Geography Commons^™

Reinforcing Boundaries Does Not Contribute To Change, Julie Urbanik

Animal Sentience

In prescribing blanket policy bans around wildlife and industrial animal farming as a protective response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Wiebers & Feigin ignore the geographical context of their bans and reinforce problematic boundaries between nature and human society, human cultural groups, and animal-related industries.

Comparing Rusle Ls Calculation Methods Across Varying Dem Resolutions, Amanda Moody

All Master's Theses

Soil erosion is a global problem that reduces land productivity and causes environmental degradation. Soil erosion models, such as the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE), are used to estimate the severity and distribution of erosion. The topographic factor (LS), which combines slope length and angle, is an important part of RUSLE. This work compared two methods of L calculation, the grid cumulation (GC) and the contributing area (CA) methods, and two methods of S calculation, the neighborhood (NBR) and maximum downhill slope (MDS) methods. These were compared across digital elevation models (DEMs) of 1, 5, 10, and 30m resolutions. …

Author Biographical Notes, Mssj Staff

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Reviewers And Referees, Mssj Staff

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Volume 22, Full Contents, Mssj Staff

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Prevalence Of Left-Handedness In China 2011: Small-Area Estimates, Hongwei Xu

Publications and Research

Nationally representative survey data and small-area estimation techniques are used to assess the geographic prevalence of left-handedness in China 2011. Measures of individuals’ handedness are their self-reported dominant hand and their hand grip strength, which yield four estimates of left-handed prevalence, and these statistics are recorded at the provincial level. These estimates concord with one another. There are several geographic clusters of high-prevalence rates of left-handers located in ethnic minority-designated autonomous areas or historically revolutionary base areas, which may reflect a deep-rooted sense of defiance to authorities and promote such cultural values as individual autonomy and equality among local people.

Elephants At Work, Jamie Lorimer, Khatijah Rahmat

Animal Sentience

Baker & Winkler (B&W) propose rewilding Asian elephants in a model in which they are rescued, rehabilitated and then given work with their mahouts in ecological restoration and ecotourism. In a sympathetic critique, we explore the status that B&W’s analysis accords to work. Types of work and working conditions need to be differentiated. We caution against a model of conservation that would make the future of life conditional on participating in the workforce.

Places Of Memory And Meaning: The Eastern Sierra And Mojave Desert, Glenn Pascall

Eastern Sierra History Journal

A long-time lover of the Eastern Sierra, Glenn Pascall recalls in words and photographs how and why this region of staggering beauty has resonated so deeply with him.

The Ever-Changing World Of The Paiute, Joseph Lent

Eastern Sierra History Journal

In this important article, Joseph Lent offers a counter-narrative to settler-colonial conceptions of what we now call the Eastern Sierra that derives its power from the oral histories of the Paiute nation.

Crucible Of The Modern Republic: The Yosemite Grant And Environmental Citizenship, Jen A. Huntley

Eastern Sierra History Journal

The Yosemite Grant, which established the basis for the state, later national park in the central Sierra, initiated a powerful new force that constituted a tipping point in American environmental history, Jen A. Huntley argues. A moment in US history when the right combination of people and politics and ideas hit a nerve in the broad social psyche of a time and launched a new environmental understanding.

Eastern Sierra Water: Historic Choices That Shaped California, David Carle

Eastern Sierra History Journal

The story of Los Angeles' legendary water grab in the Eastern Sierra is well and often told. David Carle reengages compellingly with this history in this reflective essay that condenses a century's worth of battles over the flow and distribution of what some have called "white gold."

Horse Meadows And Bohler Canyon Arborglyphs: History Recorded On The Trees, Nancy Hadlock, Richard Potashin

Eastern Sierra History Journal

In this close reading of Arborglyphs in canyons above the Mono Basin, the authors discuss how and why Basque shepherds and others carved their names with knives into (mostly) Aspens. Documenting these expressive markings is one way to reclaim the shepherd-artists' names and something of their experiences in the High Sierra tending their flocks.

Making The Past Present: Editor's Note, Char Miller

Eastern Sierra History Journal

For this inaugural volume of the ESHJ, editor Char Miller discusses the formative role that writer Mary Austin (1868-1934) has had in identifying many of the Eastern Sierra's key features, natural and human. This new journal hopes to add to the intellectual work that she launched, serving as a window into this complex, fascinating, and contested region.

A Photometric Study Of The South Polar Terrain Of Enceladus, Bereket Daniel Mamo

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Saturn's moon, Enceladus, is a unique body in the Solar System. It is an icy world with ongoing geologic activity that spews out jets of ice particles, water vapor, and other gases from active tectonic fractures (called sulci) near its south pole. Emission from these jets is the dominant source of particles for Saturn's diffuse E ring, which envelops other icy satellites. The south polar fractures are also sources of tidally generated high heat flow. Accurate determination of this endogenic thermal output requires knowledge of the thermophysical properties of the surface, which are reliably estimated by modeling the photometric behavior …

Tropical Cyclone Vulnerability Of Atlantic Coastal Counties In The United States, Zachary Alexander

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

1. Abstract

   Coastal populations along the Atlantic Coast of the United States face a persistent threat of tropical cyclones. Tropical cyclones of any strength can cause significant damages and losses to both life and property. As coastal populations continue to rise in a changing climate, the power of knowing which communities are the most and least vulnerable to future tropical cyclone events can assist in mitigating some of the losses. This paper explores the factors that make a coastal community more or less vulnerable to tropical cyclones based on prior natural hazards research and creates a relative index that will tell …

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Deep Learning For Overhead Imagery: Algorithms And Applications, Anthony Manuel Ortiz Cepeda

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Remote sensing using overhead imagery has critical impact to the way we understand our environment and offers crucial information for scene understanding, climate change research, disaster response, urban planning, forest management, and many other applications. At present, deep learning is increasingly used in remote sensing, but mostly borrowing algorithms developed for natural images in the computer vision community. Specific challenges arise while applying deep learning to remote sensing. These challenges include issues related to the high dimensionality and limited labeled data, security and robustness to adversarial attacks, and model generalization. In this Thesis we focus on tackling these key challenges. …

Glacier Segmentation In Satellite Images For Hindu Kush Himalaya Region, Bibek Aryal

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Climate change poses a risk to individuals whose livelihoods depend on the health of glacier ecosystems. Monitoring glaciers in the Himalayan Hindu Kush (HKH) region is of high importance especially when we consider the impact of recent climate change on them. Our work aims to provide an automated method to outline glaciers using machine learning techniques and publicly available remote sensing imagery.In this work, we present ways to delineate glaciers from Landsat-7 imagery using various machine learning and computer vision techniques. The multi-step methodology that we present in this work is generalizable across different types of satellite and overhead imagery, …

Glacial Deposits, Vol. 45, 2020, Department Of Geography, Geology, And The Environment

Glacial Deposits

Newsletter of the Department of Geography, Geology, and the Environment

Prototyping A Social Media Flooding Photo Screening System Based On Deep Learning, Huan Ning, Zhenlong Li, Michael E. Hodgson, Cuizhen Wang

Faculty Publications

This article aims to implement a prototype screening system to identify flooding-related photos from social media. These photos, associated with their geographic locations, can provide free, timely, and reliable visual information about flood events to the decision-makers. This screening system, designed for application to social media images, includes several key modules: tweet/image downloading, flooding photo detection, and a WebGIS application for human verification. In this study, a training dataset of 4800 flooding photos was built based on an iterative method using a convolutional neural network (CNN) developed and trained to detect flooding photos. The system was designed in a way …

Restructuring Legal Geography, Reecia Orzeck, Laam Hae

Faculty Publications - Geography, Geology, and the Environment

We argue that legal geography’s ability to produce holistic knowledge about law and legal relations is hampered by the qualified dominance in the field of what we refer to as a contingency orientation. This phrase refers to both the belief that law, legal relations, and legal outcomes are more open and contingent than they appear to be, and to an empirical interest in bringing to light moments when law, legal relations, and legal outcomes appear to depart from dominant representations of these as closed, determinate, aspatial, and wholly formal. Because holistic accounts of the social world require attention to both …

Using Unmanned Aerial Systems (Drones) With A Thermal Sensor To Map And Count Deer Population, Maxwell C. Ott

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The number of deer in an area is an important statistic for land managers to know, as overabundance has many negative effects. There are many methods that have been used to count deer in the past, such as using manned helicopters and airplanes, walking on foot, and conducting controlled hunts. UAS (unmanned aerial systems) is a growing field that provides many benefits over traditional methods of counting deer, such as lower cost and missions being less time consuming. Using a thermal sensor attached to a UAS makes it simple to spot any deer during a flight. Two main methods of …

The Impacts Of Accessibility On Vulnerability Of Place In Comfort Castle, Jamaica, Heather Thole

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Jamaica experiences meteorological, hydrological, and geological natural hazards that can produce island-wide impacts. The island’s exposure to multiple hazard types requires effective and sustainable mitigation and disaster risk management to lessen potential impacts, especially for vulnerable populations and communities. Comfort Castle, a small rural farming community, sits in the upper Rio Grande Valley of Portland parish and experiences earthquakes, landslides, hurricanes, heavy rainfall, and floods. Steep terrain and remoteness due to geographic location affect the community’s geophysical vulnerability. Their social vulnerability results from a lack of employment, health, educational, and livelihood resources within the community. Together, geophysical, and social factors …

Domestic Violence In Culturally And Linguistically Diverse (Cald) Communities: Perceptions, Therapeutic Approaches And Responses Of Frontline Workers In New South Wales (Nsw), Oluwatoyin A. Dedeigbo

Theses

Domestic violence is a universal public health concern (VicHealth, 2011; World Health Organisation [WHO], 2013). Domestic violence cuts across all countries, regardless of economic, social, cultural or religious differences (Ali et al., 2020; VicHealth, 2011; WHO 2013). Men are often responsible for perpetrating domestic violence against women (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2019; Australia Institute of Health and Welfare [AIHW], 2018).

The effects of domestic violence on victims can be serious and long-term; affecting their physical and mental wellbeing, and lingering even after the exposure to violence has ended (Mitchell, 2011). That is, the effect on victims’ mental health is …

Enhanced Intensity Analysis To Quantify Categorical Change And To Identify Suspicious Land Transitions: A Case Study Of Nanchang, China, Zheyu Xie, Robert Gilmore Pontius, Jinliang Huang, Vilas Nitivattananon

Geography

Conventional methods to analyze a transition matrix do not offer in-depth signals concerning land changes. The land change community needs an effective approach to visualize both the size and intensity of land transitions while considering possible map errors. We propose a framework that integrates error analysis, intensity analysis, and difference components, and then uses the framework to analyze land change in Nanchang, the capital city of Jiangxi province, China. We used remotely sensed data for six categories at four time points: 1989, 2000, 2008, and 2016. We had a confusion matrix for only 2016, which estimated that the map of …

A Green Transition In South Africa? Sociotechnical Experimentation In The Atlantis Special Economic Zone, Richard Grant, Pádraig Carmody, James T. Murphy

Geography

South Africa faces interconnected challenges of developing and diversifying its economy and adapting to and mitigating the impacts of climate change. A green policy tilt is ascendant in the country, manifest in a cascading array of policies and special initiatives. Utilising concepts from the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions, we assess Africa's first designated Green Special Economic Zone (SEZ), Atlantis SEZ (ASEZ) in the Western Cape, a niche innovation aimed at transforming the Province's industrial base. This initiative is very ambitious in four respects: (1) it links green SEZ development in a deprived metropolitan area to the broader regional economy; …

Framing The Search For A Theory Of Land Use, B. L. Turner, Patrick Meyfroidt, Tobias Kuemmerle, Daniel Müller, Rinku Roy Chowdhury

Geography

Land system science and affiliated research linked to sustainability require improved understanding and theorization of land and its change as a social-ecological system (SES). The absence of a general land-use theory, anchored in the social subsystem but with explicit links to the environmental subsystem, hampers this effort. Drawing on land-use explanations, meta-analyses, and associated frameworks, we advance a broad framework structure of eight elements–aggregations of explanatory variables–with links to the biophysical subsystem, for systematic comparisons of extant explanations. Tests and models can be employed to identify which set of variables and their configurations provide robust explanations of across land uses, …

Accounting For Training Data Error In Machine Learning Applied To Earth Observations, Arthur Elmes, Hamed Alemohammad, Ryan Avery, Kelly Caylor, J. Ronald Eastman, Lewis Fishgold, Mark A. Friedl, Meha Jain, Divyani Kohli, Juan Carlos Laso Bayas, Dalton Lunga, Jessica L. Mccarty, Robert Gilmore Pontius, Andrew B. Reinmann, John Rogan, Lei Song, Hristiana Stoynova, Su Ye, Zhuang Fang Yi, Lyndon Estes

Geography

Remote sensing, or Earth Observation (EO), is increasingly used to understand Earth system dynamics and create continuous and categorical maps of biophysical properties and land cover, especially based on recent advances in machine learning (ML). ML models typically require large, spatially explicit training datasets to make accurate predictions. Training data (TD) are typically generated by digitizing polygons on high spatial-resolution imagery, by collecting in situ data, or by using pre-existing datasets. TD are often assumed to accurately represent the truth, but in practice almost always have error, stemming from (1) sample design, and (2) sample collection errors. The latter is …

Hotspot Analysis Of Unregistered Voters In Columbus, Georgia, Jordan Brasher

Columbus Community Geography Center

Dr. Jordan Brasher created this map in partnership with the New Georgia Project (NGP) during the November 2020 election cycle. NGP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan voter education, registration, and advocacy organization. Dr. Brasher used address data provided by NGP to map hotspots of densely clustered address points representing households with one or more suspected unregistered voters. Red hotspots on the map represent statistically significant spatial clusters of suspected unregistered voters; blue coldspots represent places where the address data are more spread out (i.e., a lack of spatial clustering). Notable hotspots include downtown Columbus and several areas south and east of …

Spatial Multi-Objective Land Use Optimization Toward Livability Based On Boundary-Based Genetic Algorithm: A Case Study In Singapore, Kai Cao, Muyang Liu, Shu Wang, Mengqi Liu, Wenting Zhang, Qiang Meng, Bo Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this research, the concept of livability has been quantitatively and comprehensively reviewed and interpreted to contribute to spatial multi-objective land use optimization modelling. In addition, a multi-objective land use optimization model was constructed using goal programming and a weighted-sum approach, followed by a boundary-based genetic algorithm adapted to help address the spatial multi-objective land use optimization problem. Furthermore, the model is successfully and effectively applied to the case study in the Central Region of Queenstown Planning Area of Singapore towards livability. In the case study, the experiments based on equal weights and experiments based on different weights combination have …

Stone-Stacking As A Looming Threat To Rock-Dwelling Biodiversity, Ricardo Rocha, Paulo A. V. Borges, Pedro Cardoso, Mirza Dikari Kusrini, José Luis Martín-Esquivel, Dília Menezes, Mário Mota-Ferreira, Sara F. Nunes, Inês Órfão, Catarina Serra-Gonçalves, Manuela Sim-Sim, Pedro Sepúlveda, Dinarte Teixeira, Anna Traveset

Human–Wildlife Interactions

This letter to the editor describes the surge of “photo-friendly” stacks of stones as an emerging tourism-associated threat to rock-dwelling biodiversity.