Geography Commons^™

Using Redundant Primer Sets To Detect Multiple Native Alaskan Fish Species From Environmental Dna, Damian Menning, Trey Simmons, Sandra Talbot

United States National Park Service: Publications

Accurate and timely data regarding freshwater fish communities is important for informed decision-making by local, state, tribal, and federal land and resource managers; however, conducting traditional gear-based fish surveys can be an expensive and time-consuming process, particularly in remote areas, like those that characterize much of Alaska. To help address this challenge, we developed and tested five multi-species environmental DNA (eDNA) primer sets for the simultaneous detection of up to 37 target fish species in a single sample. Using these primer sets can reduce the cost and time needed to perform future studies of fish communities. Our results comparing multiple …

Oil Spills Detection By Means Of Uas And Low-Cost Airborne Thermal Sensors, A. Al-Shammari, Eugene Levin, R. Shults

School of Technology Publications

This paper provides an overview of oil spill scenarios and the remote sensing methods used for detection and mapping the spills. It also discusses the different kinds of thermal sensors used in oil spills detection. As UAS is becoming an important player in the oil and gas industry for the low operating costs involved, this research involved working with a cheap thermal airborne sensor mounted on DJI Phantom 4 system. Data were collected in two scenarios, first scenario is collecting data in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula at a petroleum company location and the second scenario was an indoor experiment simulating an …

Assessing The Cooling Effects Of Urban Vegetation On Urban Heat Mitigation In Selected U.S. Cities, Qiuyan Yu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Urban Heat Island (UHI) is a growing problem worldwide. Mitigation of UHI is necessary for cities to adapt to climate change and enhance sustainable development at a city scale. Cooling cities with urban vegetation management is a sustainable solution for urban heat mitigation. Urban vegetation influences urban microclimate through the shading effect, surface roughness, and evapotranspiration. The differences in horizontal and vertical structures of urban vegetation determine the shading effect, surface roughness, and evapotranspiration. Enhancing the cooling effect of urban vegetation requires a comprehensive understanding of how vegetation structure affects UHI. The effects of horizontal structure on land surface temperature …

Steve & Anita, Steve, Anita, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Steve and Anita Canfield helped the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Turkey. They helped send blankets, coats, and washing machines to Syrian refugees. They were assigned to Frankfurt to assess refugee camps, soup kitchens, warehouses, and immigrant communities. The couple visited refugee camps and soup kitchens all over Europe to determine what was needed most by refugees.

The Canfields established the Friendship Center in Rome. The center offers classes in Italian, English, Italian, and a Red Cross course. It also has a gospel choir, a popular activity for primarily African refugees. The LDS Church has plans to …

Mapping Soil Alkalinity And Salinity In Northern Songnen Plain, China With The Hj-1 Hyperspectral Imager Data And Partial Least Squares Regression, Lin Bai, Cuizhen Wang, Shuying Zang, Changshan Wu, Jinming Luo, Yuexiang Wu

Faculty Publications

In arid and semi-arid regions, identifying and monitoring of soil alkalinity and salinity are in urgently need for preventing land degradation and maintaining ecological balances. In this study, physicochemical, statistical, and spectral analysis revealed that potential of hydrogen (pH) and electrical conductivity (EC) characterized the saline-alkali soils and were sensitive to the visible and near infrared (VIS-NIR) wavelengths. On the basis of soil pH, EC, and spectral data, the partial least squares regression (PLSR) models for estimating soil alkalinity and salinity were constructed. The R² values for soil pH and EC models were 0.77 and 0.48, and the root …

Evaluation Of Spatial Generalization Characteristics Of A Robust Classifier As Applied To Coral Reef Habitats In Remote Islands Of The Pacific Ocean, Justin J. Gapper, Hesham El-Askary, Erik J. Linstead, Thomas Piechota

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

This study was an evaluation of the spectral signature generalization properties of coral across four remote Pacific Ocean reefs. The sites under consideration have not been the subject of previous studies for coral classification using remote sensing data. Previous research regarding using remote sensing to identify reefs has been limited to in-situ assessment, with some researchers also performing temporal analysis of a selected area of interest. This study expanded the previous in-situ analyses by evaluating the ability of a basic predictor, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), trained on Depth Invariant Indices calculated from the spectral signature of coral in one location …

Web-Based Archaeology And Collaborative Research, Fabrizio Galeazzi, Heather Richards-Rissetto

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

While digital technologies have been part of archaeology for more than fifty years, archaeologists still look for more efficient methodologies to integrate digital practices of fieldwork recording with data management, analysis, and ultimately interpretation.This Special Issue of the Journal of Field Archaeology gathers international scholars affiliated with universities, organizations, and commercial enterprises working in the field of Digital Archaeology. Our goal is to offer a discussion to the international academic community and practitioners. While the approach is interdisciplinary, our primary audience remains readers interested in web technology and collaborative platforms in archaeology

The Spatialization Of Peace Amidst Militarization And Development In Buenaventura, Colombia., Maria Del Pilar File-Muriel

Shared Knowledge Conference

Innovative community driven spatial practices are integral to sustaining long lasting peace amidst post-peace-accords times and the continued structural genocide of Afro-Colombians and indigenous communities in Buenaventura, Colombia. This paper illuminates the case of multiple transformative spaces --the Humanitarian Space Puente Nayero and the Comunal Port Punta Icaco in the city of Buenaventura, the rural interethnic humanitarian and biodiversity space of La Esperanza and the Paro Cívico struggle in the district of Buenaventura-- as examples of the creative power of citizens and of the transformative production of spaces of peace that resist local and global violent development and urbanization processes. …

La Gota Que Colma La Caguama: How A Brewery Development Sparked Public Participation In Water Decisions, Anthony J. Meluso

Shared Knowledge Conference

Broad and diverse participation of actors is well recognized as a prerequisite for effective and equitable water management. However, scholarship in development and social movement literature in Latin America demonstrates that patterns of participation are shifting to more diverse strategies with non-traditional alliances. This project explores how an internationally owned brewery development sparked renewed participation from various urban and rural groups in the Mexicali Valley. I argue that widespread resistance from different groups was underpinned by neoliberal development tensions that have diminished local agency, but the strong symbolic nature of water, beer and politics provided the catalyst for a social …

Textures Of Transition: Understanding Memorial Spaces In Medellin, Colombia, Hayley Pedrick

Shared Knowledge Conference

The past decade has welcomed a surge in the creation of memory and human rights museums with existing scholarship linking concepts of transitional justice and the rush to memorialize. The role of symbolic reparation in transitional justice through memorials in Latin America, in particular, is increasingly prominent at both local and international scales, ranging from recommendations outlined by the Inter-American court system to the state-funded construction of memory sites in rural communities. Colombia, home to the longest ongoing civil conflict in the Americas and currently in transition towards peace, presents unique approaches to symbolic reparation. Apart from land restitution and …

Elevation And Azimuth-Aided Channel Estimation Scheme For Airborne Hyperspectral Data Transmission, Vahid Vahidi, Ebrahim Saberinia

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

A channel-estimation (CE) scheme is proposed to estimate the complex amplitude, Doppler shift, angle-of-departure, and angle-of-arrival of the channel taps for sparse and doubly selective channels for hyperspectral image transmission from unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs) to ground stations. The proposed method is dubbed as compressed-sensing joint parameter estimation (CS-JPE) and finds the channel parameters matrix by employing a compressed-sensing (CS)-based method. Afterward, a modified version of the joint parameter estimation (JPE) is proposed as CS-JPE and is dubbed as M-CS-JPE, which employs the elevation-azimuth angles of the line-of-sight channel tap to estimate the channel parameters with higher accuracy and lower …

Bhutan Landscape Anomaly: Possible Effect On Himalayan Economy (In View Of Optimal Description Of Elevation Profiles), Thach N. Nguyen, Laxman Bokati, Aaron A. Velasco, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Economies of countries located in seismic zones are strongly effected by this seismicity. If we underestimate the seismic activity, then a reasonably routine earthquake can severely damage the existing structures and thus, lead to huge economic losses. On the other hand, if we overestimate the seismic activity, we waste a lot of resources on unnecessarily fortifying all the buildings -- and this too harms the economies. From this viewpoint, it is desirable to have estimations of regional seismic activities which are as accurate as possible. Current predictions are mostly based on the standard geophysical understanding of earthquakes as being largely …

Finding Ft. Smith And Ft. Star In Smithland, Ky, Austin Valentine, Austin Valentine Jr.

Student Scholarship & Creative Works

Through the utilization of Light Detection and Ranging data, one can compile 3-dimensional models that can be used to spot anomalies of historical interest. These anomalies, if recognizable by the trained eye, can then be used to geo-reference historic maps to gain a better understanding of historic sites as well as to reveal possible areas of interests or unknown features.

By using a 3-dimensional model compiled by LiDAR data, I was able to geo-reference a December 13^th, 1861 map of the Civil War defenses for the town of Smithland, Kentucky. Through this process, I have been able to …

No. 16: Cheap Industrial Food And The Urban Margins, Tony Weis, Marylynn Steckley, Bruce Frayne

Hungry Cities Partnership

From the middle of the 20th century onwards, the productivity gains associated with high-input, high-yield monocultures and livestock operations have become increasingly central to global food security and to dynamics of urbanization across the global south. On one hand, competition has deflated prices and helped undermine the viability of small farm livelihoods in many places. On the other hand, rising flows of cheap food have effectively subsidized urban migration in impoverished urban and peri-urban settings. But this cheapness is highly deceptive, as it hinges on the failure to account for an array of biological and physical costs – which can …

No. 17: Revisiting Africa's Supermarket Revolution, Jonathan Crush, Ndeyapo Nickanor, Lawrence N. Kazembe, Jeremy Wagner

Hungry Cities Partnership

Africa is urbanizing at an unprecedented rate and food systems are undergoing rapid transformation. This transformation is being driven in part by a global supermarket revolution. However, the idea of an inexorable supermarket revolution on the continent has recently been contested. This paper examines the role of supermarkets in Namibia’s capital city Windhoek to test the applicability of the model. The paper is based on (a) a review of the literature on South African supermarket expansion; (b) a survey of the food purchasing behaviour of a representative sample of 875 households in Windhoek; and (c) a comprehensive product inventory of …

No.03: Devising Urban Food Security Policy For African Cities, James Sgro

Hungry Cities Partnership

■ Informal food services are one of the few options for financially disadvantaged families. Food access policy needs to be created in partnership with informal economy actors to ensure that those who rely on informal systems are not ignored.

■ As household size increases, the likelihood of food insecurity grows exponentially. Adequate social protection programs are required to support household dependants including children and the aged and improve food security.

■ Secondary school completion is a specific milestone that significantly increases one’s food security outlook. Free primary and secondary school policies could return dividends in terms of nation-wide food security, …

Niobrara National Scenic River, Socioeconomic Monitoring Pilot Implementation, Summer 2016, Resource Systems Group

United States National Park Service: Publications

Executive Summary

This report describes the results of a visitor study at Niobrara National Scenic River (NSR) conducted from July 15 through July 24, 2016. During the sampling period, 253 visitor groups were contacted to participate in the survey. Of those groups, 217 agreed to participate in the study by accepting a mail-back survey packet. Questionnaires were completed and returned by 110 visitor groups, resulting in a completion rate of 51% among those visitor groups that agreed to participate in the study and an overall response rate of 43% for the study.

 This report profiles a systematic random sample …

Quality Assurance Plan For Monitoring White-Tailed Deer In The Heartland Inventory And Monitoring Network, United States National Park Service, Heartland Inventory And Monitoring Network

United States National Park Service: Publications

Abstract

In accordance with guidelines set forth by the National Park Service Inventory and Monitoring Division, a quality-assurance plan has been created for use by the Heartland Inventory and Monitoring Network in the implementation of the White-tailed Deer Monitoring Protocol (HTLN 2018). This quality-assurance plan documents the standards, policies, and procedures used by the Heartland Network for activities related to the collection, processing, storage, analysis, and publication of monitoring data. The policies and procedures documented in this quality-assurance plan complement the quality-assurance plans for other monitoring activities conducted by the Heartland Network and supplement the National Inventory and Monitoring Division …

Economic Resilience And Concentration In Indiana Over 2002-2016, Santiago Ruiz, Michael Wilcox, Indraneel Kumar

Purdue GIS Day

It is well accepted that recessionary shocks affect long-term patterns of economic growth within regions. For this reason, it is important to understand how regional economies recover and in which extent a shock could be an economic burden in long term. A relevant variable to measure shock’s impact is employment, for two reasons. First, past recessions suggested that in most cases, the decline in employment tended to be deeper than in output. Second, layoffs of workers are key forms of adjustment to which employees seek to reduce costs. Given these, our research aims to understand shifts in employees during, after …

Gis Applications, Andriy Zhalnin, Indraneel Kumar, Benjamin St. Germain, Darrell Schulze, Rachel Moore, Mark Ehle

Purdue GIS Day

This roundtable discusses various GIS applications in different fields. Purdue's Center for Regional Development presents "harmonized space-time data and measures: a study of race, ethnicity and poverty". Prof. Darrell Schulze from Agronomy and Purdue Center for Environmental and Regulatory Information Systems showcase SoilExplorer, a soil map application for teaching and learning soil science. Mark Ehle, Tippcanoe County GIS administrator, introduces the county's GIS services and maps.

Gis To Address Questions In Forest Ecology And Management, Nicolas Picard

Purdue GIS Day

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are powerful tools to deal with spatialized issues. As such, they have become routine tools in forestry to delimit forest resources, support the design of forest inventories, map forest resources, and analyze, model and support decision making to sustainably manage forests. Two examples will be provided to show how forest management can benefit from progress in GIS technology. The first one deals with the optimization of forest roads to harvest trees in tropical rainforests. It required the development of heuristics to solve the multiple target access problem in a reasonable time. The second one deals with …

Uas, Joseph P. Hupy

Purdue GIS Day

This roundtable focuses on UAS as a geospatial data collection tool. Researchers with extensive background in GIS and remote sensing software, or interest in incorporating their UAS data more into GIS discuss about possible research opportunities and collaboration as well as how to incorporate UAS and GIS into curriculum.

Is Corruption Influenced By Human Development Index And Transparency? A Global Spatial Assessment Using Gis, Seyedali Ghahari, Shabnam Ghotbi, Samuel Labi, Nader Naderpajouh

Purdue GIS Day

The intricacy of the construction practices sometimes causes the vague atmosphere between clients, partners, and providers, is one of the Achilles heels of infrastructure projects; this grounds the industry as the most inefficient, corrupted business in the world. Governments, in recent years, have made a significant positive effort on public transparency. E-government is an effective tool to execute the very subject. Not only e-government helps transparency, but also it provides openness, accountability, the participation of citizens, etc. By giving citizens access to the functionality of public organizations and institutions, and providing open media for public debates, nations can obtain higher …

Spatial Humanities, Katherine M. Jarriel, Megha Anwer, Elizabeth Brite, Matthew Hannah, Amber N. Nickell

Purdue GIS Day

This roundtable introduces spatial humanities researches at Purdue. Projects include "Mapping Victorian women's habitation and violence encounter" by Dr. Megha Anwer; "Animating material agencies with GIS data: an example from the archealogy of the Soviet Union" by Dr. Elizabeth Brite; "Modeling community interaction in Bronze Age Greece" by Dr. Katherine Jarriel; "Mapping 'no place': Eastern and Central Europe's nineteenth and twentieth century phantom, indifferent, and alternative geographies by Amber Nickell.

How Much Do Purdue's Trees Weigh? Estimating Biomass In Urban Areas, Jacob Klaybor, Gillian Clark, Brady Hardiman

Purdue GIS Day

Vegetation plays an important role in urban areas by reducing the urban heat island effect, sequestering carbon emissions, and providing socioeconomic benefits to the surrounding areas. However, the roles and distributions of urban forests have historically been ignored or underestimated. This presentation uses the campus of Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN, as a case study to quantify the aboveground vegetative biomass of campus trees. Tree biomass is calculated with data from the Purdue Arboretum and family-specific allometric relationships based on each tree's diameter at breast height to estimate the total carbon storage available within campus trees. Biomass estimates of …

Economic Resilience And Diversity In Indiana From 2002 To 2016, Santiago Ruiz, Michael Wilcox, Indraneel Kumar

Purdue GIS Day

It is well accepted that recessionary shocks affect long-term patterns of economic growth within regions. For this reason, it is important to understand how regional economies recover and in which extent a shock could be an economic burden in long term. A relevant variable to measure shock’s impact is employment, for two reasons. First, past recessions suggested that in most cases, the decline in employment tended to be deeper than in output. Second, layoffs of workers are key forms of adjustment to which employees seek to reduce costs. Given these, our research aims to understand shifts in employees during, after …

My Laptop Takes Forever, Now What!, Eric Adams

Purdue GIS Day

ITAP Research Computing's Data Workbench offers researchers access to an interactive computing environment for non-batch big data analysis and simulation. Researchers who outgrow their local computing resources can benefit from the extra computing power that Data Workbench offers without jumping directly into the High-Performance Computing clusters.

In this presentation, we will discuss the details of Data Workbench, file storage options including the Data Depot and how to transfer large files reliably with the Globus research data management service.

Sustainable Environment: Nexus Project, Zachary S. Brecheisen, Darrell Schulze, Timothy Filley, Jino Ramson, W. Daniel Leon-Salas, Natalie Chin, Fariborz Daneshvar, Andre De Lima Moraes

Purdue GIS Day

Arequipa region is locaed in Southwestern Peru. The Arequipa Nexus Institute for food, energy, water and the environment aims to address the key challenges to a sustainable furture for the people in the region. This roundtable discusses about the sustainable water management, geosaptial analysis and environment sharing, long range sensor network solution for soil health monitoring and data management and sharing in this Nexus project.

Middle-Range Theories Of Land System Change, P. Meyfroidt, Rinku Roy Chowdhury, A. De Bremond, E. C. Ellis, K. H. Erb, T. Filatova, R. D. Garrett, J. M. Grove, A. Heinimann, T. Kuemmerle, C. A. Kull, E. F. Lambin, Y. Landon, Y. Le Polain De Waroux, P. Messerli, D. Müller, J. Nielsen, G. D. Peterson, V. Rodriguez García, M. Schlüter, B. L. Turner, P. H. Verburg

Geography

Changes in land systems generate many sustainability challenges. Identifying more sustainable land-use alternatives requires solid theoretical foundations on the causes of land-use/cover changes. Land system science is a maturing field that has produced a wealth of methodological innovations and empirical observations on land-cover and land-use change, from patterns and processes to causes. We take stock of this knowledge by reviewing and synthesizing the theories that explain the causal mechanisms of land-use change, including systemic linkages between distant land-use changes, with a focus on agriculture and forestry processes. We first review theories explaining changes in land-use extent, such as agricultural expansion, …

Centroid-Amenities: An Interactive Visual Analytical Tool For Exploring And Analyzing Amenities In Singapore, Xue Qian Jazreel Siew, Sean Jia Ming Koh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Planning for civic amenities in a fast-changing urban setting such as Singapore is never an easy task. And as urban planners look toward more data-driven approaches toward urban planning, so grows the demand for more flexible geospatial analytics tools to facilitate a more iterative and granular approach toward urban planning. Such specific tools however, are not always readily available as plugins for traditional desktop GIS software, as numerous customizations must be made to model specific temporal planning scenarios for quick analysis, which could prove both costly and time-consuming. Hence, to address this need, open-source tools such as R Shiny could …