Physical and Environmental Geography Commons^™

From Disaster To Resilience: Developing Smart Settlements In The Himalayas, Keshav Bhattarai, Ambika P. Adhikari

Himalayan Research Papers Archive

Nepal’s catastrophic 26 August 2026 Bhote Koshi–Trishuli flood should be understood not only as a humanitarian tragedy but also as a potentially major turning point in updating national settlement and reconstruction policy. Engineers and scientists have described the floods as a glacier–bedrock collapse that triggered an ice-rock avalanche and debris flow. As per the live updates on September 7, 2026, the total death toll was 1,355, and 4,996 people were missing (The Hindu, 2026). Indian and Nepali rescuers worked urgently to locate and rescue people buried under hydropower tunnels, buildings, mud, and landslide debris.

UN News reported on September 3, …

From Himalayan Catastrophe To National Resilience: Lessons From The 2026 Bhote Koshi And Trishuli River Floods In Nepal, Keshav Bhattarai, Ambika P. Adhikari

Himalayan Research Papers Archive

On the morning of 26 August 2026, the mountains above Nepal’s northern frontier delivered a disaster of almost unimaginable speed and scale. A massive mass of ice, rock, and sediment detached in the high Himalayan terrain near the Nepal–Tibet border, descended roughly 1,200 metres, interacted with the Lhende Khola system, and generated a debris-rich flood that surged through the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli river corridors, destroying settlements, markets, roads, bridges, hydropower facilities, and an international border crossing and transforming them into fields of mud, boulders, and wreckage within minutes (ICIMOD, 2026b; Reuters, 2026a). Satellite analysis indicates that a substantial section …

Automation, Migration, And Development: Geography Of Job Precarity In South Asia And North Africa, Keshav Bhattarai, Ambika P. Adhikari

Himalayan Research Papers Archive

This article examines how accelerating automation and the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in advanced economies reshape labor markets across the Global South through interconnected channels of production, migration, and remittances. Drawing on the theories and practices of economic geography, labor economics, and development studies, the analysis conceptualizes automation as a transnational shock that contracts demand for migrant labor while simultaneously amplifying employment precarity in labor-surplus economies. The article advances a geographically grounded framework linking technology adoption in core industries with labor displacement, youth unemployment, and urban labor saturation in South Asia and North Africa. It further highlights the macroeconomic …

Research Journal 2026: People And Places, José A. Rivera Ph.D

Faculty Publications

José Rivera narrates his life history from adolescence into college years, university teaching, research career, publications, and ends with post-retirement service as a giving back to community. For most of his term as an academic, his research focus was on community-based organizations that he terms “peoples’ institutions”: acequia associations and mutual help societies. For data, he conducted field work in New Mexico and the American Southwest as well as internationally, primarily in Mexico, Peru, Spain and the Philippines. While at these locations, he interviewed people, collected maps, researched archives, and took photographs as ethnographic evidence of people and places. His …

Advancing Interactive Web Cartography Through Designing And Developing An Open-Source, Data-Driven Framework For Accessible Geovisualization Of Geospatial (Big) Data, Sarigai Sarigai

Geography ETDs

The growth of geospatial big data has intensified the demand for open-source, accessible tools for interactive spatial exploration. This dissertation introduces a modular web mapping framework and details its design, extension, and evaluation to advance geovisualization through user-centered, transferable design. The first study presents the original framework, named dciWebMapper, establishing foundational cartographic and information visualization principles, with a focus on modularity and extensibility. The second study extends dciWebMapper with advanced capabilities—such as diverse map types, bivariate visualizations, temporal filtering, spatial querying, and hotspot analysis—and demonstrates its broad transferability across domains. The third study offers a structured usability evaluation of …

William Holmes Interviewing Rosetta Holmes Unm Oral History 300, William Holmes

Oral Histories HIST 300, Fall 2024

William Holmes interviews his grandmother Rosetta Holmes, a member of the Choctaw Nation, on her upbringing, life, and various stories from her childhood. She goes through how her family ended up in Hugo, Oklahoma. Her small town upbringing, how she met her husband, starting her family, and her education and the various jobs she has worked in her life. This was a project for oral history 300 at the University of New Mexico in which William used this opportunity to hear about his family and learn about his ancestors.

Geospatial Analysis Of Environmental, Tick, And Host Interactions With Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever In The Southwestern United States, Al Ekram Elahee Hridoy

Geography ETDs

This study examines the spatiotemporal distribution and determinants of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (RMSF) incidence in Arizona from 2006 to 2021. Utilizing climate variables, land cover types, and socio-economic indicators, we employed Negative Binomial Regression, Spatial autocorrelation, and Random Forest-based classification to identify key predictors and patterns of RMSF spread. Results indicate positive correlations between RMSF incidence and precipitation and shrub cover, while veterinary access, forest cover, and relative humidity show negative associations. Spatial analysis revealed significant case clustering, with limited veterinary access associated with higher RMSF incidence. A Random Forest-based predictive model was developed to identify potential tick-host interactions, …

Projecting Vegetation Condition And Fire Risk In Southern California, Westin K. Guthrie

Geography ETDs

In the western US, relationships between fire, vegetation, climate, and urban areas are dynamic and evolving. This work used a forest landscape model, LANDIS-II, informed by future climate scenarios and projections of urban expansion to understand wildfire interactions within projected Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) areas. This simulation showed that in both 2050 and 2100 +93% of the WUI in southern California experienced fire. Future work needs to be done in parametrizing forest biomass to ensure the validity of projections. Additionally, increasing each climate scenario model's replicates will create more accurate projections.

State Of Urbanization In Nepal: The Official Definition And Reality, Keshav Bhattarai, Ambika P. Adhikari, Shiva Gautam

Himalayan Research Papers Archive

Nepali government’s official delineation of several human settlements as new urban areas has been questionable because many important criteria such as urban infrastructure and services, open space, population density and economic viability are not thoroughly analyzed while defining what is urban. Many settlements in Nepal officially defined as urban, often driven by political considerations, are operating in the rural framework forming ruralopolises. This paper analyzes various criteria needed for defining urbanization that are internationally accepted to assess Nepal’s official definition of urban settlements. Urban areas have been expanding in Nepal at the cost of agricultural, forest, and shrubland land uses. …

Minimizing Surface Run-Off, Improving Underground Water Recharging, And On-Site Rain Harvesting In The Kathmandu Valley, Ambika P. Adhikari, Keshav Bhattarai

Himalayan Research Papers Archive

Nepal's political institutions and administrative units were thoroughly restructured in 2015 with the promulgation of the new Constitution. Several rural areas were combined to meet the definition of urban threshold criteria to classify rural areas into urban categories. Accordingly, over 3,900 local political and administrative units were amalgamated into 753 units, of which, 293 units are classified as urban. Within these newly defined urban areas, many natural environments have been converted into impervious surfaces such as paved roads, sidewalks, and building roofs. These impervious surfaces have drastically increased the amount of surface run-offs-often termed as "urban floods"--under increasing precipitation caused …

The Tijeras Pueblo (La 581) Archaeofaunal Project, Emily Lena Jones, Scott Kirk, Caitlin S. Ainsworth, Asia Alsgaard, Jana Valesca Meyer, Cyler Conrad

Anthropology Datasets

These files contain data generated by the Tijeras Pueblo (LA 581) Archaeofaunal Project, a project of the University of New Mexico Department of Anthropology Zooarchaeology Laboratory between 2011 and the present. This project has been supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1732622 and by a grant from the Research Allocations Committee of the University of New Mexico.

These data are the basis of the analyses presented in the following publication:

Jones, Emily Lena, Scott Kirk, Caitlin S. Ainsworth, Asia Alsgaard, Jana Valesca Meyer, and Cyler Conrad. 2021. The Community at the Crossroads: Artiodactyl Exploitation and …

Getting Past Possession: Subsurface Property Disputes As Nuisances, Joseph A. Schremmer

Faculty Scholarship

Property rights in the subsurface of land are adapting to accommodate modern activities like massive hydraulic fracturing (fracing). Property rights will need to continue adapting if they are to accommodate other developing activities like large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS). Courts and commentators rarely approach the nature of subsurface property directly. They tend instead to discuss appropriate standards for tort liability when disputes arise—for example when artificial fissures from a frac treatment extend into and drain oil or gas from a neighbor’s land. The case law and literature generally approach unauthorized subterranean invasions as trespasses. Because the tort of trespass …

Assessing How Terrain Representations And Scale Affect The Accuracy Of Distance Estimates, Kristian Mueller

Geography ETDs

Terrain is often displayed on maps either as background or foreground. Although terrain representations are ubiquitous, there is not a thorough understanding of map-readers’ cognition of geographic surfaces from various terrain representations. The research described in this thesis empirically assessed map users’ abilities at estimating straight-line distance using maps with two different types of terrain representations and at three different scales. The objective of this research was to assess how accurately map users estimate distance on the ground taking into account variations in elevation. Participant data in the form of demographics and distance estimates were statistically analyzed to determine if …

La Gota Que Colma La Caguama: Cummulative Tensions Transformed Into The Defense Of Water, Anthony J. Meluso

Geography ETDs

Making water management decisions is often where dreams and visions about potential futures are constructed and contested (Swengedouw 2015). However, in a globalized world, it is not well understood how people can challenge dominant paradigms to shape desirable futures when they are also complicit in, and dependent on existing structures (Arts & Buizer 2009; Emery, Perks, & Bracken 2013: Kleinschmit, Böcher, & Giessen 2009). This project examines a brewery conflict in the Mexicali Valley that provides an example of how protesters were able to challenge dominant assumptions about water management in a complex, globalized environment. I draw on Laclau’s (2005) …

Impact Of Drought On Land Cover Changes In Diné Bikéyah – A Study Through Remote Sensing, Anjanette A.J. Hawk

Geography ETDs

This study identifies land cover changes associated with a ten-year drought period and discusses the importance of vegetation change in Diné Bikéyah, a semi-arid land located in a remote part of the southwestern United States (US). This study concludes that drought produced slight changes in vegetation within a 540 km² study area in the Tselani-Cottonwood Chapter (TCC) in Diné Bikéyah. The data for this study consist of three Landsat images for the years 1998, 2002, and 2009. The methods used to analyze these Landsat images included image pre-processing, calculation of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) images, and supervised (maximum …

Towards Developing Indicators Of Environmental Sustainability For Kathmandu, Nepal, Published Version, Ambika P. Adhikari

Himalayan Research Papers Archive

Sustainability is now considered one of the key objectives in urban planning. However, due to inappropriate planning, weak institutions, limitation of resources, and poor implementation of policies, many big cities in the developing countries have become even less environmentally, economically and socially sustainable than they were in the past. Historically, the Kathmandu valley enjoyed a unique tradition, rich heritage and a moderate state of sustainability in all areas, particularly in the environmental arena. However, the rapidly expanding and modernizing cities in the valley are facing serious problems of sustainability in all fronts: economic, social, environmental and ecological. Whereas environmental and …

Lter Correspondence & Letters, Jerry F. Franklin

Long Term Ecological Research Network

1st. Letter written by Jerry F. Franklin, chair of LTER Network, addressed to David Greenland of the department of Geography. Franklin extends an invitation to the upcoming Coordinating Committee meeting taking place from October 19-21.

2nd. Letter written by Jerry F. Franklin, chair of LTER Network, addressed to Joshua Greenberg of he College of Forest Resources. Franklin extends an invitation to the upcoming Coordinating Committee meeting taking place from October 19-21.

3rd. Letter written by Jerry F. Franklin, chair of LTER Network, he writes on the significant decisions taken place over the LTER/CC meeting held on April 22-24.

4th. Letter …