Geography Commons^™

Impacts Of Land Cover Changes On Ecosystem Services Delivery In The Black Hills Ecoregion From 1950 To 2010, Suzanne Cotillon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Environmental degradation generated by land use choices and human activities is the first driver of change in the provision of ecosystem goods and services. One of the challenges in ecosystem services research is to evaluate the contribution of each land cover unit to ecosystem services delivery while considering multiple services. In this thesis, I develop a framework to assess the capacity of many land covers to independently produce ecosystem services (i.e., potential production) and the capacity of the whole landscape to deliver multiple services to the population (i.e., potential supply). In the first part, this methodology is used to report …

New Mexico's Spanish Livestock Heritage: Four Centuries Of Animals, Land, And People., Andrew Sluyter

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

History Of The Non-Spanish Antilles, Andrew Sluyter

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Digital Detroit: Rhetoric And Space In The Age Of The Network, Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In 1971, rogue Wayne State geographer William Bunge (placed on a federal list of dangerous intellectuals) published Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution, a radical polemic about how everyday citizens of a Detroit ghetto could challenge oppression and become geographers of their own neighborhoods. Forty years later, Jeff Rice (formerly a Wayne State professor himself) revisits Detroit geography, but this time largely from his laptop (and without, I hope, the same kind of federal harassment). For while Bunge’s Fitzgerald and Jeff Rice’s Digital Detroit share similar terrain, as well as a love for the city in all its contradictions, …

Energy In The Corn Belt: Is Maize Production Sustainable?, Matthew Bernau

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Technological and scientific innovation has transformed agricultural production. Corn production methods changed from a sustainable, nutrient recycling production system to one reliant on imported fossil energy inputs. Located in the Western Corn Belt, Union County, South Dakota was chosen as the study area. Changes in production methods are represented by four technological epochs: 1) The Draft Horse Epoch, 1890-1920; 2) The Tractor Epoch, 1920-1950; 3) The Fertilizer Epoch, 1950-1980; and 4) The Biotechnology and Precision Agriculture Epoch, 1980-2010. The energy budget method was used to measure the energy sustainability of corn production. The findings show that the volume of corn …

Border Integrations: The Fusion Of Political Ecology And Land Change Science To Inform And Contest Transboundary Integration In Amazonia, David S. Salisbury, Mariano Castro Sanchez-Moreno, Luis Davalous Torres, Robert Guimaraes Vasquez, Jose Saito Diaz, Pedro Tipula Tipula, Andres Treneman Young, Carlos Arana Courrejolles, Martin Arana Cardo, Grupo De Monitoreo De Megaproyectos Region Ucayali

Geography and the Environment Faculty Publications

In the southwestern Amazon lies the Sierra del Divisor, an isolated cluster of mist-covered peaks and ridges rising out of the steamy lowland rainforest. The forests of these fiercely dissected crests and valleys still ring with the low grunt of jaguar and the thunderous clacks of hundreds-strong herds of whitelipped peccaries, while the canopy sways with troops of the rare red Uakari monkey. This biodiversity inspired the Serra do Divisor National Park, and its transboundary sister reserve, but these forests are also home to humans: the descendants of Asheninka warriors and rubber tappers, a re-emergent Nawa people, I and most …

Threshold Responses Of Forest Birds To Landscape Changes Around Exurban Development, Todd R. Lookingbill, Marcela Suarez-Rubio, Scott Wilson, Peter Leimgruber

Geography and the Environment Faculty Publications

Low-density residential development (i.e., exurban development) is often embedded within a matrix of protected areas and natural amenities, raising concern about its ecological consequences. Forest-dependent species are particularly susceptible to human settlement even at low housing densities typical of exurban areas. However, few studies have examined the response of forest birds to this increasingly common form of land conversion. The aim of this study was to assess whether, how, and at what scale forest birds respond to changes in habitat due to exurban growth. We evaluated changes in habitat composition (amount) and configuration (arrangement) for forest and forest-edge species around …

Cartografía, Corredores Y Cooperación: La Búsqueda De Soluciones Transfronterizas En Las Fronteras Amazónicas, David S. Salisbury, Diego B. Leal, Andrea B. Chávaz Michaelsen, Bertha Balbín Ordaya, A. William Flores De Melo, Pedro Tipula Tipula, Maria Luiza Pinedo Ochoa

Geography and the Environment Faculty Publications

Implementation of conservation and development in the Amazon borderlands requires effective transboundary coordination. Updated, readily understandable, and transboundary cartography becomes increasingly essential in Southwestern Amazonia as residents and decision makers attempt to mitigate the socio-environmental challenges and impacts in the borderlands. The lack of updated borderland cartography complicates the planning of development, integration, and conservation projects at a variety of different scales. The Transboundary Geographic Group of Southwestern Amazonia (GTASO) has created a network to continuously exchange geographic information, resulting in a June 2013 workshop and the creation of five transboundary thematic maps of the Amazon regions of Ucayali and …

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 …

Freshwater Management In Libya : A Premonition Of The Global Water Crisis, Kelly P. Byrnes

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The global supply of freshwater depends on spatial and temporal factors. Because of its nature, there are parts of the world where sufficient amounts are simply not available. With the onset of global climate change and unpredictable politics in some areas, what is referred to as the "global water crisis" will become a cause of unrest throughout the world. Using Libya as an extreme case, this thesis seeks to display the immensely complicated nature of water provision and suggests that the unlikelihood of violent conflict predicted by certain authors, such as Aaron Wolf, needs to be reconsidered. Their faith in …

A Study Of Habitat Selection By Blanding's Turtles (Emydoidea Blandingii) In Dutchess County, New York, Shannon Rauch

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The Blanding's turtle (Emydoidea blandingii) is a New York State-listed threatened species with several disjunct populations located throughout the state. Blanding's turtles require a variety of habitat types including ponds, wetlands, vernal pools, and the surrounding uplands. Preserving these habitat complexes is necessary to ensure the persistence of Blanding's turtle populations, but this is becoming increasingly challenging in some locations due to significant development pressure. Key components of habitat protection are identifying preferred habitat types and gaining a better understanding of the variables that influence habitat selection. Previous landscape-level studies of turtles have found that land cover type, wetland type, …

The Living Among The Dead : Negotiating Social Inclusion In Albany Rural Cemetery, Jaime Lyn Mckay

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Picture Albany in the year 1840. The city had existed for over two centuries, yet the pace of development had picked up on the steep slopes overlooking the Hudson River. "Beautifully situated on ground rising steeply from the banks of the Hudson... and is one of the most attractive, cleanly, well-ordered, and elegant cities of America" (Munsell 1871, vi). Upon the hill where State Street runs, the landscape reflected the industrializing and urbanizing of New York's state capital. Like burgeoning cities up and down the East Coast, Albany was expanding and industrializing at an unprecedented rate. Similarly, the capital city …

Compression Of Gps Trajectory Data : Benchmarking Framework And New Approach, Jonathan Muckell

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

GPS-equipped mobile devices such as smart phones and in-car navigation units are collecting enormous amounts of spatial and temporal information that traces a moving object's path. The exponential increase in the amount of such trajectory data has caused three major problems. First, transmission of large amounts of data is expensive and time-consuming. Second, queries on large amounts of trajectory data require computationally expensive operations to extract useful patterns and information. Third, GPS trajectories often contain large amounts of redundant data that waste storage and cause increased disk I/O time. These issues can be addressed by algorithms that reduce the size …

Capital Punishment In The Lone Star State : A County-Level Analysis Of Contextual Effects On Sentencing, Jennifer Lynn Owens

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In its landmark decision, Furman v. Georgia (1972), the Supreme Court held all existing death penalty statutes unconstitutional, largely due to the arbitrary nature of the capital sentencing processes that resulted from them. In response to the Furman decision, several states revised their death penalty statutes to address the Court's concerns. Although the Court upheld the newly-drafted statutes in Gregg v. Georgia (1976) and its companion cases, subsequently reinstating the death penalty, intrastate variation in death sentencing suggests that the death penalty may continue to be applied in an arbitrary and capricious manner inconsistent with the Eighth Amendment. This dissertation …

Evaluating Drought In The United States Using The Emissivity Difference Vegetation Index, Hanisha Hirani

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

As monitoring vegetation and crops becomes increasingly important due to climate change, there arises the need for a monitoring scheme that places more weight on water availability as an indication of vegetation health and vitality. The Emissivity Difference Vegetation Index (EDVI) is the first step towards that type of monitoring scheme. With the potential for diurnal studies, there are applications towards agriculture monitoring, wildfire monitoring, and much more. EDVI is a synergetic product retrieved from microwave, visible, and infrared satellite measurements, as well as reanalysis. Since microwave measurements are more sensitive to vegetation water content, EDVI has the potential to …

Using Geospatial Technologies To Characterize Relationships Between Travel Behavior, Food Availability, And Health, Warren J. Christian

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Epidemic obesity in the U.S. has prompted exploration of causal factors related to the built environment. Recent research has noted statistical associations between the spatial accessibility of retail food sources, such as supermarkets, convenience stores, and restaurants, and individual characteristics such as weight, socioeconomic status, and race/ethnicity. These studies typically use residential proximity or neighborhood density to food sources as the measure of accessibility. Assessing food environments in this manner, however, is very limiting. Since most people travel outside of their neighborhood on a daily basis, the retail food sources available to individuals residing in the same area could vary …

Locative Media, Augmented Realities And The Ordinary American Landscape, Andrew Boulton

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation investigates the role of annotative locative media in mediating experiences of place. The overarching impetus motivating this research is the need to bring to bear the theoretical and substantive concerns of cultural landscape studies on the development of a methodological framework for interrogating the ways in which annotative locative media reconfigure experiences of urban landscapes. I take as my empirical cases i) Google Maps with its associated Street View and locational placemark interface, and ii) Layar, an augmented reality platform combining digital mapping and real-time locational augmentation. In the spirit of landscape studies’ longstanding and renewed interest in …

Re-Placing Sprawl: Mapping Place In An American Suburb, Ryan M. Cooper

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

In the post-World War II era land development in the United States has largely been focused on the expansion away from urban centers and out into the surrounding suburbs. While the development of suburbs began with utopian ideals of spiritual wholeness, their actual manifestation on the American landscape has been subject to harsh critiques about their long-term economic and environmental feasibility, fostering of social alienation, and general placelessness. In this thesis I address the criticism of suburbs as placeless, asking ―What are the particular practices of place-making in North American suburbs?‖ Examining interviews, cognitive map surveys, participant observation, archival materials, …

Neoliberalizing The Streets Of Urban India: Engagements Of A Free Market Think Tank In The Politics Of Street Hawking, Priyanka Jain

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation looks into the processes by which neoliberalism is mutating with various local and global discourses in order to transform urban space for marginalized street hawkers in the Global South, specifically Delhi, India. Following the current engagements in geographic literature on neoliberalism that focus on the contextually embedded character and the path-dependent process of the spread of free market ideas, I make free market advocacy think tanks--a rather unknown and under-investigated accomplice to this process--my main entry point. Corporate funded think tanks are often found advocating a neoliberal doctrine of free markets, minimal government intervention, and privatization. A self-professed …

Plant Community Composition And Structure Monitoring For Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, 2012 Annual Report, Isabel W. Ashton, Stephen K. Wilson, Daniel J. Swanson, Michael Prowatzke, Phil Graeve

United States National Park Service: Publications

Executive Summary

Agate Fossil Beds National Monument (AGFO) plays a vital role in protecting and managing some of the last remnants of native mixed-grass prairie in the region. The Northern Great Plains Inventory & Monitoring Network (NGPN) and Fire Ecology Program (FireEP) surveyed 12 long-term monitoring plots in Agate Fossil Beds National Monument in 2012 as part of an effort to better understand the condition of plant communities in the park. We measured plant diversity and cover, looked for the presence of exotic species that may be newly invading the park, and evaluated the amount of human and natural disturbance …

Does Altitude Moderate The Impact Of Lithium On Suicide? A Spatial Analysis Of Austria, Marco Helbich, Victor Blüml, Michael Leitner, Nestor D. Kapusta

Faculty Publications

Suicide, the tenth leading cause of death worldwide, is a complex phenomenon. Models aiming to explain the interaction of ambient variables such as socioeconomic factors, lithium content of drinking water and altitude are poorly developed. While controlling for several risk factors, this research bridges two different, but complementary research lines by investigating statistically the relationship on suicide mortality between lithium levels in drinking water in response to altitude above sea level. Besides regression models with main effects, a multiplicative interaction model between lithium and altitude has been developed providing estimates at the district-level for Austria where spatial autocorrelation was accounted …

New Silicon Valleys Or A New Species? Commoditization Of Knowledge Work And The Rise Of Knowledge Services Clusters, Stephan Manning

Management and Marketing Faculty Publication Series

This paper explores knowledge services clusters (KSCs) as a distinct and increasingly important form of geographic cluster, in particular in emerging economies: KSCs are defined as geographic concentrations of lower-cost skills serving global demand for increasingly commoditized knowledge services. Based on prior research on clusters and services offshoring, and data from the Offshoring Research Network (ORN), major properties and contingencies of KSC growth are discussed and compared with both high-tech clusters and low-cost manufacturing clusters. Special emphasis is put on the ambivalent effect of commoditization of knowledge work on KSC growth: It is proposed that KSCs attract most projects if …

Spatial And Temporal Characterization Of A Cold Seep-Hydrate System (Woolsey Mound, Deep-Water Gulf Of Mexico), Antonello Simonetti

Theses and Dissertations

Cold seeps are areas where methane is transferred from the lithosphere into the hydrosphere, accounting for the major source of hydrocarbons in seawaters. Formation of gas hydrate in cold seeps modulates the global discharge of methane to the environment. However, cold seeps are dynamic settings where hydrates dissociate on short and long time-scales triggering substantial methane fluxes to the oceans. These methane vents sustain unique ecosystems at the ocean floors and contribute to ocean acidification. Also, the methane can potentially reach the sea surface and be exchanged with the atmosphere contributing to global warming. Understanding how cold seep-hydrate systems (CSHSs) …

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 …

Human Capital In The Context Of Race, Gender And Geography: How Does It Really Help To Get A Good Job?, Ian Palmer

Wayne State University Theses

Human capital appears to be no longer adequate to explain why some people get good jobs and others get bad jobs. Increasingly, a person's race, gender, class and geographical location seem to be better predictors for the type of jobs people secure. The data that is used to explore the problem comes from a phone survey of Southeastern Michigan conducted during 2002 and 2003. Geographic space definitely affected demographic variables when looking at the makeup of the temporary workforce.

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

Faculty Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Analyzing The Foodshed: Toward A More Comprehensive Foodshed Analysis, Meara Butler

Geography Masters Research Papers

Foodshed Analysis is a tool used by researchers to measure the feasibility of providing more local food to a community. That there are economic, environmental, and societal benefits provided by eating locally produced food is a central assumption of Foodshed Analysis research. These benefits, however, are not inherent to a localized food system, but instead are goals that local food system participants must work to achieve. Foodshed Analysis may be a helpful tool that can be used to advise food system reform to the benefit of a community’s economy, environment, and society, but, in order for this tool to be …

Sex Trafficking: The Influence Of Cultures, Socio-Economic Structures And Law & Order On Sex Trade In Asia, Saanya Dua

Political Science Theses and Capstones

Sex trafficking and prostitution are both matters of concern in today’s world. Trafficking of human beings is a global phenomenon and has been a topic of increased discussion and attention. It is believed that the sex trade industry is considered to be the fastest growing criminal industry in the world, currently it is second to drug trafficking in terms of profits through an illegal industry. Several initiatives have been made to prevent trafficking, through significant legislative and other actions provided to aid victims and those vulnerable in the world. However, the lack of systematic research is a big issue. Asia …

The Everyday Spaces Of Humanitarian Migrants In Denmark, Malene H. Jacobsen

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Through an analysis of the Danish Immigration Law and asylum system, this research illustrates how the Danish state through state practices and policies permeates and produces the everyday space of humanitarian migrants. Furthermore, it examines how humanitarian migrants experience their everyday life in the Danish asylum system. An examination of state practices in conjunction with humanitarian migrants’ narratives of space and everyday practices, offers an opportunity to explore what kind of politics and political subjectivities that can emerge in the space of humanitarian migrants. This research contribute to our understanding of first, how the securitization of migration has direct impact …

Audience Response To The Nature/Society Binary In Kurosawa’S Dersu Uzala: An Observational Online Ethnography, Laura L. Sharp

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Geographers researching cinema have predominantly been interested in how geographic meaning is constructed and negotiated within film, but have been less productive in accounting for how these constructs are received by viewers. Using the method of observational online ethnography, I therefore investigate how fans in online reviews have interpreted the nature/society binary in the film Dersu Uzala. Working from a social constructionist view of nature I begin by deconstructing the binary as it appears in Dersu Uzala before proceeding to illustrate the way this constitutive absence is made up for by the visuality of the film’s landscapes and techniques of …