Geography Commons^™

The United States Military Realignment On Okinawa, Kevin M. Evringham

Master's Theses

The United States maintains military bases in foreign countries in efforts to protect American overseas interests, whether they are economic, diplomatic or for geostrategic purposes. In Japan, where the United States has maintained military installations since the end of World War II, debate over the realignment of forces on Okinawa has caused minor, yet growing, rifts in the stable United States-Japanese alliance. Current plans to shift American military forces from Okinawa to locations throughout the Pacific do not take into account the historical or geostrategic factors for their stationing in Japan. This thesis identifies the geostrategic challenges to the current …

An Integrated Approach For Developing Adaptation Strategies In Climate Planning: A Case Study Of Vulnerability In Dukes County, Massachusetts, Jonathan Pollak

Master's Theses

Climate Action Plans (CAP’s) are recent innovations in policy that have been catalyzed by a need to adjust the relationship between human activity and the Earth’s climate system. CAP’s often are composed of methods to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in addition to adaptation strategies. Research indicates, however, that many plans focus on mitigation strategies while adaptation policies related to predicted changes caused by climate change are often overlooked. This thesis presents an integrative framework for locating areas that are in need of adaptation strategies through a GIS based decision support system that visualizes vulnerability. It is operationalized through an empirical …

Disaster Vulnerability Of University Student Populations, Jamie Lynn Auletta

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Student populations at Gulf Coast universities and colleges are subjected to multiple forces working together making them an especially vulnerable sub-group to hazards. Research has suggested that college students represent a segment of the population that hazards research has frequently overlooked and maybe not fully appreciated in university emergency planning. Most prior research has focused on university disaster experiences, highlighting what went wrong, and what should be done but little research focuses on what is actually taking place. The primary intent of this research was to gain better insight into university emergency planning and identify areas universities have neglected with …

Sub-Pixel Classification Of Forest Cover Types In East Texas, Joey Westbrook, I-Kuai Hung, Daniel Unger, Yanli Zhang

Faculty Publications

Sub-pixel classification is the extraction of information about the proportion of individual materials of interest within a pixel. Landcover classification at the sub-pixel scale provides more discrimination than traditional per-pixel multispectral classifiers for pixels where the material of interest is mixed with other materials. It allows for the un-mixing of pixels to show the proportion of each material of interest. The materials of interest for this study are pine, hardwood, mixed forest and non-forest. The goal of this project was to perform a sub-pixel classification, which allows a pixel to have multiple labels, and compare the result to a traditional …

Liberty-Booker T Washington District Timeline Of Major Sites And Leaders, Catherine Lovin, Meredith Duke, Joyce Wade, Rafael Torres, Robert Williams

Columbus Community Geography Center

The report contains a map of the Liberty-East Commons District, along with a timeline of major sites and leaders.

Neighborhoods Of The East Highland District, Amanda Rees, T.J. Rice

Columbus Community Geography Center

This is a map of the East Highland neighborhood in Columbus, Georgia. It shows the construction periods and eras and named subdivisions.

Slope Stability Monitoring Using Remote Sensing Techniques, Omar Alberto Conte Robles

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

During the past six years the Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department (AHTD) has spent over nine million dollars repairing slope failures that have occurred in the state of Arkansas. Specifically, higher than average precipitation in 2004 and 2008 led to large quantities of slides, all of which were repaired. Two highways, within the state of Arkansas, with known historical movements along or across the highways are being monitored using traditional surveying techniques and advanced remote sensing techniques. These slides, both of which are located in fill slopes. One a 500-foot long slide located north of Chester, Arkansas, within the …

Recreation Capital: Natural Resources, Amenity Development, And Outdoor Recreation In Bend, Oregon, Brent Olson

Geography and the Environment - Dissertations

This dissertation examines the production of recreational resources associated with amenity development. I argue that recreational resources are produced along lines similar to the production of timber, water, or mineral resources. Their production depends on the material characteristics of the resource, infrastructures of development, institutional arrangements, and the cultural symbolic value of rural and natural spaces. Scholars of amenity development have glossed over both the material elements of recreational resources and the history of resource development related to amenity landscapes. As a result, these scholars have overlooked insights concerning the production of resource spaces and evolving relationships between the city …

Predicting How Adaptation To Climate Change Could Affect Ecological Conservation: Secondary Impacts Of Shifting Agricultural Suitability, Bethany A. Bradley, Lyndon D. Estes, David G. Hole, Stephen Holness, Michael Oppenheimer, Will R. Turner, Hein Beukes, Roland E. Schulze, Mark A. Tadross, David S. Wilcove

Geography

Aim: Ecosystems face numerous well-documented threats from climate change. The well-being of people also is threatened by climate change, most prominently by reduced food security. Human adaptation to food scarcity, including shifting agricultural zones, will create new threats for natural ecosystems. We investigated how shifts in crop suitability because of climate change may overlap currently protected areas (PAs) and priority sites for PA expansion in South Africa. Predicting the locations of suitable climate conditions for crop growth will assist conservationists and decision-makers in planning for climate change. Location: South Africa. Methods: We modelled climatic suitability in 2055 for maize and …

Plastic Bags: Hazards And Mitigation, Jessica Sutton, Brittany Turner

Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge (Tek) And Modern Natural Resource Policy In China: Pathways For Integration, Lauren Elizabeth Nyman

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Excavation Of Transect 4 At The Eleanor Betty Site, A Submerged Classic Maya Salt Work, Belize, Taylor Aucoin

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

To Build A Nation: An Assessment Of Post-Development Thought And The Example Of Bolivia, Samantha Leuschner

Geography and Planning

No abstract provided.

Cultivating The City: Urban Agriculture And Agrarian Questions In Brooklyn, New York, Evan Weissman

Geography and the Environment - Dissertations

Driven by social and environmental criticism of the conventional agro-food system, food is now highly politicized. In this context, urban agriculture enjoys renewed interest as a primary space to engage the politics of food. In this dissertation, I explore urban agriculture as a window into food politics. Using the contemporary period of urban agriculture expansion in Brooklyn, New York as a case study, I investigate the ways in which urban agriculture is working to challenge the problems produced by conventional agro-food, and the engendered contradictions that arise in the tensions between the goals of urban agriculture and its practice in …

A Tale Of Three Cities: An Evaluation Of Urban World Heritage Management In Mexico, Claudia Ruth Asch

Geography and the Environment - Dissertations

UNESCO's World Heritage list aims to protect tangible and intangible World Heritage of "universal value." Mexico ranks third worldwide, surpassed only by Italy (16) and Spain (12), with ten World Heritage cities, an accomplishment frequently touted in official rhetoric and tourism promotion. This dissertation seeks to shed light on the "World Heritage experience;" the designation history, what occurs after the designation, in relation to long-term planning, investment, and how do local, state, and federal government infrastructure cope with the pressures and obligations of preservation. Drawing on newspapers, official government reports, and interviews with officials, civil servants, and tour guides, I …

Role Of Vegetation And Environmental Characteristics On Slope Stability In Northwest Arkansas, Michael Maguigan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Slope failure continues to pose risks to society because knowledge of environmental factors and their interactions are unclear and possibly misunderstood. This misunderstanding leads to generalizations about slope failure susceptibility mapping, despite knowing that slope failures are likely the result of an extensively complex set of interactions among a number of environmental, edaphic, and geomorphic characteristics. Therefore a series of experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of slope, soil texture, vegetation cover, bedrock permeability, and compaction,. A wooden flume with a slope face 1 m wide by 1.5 m long with a 10 cm toe was constructed to contain …

Defining Neighborhood: Social Disorganization Theory, Official Data, And Community Perceptions, Jeremy Waller

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

While the theory of social disorganization has been refined through research and critique, data and methods used to measure key concepts related to the theory have largely remained the same. This study examines the extent to which resident perceptions of neighborhoods are reflected similarly in official data provided by the U.S. Census, in terms of both neighborhood boundaries and neighborhood conditions. It consists of a combination of respondent-identified data and official data gathered on neighborhoods, their condition, and crime. Comparisons between perceptual indicators of neighborhood boundary and characteristics and corresponding official data at the block, block group, and Census tracts …

Navigation And Accessibility For Persons With Disabilities: An Anthropological Study Using Gis On The University Of Arkansas Campus, Deborah Jean Raiees-Dana

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The University of Arkansas was founded in 1871 on the top of a hill overlooking the Ozark Mountains, resulting in a campus that has steep slopes and numerous historical buildings that were not designed with ADA regulations in mind. This makes getting around campus especially difficult for students with limited mobility, and no campus maps exist that include handicapped accessibility features to help navigate the terrain and limited parking options. This study examines this issue using a holistic approach that explores cultural and technological factors to produce a map of the Historic Core District of campus.

Geographical Information Systems enable …

The Paleoecology Of A Morrowan Fossil Bed, Washington Mountain, Fayetteville, Arkansas, Steven Hamlin

Geosciences Undergraduate Honors Theses

This study began with a general survey of Washington Mountain that identified the stratigraphic units outcropping. While doing so, the Wedington Member of the Fayetteville Shale and the Pitkin Limestone were both found on the north face. Both units had been previously mapped as pinching out further south. The discovery of a fossil bed in the upper portion of the Cane Hill on Washington Mountain provided a rare opportunity to study the ecology of early Pennsylvanian fauna. Though the sandstone bed was poorly preserved, 14 separate genera were identified and their ecological niches were compared in an effort to establish …

Empowerment By Design?: A Case Study Of Women Living In New Urbanist Neighborhoods, Charlotte C. Fagan

Geography Honors Projects

Post-World War II suburban developments are often designed with a strict division between the private and public spheres, and are often characterized as placeless, lifeless, and an intellectual void. Since suburbia is often defined as a feminized space, these stereotypes frequently fall on women. New Urbanism, as a design school, is a push-back against placeless suburbs, and attempts to integrate the public and private spheres. This case study examines two New Urbanist developments in the Twin Cities area with the intent of understanding how women interact with their built environment in suburban neighborhoods that are designed differently than traditional subdivisions. …

Arsenic Contamination In Groundwater In Vietnam: An Overview And Analysis Of The Historical, Cultural, Economic, And Political Parameters In The Success Of Various Mitigation Options, Thuy M. Ly

Pomona Senior Theses

Although arsenic is naturally present in the environment, 99% of human exposure to arsenic is through ingestion. Throughout history, arsenic is known as “the king of poisons”; it is mutagenic, carcinogenic, and teratogenic. Even in smaller concentrations, it accumulates in the body and takes decades before any physical symptoms of arsenic poisoning shows. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the safe concentration of arsenic in drinking water is 10 µg/L. However, this limit is often times ignored until it is decades too late and people begin showing symptoms of having been poisoned.

This is the current situation for Vietnam, …

Interim Report On The East Highlands District, Columbus Ga, Amanda Rees, T. J. Rice

Columbus Community Geography Center

The East Highlands district is located on the raised bench above the flood plains of the Chattahoochee River in Columbus, west-central Georgia. The district lies approximately 1 mile east of the river.

Finding Multi-Centers: Using Crowd-Sourcing Technologies To Define Communities Of Landscape Architecture, Geoffrey Taylor

All Theses

This paper presents findings from website-based analytics identifying social and geographic topic hotspots within the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. Three crowd-sourced surveys are utilized to record thousands of user's topic interests and pinpoint locations on a global scale. Topics include projects, research, visualization, sustainability, and competitions within architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. The surveys also identify user locations, topics of interest, day and time of contact, social sharing, and user demographics. The goal of the research is to understand the online social structure and responses of groups involved with developing the built environment. These professionals …

Delineating The Wildland Urban Interface Using Publicly Available Geospatial Data, Mary Rozmajzl

Student Work

The Wildland Urban Interface (WUI), a human-designated area between undeveloped wildlands and urban areas, has been identified using many different kinds of data. The most common data used have been census housing densities to determine urban areas and a vegetation layer from the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) to identify wildlands (Theobald and Romme 2007, Radeloff et al. 2005, Stewart et al. 2003, and Haight et al. 2004). Knowing the location and area of a WUI is important for federal land agencies because federal legislation (Federal Register Notice 2001, 66-3) has provided parameters to identify WUIs and has directed agencies …

Landscape History In The G.K. Warren Missouri River Maps, Graham Alan Callaway

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 1855 and 1856, military surveyor Gouverneur K. Warren and his assistants produced what was at the time the most accurate map ever made of the Missouri River. This series of highly detailed sketch maps records numerous cultural features and an extraordinary level of environmental detail, making it an invaluable resource for research on the history of the region. This paper represents the first attempt to comprehensively interpret the content of these maps, identifying the features recorded where possible and assessing the probability of archaeological preservation of those not previously known. A subset of the recorded environmental data, from roughly …

Assessment Of Land Use Suitability Based On Water Erosion Susceptibility In Medium-Sized Urban Areas Of The Metropolitan Region Of Santiago, Central Chile, Roberto Fernandez

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Urban areas constitute complex spatial entities where biophysical and socioeconomic environments interact through processes that determine the distribution of land use in the territory. Given Chile's variety of landscapes, water erosion, and mass movement, and rapid expansion of its medium-sized cities, straightforward techniques for assessment of land use suitability are essential. Through evaluation of water erosion susceptibility, it is possible to efficiently determine suitability of land use in medium-sized cities and their adjacent environments. The adaptation and application of the Erosion Response Units (ERU) concept (Märker et al., 2001) in the cities of Colina and Melipilla, Metropolitan Region of …

An Alternate Approach To Ecosystem Mapping: Fusing Orthophotography With Landsat Etm+ Data For A Object-Based Classification, South Eastern Arkansas., David Mcfee

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Maintaining representative sampling of biologically rich and rare ecosystems has become an important means to preventing biodiversity loss. A limitation in indentifying and quantifying ecosystems is the cost of obtaining high resolution imagery necessary for a high resolution land cover assessment. This research shows how free, different resolution imagery (orthoimages and LANDSAT ETM+) could be combined to produce a hybrid dataset with enhanced spectral, spectral and temporal properties, and processed to obtain a object-based classification of land cover of bottomland and pine hardwood forest in south eastern Arkansas. Three classification techniques were evaluated: 1) a human derived, rule based method, …

Identifying Optimal Cellulosic Biomass Feedstock Supply Areas For Potential Biorefineries In Arkansas, Mark Cooper

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In February 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released the revised Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2), mandating at least 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels to be produced annually in America, and blended into all on/off road, locomotive, and marine gasoline and diesel by the year 2022. America's existing biorefineries fall significantly short of being able to meet this mandate, resulting in the need for rapid expansion in the near future if this goal is to be met. The state of Arkansas has abundant resources to offer the renewable energy industry, if properly utilized. The goal of this thesis is to …

Reappraising The Land Behind Baghdad: Using Corona Satellite Imagery To Reassess The Archaeological Landscape Of The Diyala Plain, Iraq, James Henry Wesolowski

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

High-resolution low-cost declassified CORONA spy satellite imagery is used to detect archaeological sites and relict canals in the Diyala Plain to the east of Baghdad, Iraq. This project seeks to improve upon the ground survey conducted there in the 1950s by providing better geographic control and discovering sites and canals that were not included in the original survey. CORONA imagery provides a sub-2-meter spatial resolution and was acquired shortly after the original ground survey was conducted, providing an excellent medium for comparison. CORONA imagery is subject to significant spatial distortions because of its camera technology and the LPS package for …

Anderson, Linda Allen (Fa 77), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text scan of paper (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 77. “Stone Masons and Their Craft in the Bluegrass Area of Kentucky,” interpretive paper and interviews executed for a folk studies class at Western Kentucky University in 1986. Collection includes photographs of stone cutting and stonework in the Bluegrass region.