the fixation of the user. Even then, there may be a limit to the number of simultaneous changes …

An Assessment Of Technology Adoptability In Sugarcane Burning Smoke Plume Mitigation, Sara Flecher

Theses and Dissertations

The adverse health effects of sugarcane burning emissions on surrounding communities are well documented. Sugarcane farmers in Louisiana, a major sugarcane producing state with 385,000 acres dedicated to sugarcane farming throughout, attempt to mitigate the effects of burn emissions by estimating the characteristics of the resultant smoke plume using meteorological variables as parameters. The current mitigation method designed by the LSU AgCenter, the American Sugar Cane League, and the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry is a manual process requiring the tedious look-up of atmospheric variables from multiple sources and physically drawing a predicted smoke plume on a paper map, …

A Geographic Modeling Framework For Assessing Critical Infrastructure Vulnerability: Energy Infrastructure Case Study, Leanne Sulewski

Theses and Dissertations

Vulnerability of critical infrastructure systems is of the utmost importance to a nation's national security interests, especially the electric grid. Despite the importance of these systems, disruptions continue to occur at an alarming rate, thus indicating that there is a fundamental flaw in the way critical infrastructure systems are analyzed for vulnerability.

Critical infrastructure systems are typically analyzed using mathematical approaches such as graph theory, which strip systems of their important geographic information, and only look at their connections to each other. While these relationships and metrics provide useful information, they cannot provide the entire picture. As such, this research …

Determining The Differences In Hurricane Perception And Evacuation Behavior In The Elderly Of South Carolina, Gregg C. Bowser

Theses and Dissertations

The United States is becoming a "grayer" nation. U.S. Administration of Aging projections indicate that by 2030 nearly 20 percent of the national population will be aged 65 or older, with a significant portion of this growth occurring along the hurricane-prone Atlantic and Gulf coasts. This demographic shift creates new challenges for emergency management. Previous research shows that the elderly do not perceive risks and warnings the same way as other groups, and as a result may react differently to risk. Disproportionately high fatality rates for the elderly in recent disasters indicate that these differences are a key determinant of …

Youth Citizenship, Civic Education, And Spaces Of Belonging In Tallinn, Estonia, Catherine Michelle Cottrell

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigated the ways that young people in Tallinn, Estonia conceptualize citizenships, identities, and belongings in national and post-national communities. Focus groups were conducted with 29 students from ethnic Estonian and Russophone backgrounds in their final year of secondary school; in-depth interviews were conducted with 16 civic education teachers from the students' schools. Theories of citizenship and nationalism, as well as civic education research, were used to explore the ways in which young people conceptualize the terms of belonging and negotiate cultural difference as they move within and through their everyday spaces, particularly in the school. The study demonstrated …

Hyperspectral Image Classification Using A Spectral-Spatial Sparse Coding Model, Ender Oguslu, Guoqing Zhou, Jiang Li, Lorenzo Bruzzone (Ed.)

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

We present a sparse coding based spectral-spatial classification model for hyperspectral image (HSI) datasets. The proposed method consists of an efficient sparse coding method in which the l₁/l_q regularized multi-class logistic regression technique was utilized to achieve a compact representation of hyperspectral image pixels for land cover classification. We applied the proposed algorithm to a HSI dataset collected at the Kennedy Space Center and compared our algorithm to a recently proposed method, Gaussian process maximum likelihood (GP-ML) classifier. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve significantly better performances than the GP-ML classifier when training data …

A Historical Geography Of Sand Island 1870–1944, Lucas P. Johnson

Department of Geography: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines the settlement of Sand Island, one of two permanent colonies included within Lake Superior’s Apostle Islands archipelago. Following the introduction and literature review, a summary of Sand Island’s geology, climate and biological features is presented, serving to construct a baseline upon which to build a discussion of the island’s communal life. This foundation gives context to the seventy-four year struggle faced by the predominantly Norwegian immigrants adapting to that environment. It also serves to assist future scholars in studying wilderness recovery after what today is nearly an eighty year absence of the farmer’s plow. Chapter Four includes …

Preserving Place: A Grounded Theory Of Citizen Participation In Community-Based Planning, Pamela Jo Hatley

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

For this research project I used grounded theory methodology and qualitative research methods to examine how and why citizens participated in local community-based planning and land development entitlement processes, and learn about their experiences participating in those processes. I conceptualized the citizens' main concern as preserving the character of the place they consider their community. This research demonstrates that citizens participate in community-based planning and land development entitlement processes out of a concern for preserving the character of their communities. They define the character of their communities in terms of their geographic boundaries, history, traditions, people, lifestyle, and qualitative features …

Ecological Diversity In Hillsborough County, Florida: Correlations Between Landscape Metrics And Socio-Demographic Variables, David Godfrey

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Landscape metrics, a means of quantifying landscape attributes, are frequently used in landscape ecology to describe the spatial characteristics of a landscape, but they have been less often used in anthropology. Using geographic information system (GIS) software, this study tests a method that investigates statistical correlations between groundcover landscape metrics and socio-demographic variables in Hillsborough County, Florida. Statistically significant correlations were found, illustrating the potential utility of this exploratory method. Wealthier areas with fewer ethnic minorities tend to be more fragmented and diverse in terms of groundcover; these areas also tend to have a lower percentage of impervious surfaces. The …

Eco-Epidemiology Of Eastern Equine Encephalitis Virus, Patrick Vander Kelen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Eastern Equine Encephalitis virus (EEEV) is an alphavirus with high pathogenicity in both humans and horses. Florida continues to have the highest occurrence of human cases in the USA, with four fatalities recorded in 2010. Unlike other states, Florida supports year-round EEEV transmission. This research uses Geographic Information Science (GIS) to examine spatial patterns of documented sentinel seroconversions and horse cases in order to understand the relationships between habitat and transmission intensity of EEEV in Florida. Sentinel sites were categorized as enzootic, periodically enzootic, and negative based on the amount of chicken seroconversions to EEEV. Sentinel sites were analyzed …