Geography Commons^™

Volunteer Environmental Stewardship And Affective Labour In Philadelphia, Alec Foster

Faculty Publications - Geography, Geology, and the Environment

Recent research has critically evaluated the rapid growth of volunteer urban environmental stewardship. Framings of this phenomenon have largely focused upon environmentality and/or neoliberal environments, unfortunately often presenting a totalising picture of the state and/or market utilising power from above to create environmental subjects with limited agency available to local citizens. Based upon qualitative research with volunteer urban environmental stewards in Philadelphia, affective labour is proposed as an alternative explanation for participation. Stewards volunteered their time and labour due to the intense emotional attachments they formed with their neighbourhoods, neighbours, and nonhuman others in relationships of affective labour. Volunteer urban …

Climate Science Literacy: A Study Of Climate Programs' Usability, Amber Rochelle Williams

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Literacy is an important facet of understanding how undergraduate college students comprehend climate science. This research, conducted at West Virginia University, examines the usability of climate data in three commonly used climate programs to reduce the prominent knowledge gap in climate science literacy about college students.

The objective of this research is to investigate the knowledge gap in climate science literacy by conducting focus group surveys to examine the usability of programs that use climate datasets. The three programs used in this research were the NOAA online tool, NASA’s Panoply data viewer, and GrADS programmable tool. The NOAA tool is …

Measuring Agricultural Drought And Uncertainty In Future Drought Projections, Junyu Lu

Theses and Dissertations

Drought is a devastating, recurring, and widespread natural hazard that affects natural habitats, ecosystems, and economic and social sectors. Within the agricultural sector, droughts can reduce soil-water availability, affect water and soil quality, contribute to crop failures and pasture losses, and severely reduce crop yield. Effective drought quantification and early warning are critical for drought risk adaptation. Moreover, future drought risks could be exacerbated due to climate change. Modeling how climate change might influence future drought risks is of great importance in natural resources and water resources planning management. This dissertation has three parts. 1) The first part compares and …

Everyday Occupations: Traffic, Hazards, And Mobility In The West Bank, Alice Arnold

Theses and Dissertations

Mobility in the West Bank is inherently tied to the Israeli military occupation. Each new stage of the decades old conflict comes with new implications for the way Palestinians move around the West Bank. The past years have seen a transition during which the severe mobility restrictions that constituted the closure policy of the second intifada eased and intercity travel has increased. In this study I examine day-to-day experiences of mobility in the West Bank in the post-closure period. In doing so I highlight the ways in which routine experiences of mobility, those with traffic, road hazards, and infrastructure, bring …

Internal Gravity Wave Detection During The 21 August 2017 Total Solar Eclipse, Michael J.W. Stewart

Theses and Dissertations

Total solar eclipses supply both visual captivation and a controlled meteorological experiment through a sudden decrease in solar radiation. However, along with commonly expected changes in weather conditions, prior research suggests an adjustment of atmospheric dynamics caused by both a decrease in local incident solar radiation and the Moon’s sweeping shadow across the Earth at supersonic speed. The result is the potential production of internal gravity waves, which transfer both energy and momentum vertically to and from the upper levels of the atmosphere. A series of radiosondes were launched before, during, and after the 21 August 2017 eclipse in Batesburg, …

Multi-Scale Flow Mapping And Spatiotemporal Analysis Of Origin-Destination Mobility Data, Xi Zhu

Theses and Dissertations

Data on spatial mobility have become increasingly available with the wide use of location-aware technologies such as GPS and smart phones. The analysis of movements is involved in a wide range of domains such as demography, migration, public health, urban study, transportation and biology.

A movement data set consists of a set of moving objects, each having a sequence of sampled locations as the object moves across space. The locations (points) in different trajectories are usually sampled independently and trajectory data can become very big such as billions of geotagged tweets, mobile phone records, floating vehicles, millions of migrants, etc. …

Analysis Of Evacuation Behaviors And Departure Timing For October 2016’S Hurricane Matthew, Erika O. Pham

Theses and Dissertations

During a hurricane, an individual’s risk perception does not remain static. Spatial and temporal variations of a hurricane will shift perceptions of risk, and complicating this dynamic are information-seeking processes increasingly reliant on the individual’s self-motivated interpretation of information sources. Initial evacuation resistance or willingness could change even after evacuations are ordered, affecting evacuation preferences and departure times. Because Hurricane Matthew’s continually shifting track had virtually nonstop coverage, evacuation decisions were also being modified as residents either grew more or less certain of their safety.

This research investigates the evacuation behaviors associated with Hurricane Matthew in October of 2016. It …

Anthropogenic Influences On Sedimentation In The Chicken Creek Watershed Of South Carolina, Tyler L. Dearman

Theses and Dissertations

Anthropogeomorphic changes in response to destructive agricultural practices followed the arrival of European settlers into the Americas. The southeastern Piedmont physiographic region of the USA was severely affected by erosion and sedimentation following settlement in the 1700s and farming up through the 1930s. Deep floodplain aggradation formed uninterrupted alluvial deposits that extended many km. This research examines anthropogenic impacts of land-use change on valley bottom sedimentation in the Chicken Creek Watershed of South Carolina. Abrupt contacts between pre-settlement floodplain soils and a thick overburden of legacy sediment are common throughout the two-km study reach and provide clear evidence of extensive …

Catchment Hydrology In The Anthropocene: Impacts Of Land-Use And Climate Change On Stormwater Runoff, Chen-Ling Jenny Hung

Theses and Dissertations

Urbanization and climate change are associated with extreme changes to hydrologic processes that alter the amount and timing of runoff delivery in the Anthropocene. This dissertation research examined the degree of urbanization, climate change, and hydrologic responses in Rocky Branch Watershed (RBW), a small, highly urbanized catchment with dense vegetation canopy in Columbia, South Carolina. This dissertation is composed of three parts: (1) an automated algorithm for mapping building impervious areas (BIA) from remote sensing data for estimating percent impervious area (PIA), (2) a paired watershed study contrasting a forested with an urban watershed, and (3) a hydrologic simulation model …

Comparison Of Sentinel-2 And Landsat 8 Oli In The Mapping Of Soil Salinity In Hyde County, North Carolina, Eleanor Davis

Theses and Dissertations

This study presents the first comparison of Landsat 8 OLI and Sentinel-2A MSI imagery in identifying soil salinity using soil physiochemical, spectral, statistical, and image analysis techniques. By the end of the century, intermediate sea level rise scenarios project approximately 1.3 meters (4.2 feet) of sea level rise along the coast of the southeastern United States. One of the most vulnerable areas is Hyde County, North Carolina, where 440 square miles of agricultural lands are being salinized, endangering 4,200 people and 40 million dollars of property. To determine the best multispectral sensor to map the extent of salinization, this study …

Tweets About Tornado Warnings: A Spatiotemporal And Content Analysis, Raelene C. Campbell

Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the United States, tornadoes frequently occur throughout the entire year. With each tornado there is a tornado warning that the National Weather Service (NWS) issues with a goal of protecting life and property. By using social media, these messages quickly reach the public. By analyzing Twitter data, this study aims to gain a spatiotemporal understanding of tweets, including when and where they most frequently occur. Most tweets occur within the warning time (temporal) and inside the warning polygon (spatial). To gain a better understanding of the information the tweet contains, a content analysis shows key warning characteristics such as …

Why Is No One Getting A Weave Of An Afro: Examining Culture, Economy, And Domestic Human Hair Consumption By African American Women, Brittani Young

Theses and Dissertations

The market for human hair, in the form of wigs and hair weaves, has grown exponentially, with African American women comprising a significant portion of consumers in the United States. Similar to other markets, the structure and patterns of hair consumption by African American women is the result of a variety of historical and geographical factors. In this thesis I investigate the role of African American women in the global human hair trade, and consider the implications of contemporary discourses around ‘good’ and ‘black’ hair in order to better understand trade in human hair. In particular, I use a combination …

From Rhetoric To Response: Climate Change, Conflict, And Development In Karamoja, Uganda, Daniel Abrahams

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the broad question: How do the discourses of climate change and conflict travel across time and space to become policy, programming, and ultimately a development initiative that exist on the ground? To answer this question, I broke the research into three separate papers. The first examines how the US policy community approaches, understands and seeks to address the discourses of climatesecurity. The second examines the ways in which climate change affects conflict outcomes in Karamoja, Uganda. And the third, using the efforts of Mercy Corps in Karamoja as a case study, examines the realities and opportunities in …

Investigation Of Hydrologic Change In The South Fork Edisto Basin 1981-2016, Alexander Preston Butler

Theses and Dissertations

Increased demands on water resources coupled with an increased awareness of the need to preserve environmental flows have led to a need to understand how anthropogenic activities may have impacted water resources in South Carolina. The South Fork of the Edisto River has been facing increasing demands for both surface water and groundwater. This research investigated if and why hydrologic change, as indicated by a change in the rainfall/ stream discharge relationship, occurred in the South Fork Edisto Basin, in South Carolina, between the years 1980-2016. A double-mass curve analysis, which is corroborated by runoff coefficients, indicates that a fundamental …

Exploring Spatial And Temporal Variability Of Soil And Crop Processes For Irrigation Management, Javier Reyes

Theses and Dissertations--Plant and Soil Sciences

Irrigation needs to be applied to soils in relatively humid regions such as western Kentucky to supply water for crop uptake to optimize and stabilize yields. Characterization of soil and crop variability at the field scale is needed to apply site specific management and to optimize water application. The objective of this work is to propose a characterization and modeling of soil and crop processes to improve irrigation management. Through an analysis of spatial and temporal behavior of soil and crop variables the variability in the field was identified. Integrative analysis of soil, crop, proximal and remote sensing data was …

การพัฒนาระบบสืบค้นข้อมูลการจัดการลดน้ำสูญเสียของการประปาส่วนภูมิภาคด้วยระบบสารสนเทศภูมิศาสตร์บนเว็บ, วราภรณ์ เพชรปฐมชล

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

งานวิจัยนี้มีวัตถุประสงค์เพื่อพัฒนาระบบสืบค้นสารสนเทศภูมิศาสตร์ที่แสดงผลบนเว็บ เพื่อสนับสนุนการวางแผนและจัดการลดน้ำสูญเสียของการประปาส่วนภูมิภาค โดยเลือกใช้ข้อมูลสารสนเทศภูมิศาสตร์ของการประปาส่วนภูมิภาคสาขามวกเหล็ก และซอฟต์แวร์รหัสเปิดในการพัฒนาระบบซึ่งสามารถทำงานบนเว็บเบราว์เซอร์ผ่านเครือข่ายอินเทอร์เน็ต ระบบสืบค้นฯ ประกอบด้วยสถาปัตยกรรม 3 ส่วน ได้แก่ ส่วน client ส่วน web server และส่วน database server ผู้ใช้งานสามารถโต้ตอบกับระบบด้วยการคลิกเลือกเครื่องมือที่ต้องการ ประกอบด้วย เครื่องมือจัดการแผนที่ เครื่องมือระบุข้อมูล (identify) เครื่องมือสอบถามข้อมูล (ad-hoc query) เครื่องมือสืบค้นข้อมูลตามเงื่อนไขที่กำหนดไว้ก่อนหน้า (pre-defined query) ได้แก่ ข้อมูลแนวท่อ ข้อมูลมาตรวัดน้ำที่มีการใช้น้ำผิดปกติ ข้อมูลจุดซ่อมท่อ ข้อมูลการใช้น้ำภายในขอบเขตพื้นที่จ่ายน้ำย่อย และข้อมูลน้ำสูญเสีย ซึ่งสามารถส่งออกผลลัพธ์ในรูปแบบตารางได้ ผลการศึกษาพบว่า ระบบสารสนเทศภูมิศาสตร์บนเว็บที่พัฒนาขึ้นนี้ ผู้ใช้งานสามารถนำข้อมูลไปใช้สนับสนุนการตัดสินใจในการบริหารจัดการลดน้ำสูญเสียของการประปาส่วนภูมิภาคได้เป็นอย่างดี บุคลากรในหน่วยงานสามารถเข้าถึงข้อมูลสารสนเทศภูมิศาสตร์ได้โดยง่าย โดยที่ผู้ใช้งานไม่ต้องมีความเชี่ยวชาญทางด้านคอมพิวเตอร์หรือระบบสารสนเทศภูมิศาสตร์เป็นพื้นฐาน ทำให้ช่วยลดระยะเวลาในการดำเนินงาน และมีความสะดวกมากขึ้นในการดำเนินงาน

Cohens On The Move: Jewish Residential Dynamics In Cincinnati, Ohio, 1940-2000, Carmi J. Neiger

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In the 1960s and 1970s, as many large US cities experienced rapid racial and ethnic demographic shifts, the intra-urban residential settlement and migration patterns of American Jews came to the attention of sociologists and urbanists. Although the interest in this population has waned in favor of more recent immigrant groups, patterns of Jewish residential dynamics continue to evolve, reflecting changes over time in both Jewish religious and ethnic identity and assimilation into mainstream American society. The lack of Census data identifying households by religious affiliation requires an alternative approach to the study of this group. In the first section of …

Public Private Partnerships For Economic Development: Impacts On Shrinking Cities, Brenden M. Geraghty

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Over the last few decades in the United States, Public Private Partnerships have become essential devices to city development and redevelopment. This study examines the uses of Public Private Partnerships within the discipline of Economic Development. The cities researched are located in the Rust Belt region of the United States and their economies have experienced a drastic decline over the last half-century. This research reveals the economic impacts on these shrinking cities that have had programs and projects implemented through the agreements and workings of the public and private sectors. Several factors are analyzed to determine what constitutes the (un)successful …

A Comparative Assessment Of Food Deserts Using Geographic Information Systems (Gis) In El Paso County, Tx And Loudoun County, Va, Amit Ugamraj Raysoni

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

BACKGROUND & SIGNIFICANCE: Consumption of processed foods high in sodium and fat can have a plethora of health complications, including, but not limited to hypertension, high cholesterol levels, obesity, diabetes and cancer. Previous studies have documented that lack of access to viable healthy eating options' grocery stores selling affordable fresh fruits and vegetables - in any neighborhood or area can result in negative public health outcomes. These areas devoid of such grocery stores and healthy eating options can be classified as "Food Deserts", as per one of the criteria adopted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). In addition, …

Design Of Robotic Tram Unit For Field Data Collection, Quetzalcoatl Mendoza Rosas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Satellite remote sensing is the most applied method for detection and measurement of electromagnetic energy and its interaction with Earth surface. the analysis of the data acquired can provide important information with uses in areas as like weather forecasting, military intelligence and environmental and resources location. Due to the great distance from where the samples are taken and even with the most sophisticated sensor it is impossible to have an exactly replica of the Earth surface. As a result, scientist analyze imagery where a single pixel can be the representation of a 30 by 30 meters area of land. This …

Geometry, Timing, And Kinematics Of Neogene Extensional And Transtensional Structures Of Southern Death Valley: Implications For Regional Reconstructions And A Corrective Method For Rigid Body Rotations, Zachariah Fleming

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Chapter 1:Advancements in computing capabilities over the last decade have allowed for the routine creation of Structure from Motion-Multiview Stereo (SfM-MVS) terrain models that can serve as base for high resolution geologic mapping. Outcrops models developed from these systems are high-resolution, photo-realistic 3D base providing unprecedented capability for geometric analysis. Yet, before this technology becomes a mainstay of field geology, the potential errors associated with it must be well understood. Here, we compare orientation measurements from multi-point analyses on the SfM-MVS point clouds to those taken in the field with the objective of resolving the geometry of complex folds within …

Homogenization Of Plant Diversity, Composition, And Structure In North American Urban Yards:, William D. Pearse, Jeannine Cavender-Bares, Sarah E. Hobbie, Meghan L. Avolio, Neil Bettez, Rinku Roy Chowdhury, Lindsay E. Darling, Peter M. Groffman, J. Morgan Grove, Sharon J. Hall, James B. Heffernan, Jennifer Learned, Christopher Neill, Kristen C. Nelson, Diane E. Pataki, Benjamin L. Ruddell, Meredith K. Steele, Tara L.E. Trammell

Geography

Urban ecosystems are widely hypothesized to be more ecologically homogeneous than natural ecosystems. We argue that urban plant communities assemble from a complex mix of horticultural and regional species pools, and evaluate the homogenization hypothesis by comparing cultivated and spontaneously occurring urban vegetation to natural area vegetation across seven major U.S. cities. There was limited support for homogenization of urban diversity, as the cultivated and spontaneous yard flora had greater numbers of species than natural areas, and cultivated phylogenetic diversity was also greater. However, urban yards showed evidence of homogenization of composition and structure. Yards were compositionally more similar across …

Cross-Scale Correlation Between In Situ Measurements Of Canopy Gap Fraction And Landsat-Derived Vegetation Indices With Implications For Monitoring The Seasonal Phenology In Tropical Forests Using Modis Data, Nicholas Cuba, John Rogan, Deborah Lawrence, Christopher A. Williams

Geography

Deciduousness in dry tropical forests results in substantial seasonal changes to canopy gap fractions. The characterization of such structural properties over large areas is necessary for understanding energy and nutrient distribution within forest ecosystems. However, a spatial extrapolation of measurements from relatively few, spatially-concentrated field observations can yield estimated values that have questionable accuracy and precision at regional scales. This paper uses linear regression models to compare measurements of canopy gap fraction from in situ digital cover photography in the dry tropical forest of the Southern Yucatán, Mexico, to measurements of seasonal vegetation change based on three vegetation indices-the Normalized …

Criteria To Confirm Models That Simulate Deforestation And Carbon Disturbance, Robert Gilmore Pontius

Geography

The Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) recommends the Figure of Merit (FOM) as a possible metric to confirm models that simulate deforestation baselines for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD). The FOM ranges from 0% to 100%, where larger FOMs indicate more-accurate simulations. VCS requires that simulation models achieve a FOM greater than or equal to the percentage deforestation during the calibration period. This article analyses FOM's mathematical properties and illustrates FOM's empirical behavior by comparing various models that simulate deforestation and the resulting carbon disturbance in Bolivia during 2010-2014. The Total Operating Characteristic frames FOM's mathematical properties as …

Upside-Down Fluxes Down Under: Co2 Net Sink In Winter And Net Source In Summer In A Temperate Evergreen Broadleaf Forest, Alexandre A. Renchon, Anne Griebel, Daniel Metzen, Christopher A. Williams, Belinda Medlyn, Remko A. Duursma, Craig V.M. Barton, Chelsea Maier, Matthias M. Boer, Peter Isaac, David Tissue, Victor Resco De Dios, Elise Pendall

Geography

Predicting the seasonal dynamics of ecosystem carbon fluxes is challenging in broadleaved evergreen forests because of their moderate climates and subtle changes in canopy phenology. We assessed the climatic and biotic drivers of the seasonality of net ecosystem-atmosphere CO2 exchange (NEE) of a eucalyptus-dominated forest near Sydney, Australia, using the eddy covariance method. The climate is characterised by a mean annual precipitation of 800mm and a mean annual temperature of 18°C, hot summers and mild winters, with highly variable precipitation. In the 4-year study, the ecosystem was a sink each year (-225gCm-2yr-1 on average, with a standard deviation of 108gCm-2yr-1); …

Measurements And Observations In The Xxi Century (Moxxi): Innovation And Multi-Disciplinarity To Sense The Hydrological Cycle, Flavia Tauro, John Selker, Nick Van De Giesen, Tommaso Abrate, Remko Uijlenhoet, Maurizio Porfiri, Salvatore Manfreda, Kelly Caylor, Tommaso Moramarco, Jerome Benveniste, Giuseppe Ciraolo, Lyndon Estes, Alessio Domeneghetti, Matthew T. Perks, Chiara Corbari, Ehsan Rabiei, Giovanni Ravazzani, Heye Bogena, Antoine Harfouche, Luca Broccai, Antonino Maltese, Andy Wickert, Angelica Tarpanelli, Stephen Good, Jose Manuel Lopez Alcala, Andrea Petroselli, Christophe Cudennec, Theresa Blume, Rolf Hut, Salvatore Grimaldia

Geography

To promote the advancement of novel observation techniques that may lead to new sources of information to help better understand the hydrological cycle, the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) established the Measurements and Observations in the XXI century (MOXXI) Working Group in July 2013. The group comprises a growing community of techenthusiastic hydrologists that design and develop their own sensing systems, adopt a multidisciplinary perspective in tackling complex observations, often use low-cost equipment intended for other applications to build innovative sensors, or perform opportunistic measurements. This paper states the objectives of the group and reviews major advances carried out …

Participatory Gis As A Tool For Stakeholder Engagement In Building Resilience To Sea Level Rise: A Demonstration Project, Juita-Elena (Wie) Yusuf, Pragati Rawat, Carol Considine, Michelle Covi, Burton St. John Iii, J. Gail Nicula, Khairul A. Anuar

School of Public Service Faculty Publications

This article describes a participatory geographical information system (PGIS) demonstration project used as part of the stakeholder engagement efforts undertaken by the Citizen Engagement Working Group of the Hampton Roads Sea Level Rise Preparedness and Resilience Intergovernmental Planning Pilot Project. The PGIS demonstration project was conducted in the Little Creek/Pretty Lake case study area in the Hampton Roads region of southeastern coastal Virginia. PGIS served as a deliberative and participatory mechanism to obtain local knowledge from residents about the location of valued assets within the community and locations challenged by increased flooding and sea level rise. The PGIS application, using …

Community-Based Initiatives For Neighborhood And Community Rehabilitation: A Case Study Of The Mission District, San Francisco, California, Francesca Monique Gallardo

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Through the case study of San Francisco, CA’s Mission District, this research project addresses how community-based affordable housing development is operationalized to rehabilitate communities and neighborhoods experiencing effects of gentrification, mass displacement, and cultural dilution. My goals were to identify how the processes of building a sense of community, trust, and cohesion- rehabilitating and critical to affordable housing development efforts in the Mission District? And, how are nonprofit community development organizations engaging with these processes in collaboration with citizen and community partners? The final objective is to provide evidence-based strategies to assist other at-risk minority communities and neighborhoods in the …

Implications Of Unmanned Aircraft Systems And Sense Of Place: A Case Study In The Mono Basin, Sara Elizabeth Matthews

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This paper contributes to an understanding of the social implications of using UAS in natural resource areas; specifically, the ways in which these tools impact human constructed sense of place. This paper draws on in-depth interviews and document analysis to (a) develop an understanding of place meanings held among Mono Basin stakeholders and (b) define the ways in which increased UAS presence may interact with these visions of place.

In short, this research shows that sense of place in this rural area is influential in the way that UAS are received by local stakeholders. The changing nature of place meanings …

Policy Effects Of Resistance Against Mega-Projects In Latin America: An Introduction, Eduardo Silva, Maria Akchurin, Anthony J. Bebbington

Geography

In this introductory article, we present the special issue and outline our research agenda on extractive development, social mobilization, and policy impact in Latin America. We propose a shift in analytical focus from the study of resistance to studying the policy and institutional impacts of mobilization. We outline possible outcomes of interest and conditions contributing to the attainment of policy and institutional change. These conditions include movement characteristics - such as coalitions, repertoires, and alliances with state actors - and the socioeconomic, political, and ideational conditions that shape and constrain patterns of mobilization and the likelihood and durability of its …