Physical and Environmental Geography Commons^™

“Turn The Faucet”: Right-Wing Hydrosocial Imaginaries Of Irrigation Water In The Western United States, Alexander Reid Ross, Thien-Kim Bui, Alida Cantor

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

The second administration of United States President Donald Trump has taken an authoritarian, centralized approach to governance in the United States. Water management is one area in which the president has attempted to show dominance. This research theorizes President Trump’s concept of water in the United States West as a “hydrosocial imaginary” in which the release of water from rivers and reservoirs indicates virility, action, and power, instead of liberal cautiousness and prudence. By ordering the release of two billion gallons of water from California’s Central Valley into the dry Tulare Basin one hundred miles north of Los Angeles for …

Explaining The 2022 Record Low Great Salt Lake Volume, Siiri Bigalke, Paul C. Loikith, Nicholas Siler

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Great Salt Lake reached the lowest water volume in its entire 170+ year record in 2022. To explain this record low we develop and apply a lake mass‐balance model and perform four simulations: one where all input and output variables are fixed to their mid‐20th century average resulting in an equilibrium lake volume, and three others where one of the input variables (precipitation or streamflow) or the output variable (evaporation) follows observations while the other two are fixed to their mid‐20th century average. Results show anomalously low streamflow accounting for the largest proportion of the lake volume departure from …

Unseen Connections: A Storymap Exploring Case Studies In Water-Energy Transitions And Environmental Justice, Alida Cantor, Elizabeth Bartholomew, Kate Berry, James Blair, Dustin Mulvaney, Nancee Hunter

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Climate change is one of the most important challenges in the world today. Communities and decision makers at many levels, from local to international, are working to ensure that energy, water, and other societal infrastructures can transition and adapt to address climate change (IPCC, 2023). One major mitigation strategy involves the decarbonization of energy systems (Rockström et al. 2017). Despite wide recognition of the need to decarbonize globally, renewable energy infrastructures and technologies are often locally controversial, involving claims of environmental injustice and disputes over land and water (Cantor, Turley, and Maxfield 2023; Jerez, Garcés, and Torres 2021; Turley et …

Modelling Postfire Recovery Of Snow Albedo And Forest Structure To Understand Drivers Of Decades Of Reduced Snow Water Storage And Advanced Snowmelt Timing, A. Surunis, K. E. Gleason

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Forest fires darken snow albedo and degrade forest structure, ultimately reducing peak snow–water storage, and advancing snowmelt timing for up to 15 years following fire. To date, no volumetric estimates of watershed-scale postfire effects on snow–water storage and snowmelt timing have been quantified over decades of postfire recovery. Using postfire parameterizations in a spatially-distributed snow mass and energy balance model, SnowModel, we estimated postfire recovery of forest fire effects on snow–water equivalent (SWE) and snowmelt timing over decades following fire. Using this model, we quantified volumetric recovery of forest fire effects on snow hydrology across a chronosequence of eight sub-alpine …

Wasted Space: Using Parking Lots & Vacant Land To Improve Neighborhood Completeness, Ryan Martyn

Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs

This study conducts a spatial analysis of Portland, Oregon, focusing on leveraging underutilized areas like parking lots and vacant land—termed "wasted space"—to improve the city's completeness. Central to this investigation is the concept of a "complete neighborhood," characterized by access to daily necessities within convenient active transportation trip. This comprehensive idea encompasses walkability, equitable access to services, and sustainability.

This paper aims to redefine the concept of a complete neighborhood with precision and delve into its implications. The research looks at five regional, town, and neighborhood centers as defined by the city of Portland. These centers act as pivotal hubs …

Postfire Effects And Regeneration Patterns In Araucaria-Nothofagus Forests In South-Central Chile, Paola A. Arroyo-Vargas

Dissertations and Theses

Fire regime shifts due to climate and land use changes are threatening ecosystems worldwide, affecting their capacity to recover after severe wildfires. Increase of fire frequency, severity and intensity may severely affect forest ecosystems whose fire regimes have been characterized by infrequent stand-replacing fires. The temperate forests of southern South America, specifically the Andean temperate forests dominated by the conifer Araucaria araucana and the angiosperm species from Nothofagus genus, have evolved with less fire pressure, where severe wildfires may happen after decades or centuries. Recent severe and short-interval fires exacerbated by warmer and drier climate conditions have affected these forests, …

Water Quality Land Cover Change And Water Quality In Wetlands At The City Of Gresham, Or, Evelyn Barajas, Michael Gonzalez

altREU Projects

The City of Gresham, Oregon has implemented constructed wetlands around the area as an attempt to collect, filter, and purify water from different sources such as rain, agricultural waste, and domestic waste. We focused our research on three different facilities: Columbia Slough Water Quality Facility (CSWQF), Fairview Creek Water Quality Facility, and Brookside Water Quality Facility. For each of these, we conducted tests and looked at the concentration levels for nitrogen and phosphorus nutrients such as NH3-N (ammonium), NO3-N (nitrate), TKN (total Kjeldahl nitrogen), O-PO4 (phosphate), and Total P (total phosphorus), as well as heavy metals like Total Cu (total …

Introduction: Climate Change And Planned Retreat, Idowu Jola Ajibade, A. R. Siders

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Chapter 1.

This edited volume advances our understanding of climate relocation (or planned retreat), an emerging topic in the fields of climate adaptation and hazard risk, and provides a platform for alternative voices and views on the subject. As the effects of climate change become more severe and widespread, there is a growing conversation about when, where and how people will move. Climate relocation is a controversial adaptation strategy, yet the process can also offer opportunity and hope. This collection grapples with the environmental and social justice dimensions from multiple perspectives, with cases drawn from Africa, Asia, Australia, Oceania, South …

Spatial Proximity Matters: A Study On Collaboration, Arianna Salazar Miranda, Matthew Claudel

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

As scientific research becomes increasingly cross-disciplinary, many universities seek to support collaborative activity through new buildings and institutions. This study examines the impacts of spatial proximity on collaboration at MIT from 2005 to 2015. By exploiting a shift in the location of researchers due to building renovations, we evaluate how discrete changes in physical proximity affect the likelihood that researchers co-author. The findings suggest that moving researchers into the same building increases their propensity to collaborate, with the effect plateauing five years after the move. The effects are large when compared to the average rate of collaboration among pairs of …

Assessment Of Urban Flood Vulnerability Using The Social-Ecological-Technological Systems Framework In Six Us Cities, Heejun Chang, Arun Pallathadka, Jason Sauer, Nancy B. Grimm, Rae Zimmerman, Chingwen Cheng, David Iwaniec, Yeowon Kim, Multiple Additional Authors

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

As urban populations continue to grow through the 21st century, more people are projected to be at risk of exposure to climate change-induced extreme events. To investigate the complexity of urban floods, this study applied an interlinked social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) vulnerability framework by developing an urban flood vulnerability index for six US cities. Indicators were selected to reflect and illustrate exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity to flooding for each of the three domains of SETS. We quantified 18 indicators and normalized them by the cities’ 500-yr floodplain area at the census block group level. Clusters of flood vulnerable areas were …

Environmental And Spatial Factors Affecting Surface Water Quality In A Himalayan Watershed, Central Nepal, Janardan Mainali, Heejun Chang

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Various spatial interrelationships among sampling stations are not well explored in the spatial modeling of water quality literature. This research explores the relationship between water quality and various social, demographic, and topographic factors in an urbanizing watershed of Nepal with a comparison of different connectivity matrices to conceptualize spatial interrelationships. We collected electrical conductivity and dissolved oxygen data from surface water bodies using a handheld probe and used the data to establish relationships with land use, topography, and population density-based explanatory variables at both watershed and 100-m buffer scales. The linear regression model was compared with different eigenvector-based spatial filtering …

A 30-Yr Climatology Of Meteorological Conditions Associated With Lightning Days In The Interior Western United States, Dmitri Alexander Kalashnikov, Paul Loikith, Arielle J. Catalano, Duane E. Waliser, Huikyo Lee, John T. Abatzoglou

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

A 30-yr climatology of lightning days and associated synoptic meteorological patterns are characterized across the interior western United States (WUS). Locally centered composite analyses show preferred synoptic meteorological patterns with positive 500-hPa geopotential height anomalies located to the northeast and negative sea level pressure anomalies to the northwest and collocated with local lightning days. Variations in preferred patterns for local lightning days are seen across the interior WUS. Areas not commonly affected by the North American monsoon system including the western Great Basin and northern Rocky Mountains show higher-amplitude anomalies of geopotential height, moisture, and midtropospheric instability patterns suggesting the …

Legal Geographies And Political Ecologies Of Water Allocation In Maui, Hawai'i, Alida Cantor, Kelly Kay, Chris Knudson

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Throughout the Hawaiian Islands, sugar plantations have controlled a large proportion of water resources for over a century, often leaving little water in streams to support ecosystems or Native Hawaiian cultural and agricultural practices. Recently, in Maui, Hawai‘i, community activists and lawyers representing Native Hawaiian and environmental interests have successfully reclaimed water resources for instream flow utilizing legal processes and tools such as Hawai‘i’s public trust doctrine, which has plural roots in both Hawaiian and Western legal traditions. In this paper, we use qualitative fieldwork, including interviews, participant observation, and archival data collection, to explore two recent and ongoing legal …

Population Collapse And Retreat To Fire Refugia Of The Tasmanian Endemic Conifer Athrotaxis Selaginoides Following The Transition From Aboriginal To European Fire Management, Andres Holz, Samuel W. Wood, Carly Ward, Thomas T. Veblen, David M.J.S. Bowman

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Untangling the nuanced relationships between landscape, fire disturbance, human agency, and climate is key to understanding rapid population declines of fire‐sensitive plant species. Using multiple lines of evidence across temporal and spatial scales (vegetation survey, stand structure analysis, dendrochronology, and fire history reconstruction), we document landscape‐scale population collapse of the long‐lived, endemic Tasmanian conifer Athrotaxis selaginoides in remote montane catchments in southern Tasmania. We contextualized the findings of this field‐based study with a Tasmanian‐wide geospatial analysis of fire‐killed and unburned populations of the species. Population declines followed European colonization commencing in 1802 ad that disrupted Aboriginal landscape burning. Prior to …

Socio-Hydrology: An Interplay Of Design And Self-Organization In A Multilevel World, David J. Yu, Heejun Chang, Taylor T. Davis, Vicken Hillis, Landon T. Marston, Woi Sok Oh, Murugesu Sivapalan, Timothy M. Waring

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

The emerging field of socio-hydrology is a special case of social-ecological systems research that focuses on coupled human-water systems, exploring how the hydrologic cycle and human cultural traits coevolve and how such coevolutions lead to phenomena of relevance to water security and sustainability. As such, most problems tackled by socio-hydrology involve some aspects of engineering design, such as large-scale water infrastructure, and self-organization in a broad context, such as cultural change at the population level and the hydrologic shift at the river basin or aquifer level. However, within the field of socio-hydrology, it has been difficult to find general theories …

Socio-Ecological Interactions In The National Forests And Grasslands Of Central Oregon: A Summary Of Human Ecology Mapping Results, David Banis, Rebecca Mclain, Alicia Milligan, Krystle N. Harrell, Lee Cerveny

Occasional Papers in Geography

Occasional Papers in Geography Publication No. 8

In 2015, Portland State University, the US Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station, Deschutes National Forest (DNF), Ochoco National Forest (ONF), US Forest Service Region 6, and Discover Your Forest embarked on a collaborative project to understand spatial patterns of public use on the national forests and grasslands of Central Oregon and the ecosystem benefits attached to those places. At the time the project began, the DNF and ONF anticipated that they would be revising their forest/grassland plans in the near future. This human ecology mapping project generated socio-spatial data layers describing the …

Spatiotemporal Variability Of Twenty‐First‐Century Changes In Site‐Specific Snowfall Frequency Over The Northwest United States, Arielle J. Catalano, Paul C. Loikith, C. M. Aragon

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the Northwest United States, warming temperatures threaten mountain snowpacks. Reliable projections of snowfall changes are therefore critical to anticipate the timeline of change. However, producing such projections is challenging, as most state‐of‐the‐art climate models are limited in sufficiently resolving influential topography. Here we leverage atmospheric freezing level to estimate precipitation phase and project twenty‐first‐century snowfall frequency change at Snowpack Telemetry Network stations across the Northwest. Under “moderate” and “business‐as‐usual” emission pathways in Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 models, snowfall frequency is projected to decline at all stations. Business‐as‐usual declines accelerate after midcentury at most locations, whereas moderate declines …

Homelessness In Portland, Oregon: An Analysis Of Homeless Campsite Spatial Patterns And Spatial Relationships, Krystle N. Harrell

Geography Masters Research Papers

Homelessness is a complex American social issue. Understanding the homeless population, including how many people experience homelessness, how they entered the experience, their demographics, how they survive, and where they survive, aids policymakers, planners, and advocates in developing the appropriate approaches and solutions to end and prevent homelessness. Analysis of homeless spatial patterns and distributions across different locales provides a more in-depth understandings of this population and how best to support them, from the local to national level. Using geographic information systems (GIS) and statistical methods, this study examines the spatial patterns of homeless campsites and their relationship with urban …

California Groundwater Management, Science-Policy Interfaces, And The Legacies Of Artificial Legal Distinctions, David Owen, Alida Cantor, Nell Green Nylen, Thomas Harter, Michael Kiparsky

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

California water law has traditionally treated groundwater and surface water as separate resources. The 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) broke with this tradition by requiring groundwater managers to avoid significant and unreasonable adverse impacts to beneficial uses of surface water. This paper considers the trajectory of this partial integration of science, law, and resource management policy. Drawing on legal analysis and participatory workshops with subject area experts, we describe the challenges of reconciling the separate legal systems that grew out of an artificial legal distinction between different aspects of the same resource.

Our analysis offers two main contributions. First, …

Characterizing Temperature Variability States Across Southern South America And Associated Synoptic-Scale Meteorological Patterns, Judah Adam Detzer

Dissertations and Theses

The aim of this thesis is to understand spatiotemporal temperature variability in southern South America by identifying overarching temperature variability states and their associated synoptic-scale meteorological patterns. Further, the temporal frequency of occurrence of those temperature variability states is investigated as is the role of recurrent low-frequency modes of climate variability (El Niño Southern Oscillation and the Southern Annular Mode) on temperature variability. K-means cluster analysis is used to group all months during the period 1980-2015 into four primary categories for summer and winter separately. Monthly maps of temperature anomalies are provided as input to the k-means algorithm and the …

Sources Of Contaminated Flood Sediments In A Rural–Urban Catchment: Johnson Creek, Oregon, Heejun Chang, Deonie Allen, Jennifer L. Morse, Janardan Mainali

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study investigated the delivery of contaminated sediments to the channel network by urban drainage systems in Johnson Creek in Oregon, USA. Concentrations of five heavy metal concentrations measured in 136 samples collected from 37 stormwater outfalls and 99 bed sampling points were analysed. While concentrations of zinc, cadmium and lead increased with distance downstream in Johnson Creek, this was not the case for chromium and copper. Zinc, copper, and cadmium concentrations in outfalls were significantly higher than those in the stream bed, indicating that stormwater runoff is responsible for delivering contaminated sediments to Johnson Creek. Zinc concentrations in outfalls …

Speculations On The Postnatural: Restoration, Accumulation, And Sacrifice At The Salton Sea, Alida Cantor, Sarah Knuth

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Using a regional political ecology lens, this paper explores emerging geographies and politics of a “postnatural” ecomodernist turn in mainstream environmentalism. We examine the unfolding case of ecological restoration and renewable energy development at Southern California’s Salton Sea. Ambitious proposals to restore the massive, increasingly degraded lake (and finance restoration) by reengineering it as a hub for geothermal energy generation and hightech green industry hinge upon the ambiguity and malleability of restoration in an environment long classified as postnatural. These plans coincide with a broader rush on renewable energy sites in the California desert, and mounting conflicts over water and …

Landscape Drivers Of Recent Fire Activity (2001- 2017) In South-Central Chile, David B. Mcwethy, Aníbal Pauchard, Rafeal García, Andrés Holz, Mauro E. Gonzales, Thomas T. Veblen, Julian Stahl, Bryce Currey

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

In recent decades large fires have affected communities throughout central and southern Chile with great social and ecological consequences. Despite this high fire activity, the controls and drivers and the spatiotemporal pattern of fires are not well understood. To identify the large-scale trends and drivers of recent fire activity across six regions in south-central Chile (~32–40° S Latitude) we evaluated MODIS satellite-derived fire detections and compared this data with Chilean Forest Service records for the period 2001–2017. MODIS burned area estimates provide a spatially and temporally comprehensive record of fire activity across an important bioclimatic transition zone between dry Mediterranean …

Simultaneous Regional Detection Of Land-Use Changes And Elevated Ghg Levels: The Case Of Spring Precipitation In Tropical South America, Armineh Barkhordarian, Hans Von Storch, Ali Behrangi, Paul C. Loikith, Carlos R. Mechoso, Judah Detzer

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

A decline in dry season precipitation over tropical South America has a large impact on ecosystem health of the region. Results here indicate that the magnitude of negative trends in dry season precipitation in the past decades exceeds the estimated range of trends due to natural variability of the climate system defined in both the preindustrial climate and during the 850–1850 millennium. The observed drying is associated with an increase in vapor pressure deficit. The univariate detection analysis shows that greenhouse gas (GHG) forcing has a systematic influence in negative 30-year trends of precipitation ending in 1998 and later on. …

More Than The Sum Of Its Parts: How Disturbance Interactions Shape Forest Dynamics Under Climate Change, Melissa S. Lucash, Robert M. Scheller, Brian R. Sturtevant, Eric J. Gustafson, Alec M. Kretchun, Jane R. Foster

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Interactions among disturbances are seldom quantified, and how they will be affected by climate change is even more uncertain. In this study, we sought to better understand how interactions among disturbances shift under climate change by applying a process-based landscape disturbance and succession model (LANDIS-II) to project disturbance regimes under climate change in north-central Minnesota, USA. Specifically, we (1) contrasted mortality rates and the extent of disturbance for four individual (single) disturbance regimes (fire, insects, wind, or forest management) vs. all four disturbance regimes operating simultaneously (concurrent) under multiple climate change scenarios and (2) determined how climate change interacts with …

Climate Change Amplifications Of Climate‐Fire Teleconnections In The Southern Hemisphere, Michela Mariani, Andrés Holz, Thomas T. Veblen, Grant J. Williamson, Michael-Shawn Fletcher, David M. J. S. Bowman

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Recent changes in trend and variability of the main Southern Hemisphere climate modes are driven by a variety of factors, including increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases, changes in tropical sea surface temperature, and stratospheric ozone depletion and recovery. One of the most important implications for climatic change is its effect via climate teleconnections on natural ecosystems, water security, and fire variability in proximity to populated areas, thus threatening human lives and properties. Only sparse and fragmentary knowledge of relationships between teleconnections, lightning strikes, and fire is available during the observed record within the Southern Hemisphere. This constitutes a major knowledge gap …

Fisheries’ Property Regimes And Environmental Outcomes: A Realist Synthesis Review, Rebecca J. Mclain, Steven Lawry, Maria Ojanen

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Our paper describes the application of a realist approach to synthesizing evidence from 31 articles examining the environmental outcomes of marine protected areas governed under different types of property regimes. The development of resource tenure interventions that promote sustainable management practices has been challenged by the difficulties of determining how contextual factors affect environmental outcomes given the complexity of socio-ecological systems. Realist synthesis is a promising evidence review technique for identifying the mechanisms that influence policy intervention outcomes in complex systems. Through a combination of inductive and deductive analysis of the links between context, mechanisms, and outcomes, realist synthesis can …

Holocene Dynamics Of Temperate Rainforests In West-Central Patagonia, Virginia Iglesias, Simon G. Haberle, Andrés Holz, Cathy Whitlock

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Analyses of long-term ecosystem dynamics offer insights into the conditions that have led to stability vs. rapid change in the past and the importance of disturbance in regulating community composition. In this study, we (1) used lithology, pollen, and charcoal data from Mallín Casanova (47°S) to reconstruct the wetland, vegetation, and fire history of west-central Patagonia; and (2) compared the records with independent paleoenvironmental and archeological information to assess the effects of past climate and human activity on ecosystem dynamics. Pollen data indicate that Nothofagus-Pilgerodendronforests were established by 9,000 cal yr BP. Although the biodiversity of the understory increased …

Regional Climate Model Evaluation System Powered By Apache Open Climate Workbench V1.3.0: An Enabling Tool For Facilitating Regional Climate Studies, Huikyo Lee, Alexander Goodman, Lewis Mcgibbney, Duane E. Waliser, Jinwon Kim, Paul C. Loikith, Peter B. Gibson, Elias C. Massoud

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Regional Climate Model Evaluation System (RCMES) is an enabling tool of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to support the United States National Climate Assessment. As a comprehensive system for evaluating climate models on regional and continental scales using observational datasets from a variety of sources, RCMES is designed to yield information on the performance of climate models and guide their improvement. Here, we present a user-oriented document describing the latest version of RCMES, its development process, and future plans for improvements. The main objective of RCMES is to facilitate the climate model evaluation process at regional scales. RCMES …

Multiple Methods Of Public Engagement: Disaggregating Socio-Spatial Data For Environmental Planning In Western Washington, Usa, Rebecca J. Mclain, David Banis, Alexa Todd, Lee Cerveny

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Highlights

• The effectiveness of participatory GIS approaches at engaging different publics was explored.

• Online surveys engaged urbanites; community workshops engaged rural residents.

• Urban and rural residents went to similar places but engaged in different activities.

• Use of multiple data collection methods will broaden public engagement.

• Mapping behavior studies are needed to improve understandings of PPGIS data quality.