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Physical and Environmental Geography Commons

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Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Physical and Environmental Geography

Delivering Green Streets: An Exploration Of Changing Perceptions And Behaviours Over Time Around Bioswales In Portland, Oregon, Glyn Everett, Jessica Lamond, Anita T. Morzillo, Annie Marissa Matsler, Faith Ka Shun Chan Dec 2015

Delivering Green Streets: An Exploration Of Changing Perceptions And Behaviours Over Time Around Bioswales In Portland, Oregon, Glyn Everett, Jessica Lamond, Anita T. Morzillo, Annie Marissa Matsler, Faith Ka Shun Chan

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Green Infrastructure (GI) is an increasingly popular means of dealing with flooding and water quality issues worldwide. This study examines public perceptions of, and behaviour around, bioswales, which are a popular GI facility in the United States. Bioswales are highly visible interventions requiring support from residents and policy-makers to be implemented and maintained appropriately. To understand how the residents’ perceptions and attitudes might develop over time, we interviewed residents of Portland, Oregon, living near bioswales installed 1–2, 4–5 and 8–9 years ago, to determine awareness, understanding, and opinions about the devices. We found no consistent patterns across time periods, but …


Modeling Vegetation Mosaics In Sub-Alpine Tasmania Under Various Fire Regimes, Gabriel I. Yospin, Samuel W. Wood, Andrés Holz, David M.J.S. Bowman, Robert E. Keane, Cathy Whitlock Oct 2015

Modeling Vegetation Mosaics In Sub-Alpine Tasmania Under Various Fire Regimes, Gabriel I. Yospin, Samuel W. Wood, Andrés Holz, David M.J.S. Bowman, Robert E. Keane, Cathy Whitlock

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Western Tasmania, Australia contains some of the highest levels of biological endemism of any temperate region in the world, including vegetation types that are conservation priorities: fire-sensitive rainforest dominated by endemic conifer species in the genus Athrotaxis; and fire-tolerant buttongrass moorlands. Current management focuses on fire suppression, but increasingly there are calls for the use of prescribed fire in flammable vegetation types to manage these ecosystems. The long-term effects of climate and alternative management strategies on the vegetated landscape are unknown. To help identify controls over successional trajectories, we parameterized a spatially explicit landscape-scale model of vegetation and fire …


Short-Tailed Temperature Distributions Over North America And Implications For Future Changes In Extremes, Paul C. Loikith, J. David Neelin Oct 2015

Short-Tailed Temperature Distributions Over North America And Implications For Future Changes In Extremes, Paul C. Loikith, J. David Neelin

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Some regions of North America exhibit nonnormal temperature distributions. Shorter-than-Gaussian warm tails are a special subset of these cases, with potentially meaningful implications for future changes in extreme warm temperatures under anthropogenic global warming. Locations exhibiting shorter-than-Gaussian warm tails would experience a greater increase in extreme warm temperature exceedances than a location with a Gaussian or long warm-side tail under a simple uniform warm shift in the distribution. Here we identify regions exhibiting such behavior over North America and demonstrate the effect of a simple warm shift on changes in extreme warm temperature exceedances. Some locations exceed the 95th percentile …


A Critical Physical Geography Of Urban Soil Contamination, Nathan Mcclintock Jul 2015

A Critical Physical Geography Of Urban Soil Contamination, Nathan Mcclintock

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Anthropogenic lead (Pb) is widespread in urban soils given its widespread deposition over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries via a range of point- and non-point sources, including industrial waste and pollution, leaded paint, and automobile exhaust. While soil scientists and urban ecologists have documented soil Pb contamination in cities around the world, such analyses rarely move beyond proximal mechanisms to focus on more distal factors, notably the social processes mediating Pb accumulation in particular places. In this paper, I articulate a critical physical geography of urban soil Pb contamination that considers the dialectical coproduction of soil and …


Overcoming Uncertainty And Barriers To Adoption Of Blue-Green Infrastructure For Urban Flood Risk Management, Colin R. Thorne, E. C. Lawson, Connie P. Ozawa, Samantha Hamlin, Leonard A. Smith Jan 2015

Overcoming Uncertainty And Barriers To Adoption Of Blue-Green Infrastructure For Urban Flood Risk Management, Colin R. Thorne, E. C. Lawson, Connie P. Ozawa, Samantha Hamlin, Leonard A. Smith

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI) and Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) are increasingly recognised as vital components of urban flood risk management. However, uncertainty regarding their hydrologic performance and lack of confidence concerning their public acceptability create concerns and challenges that limit their widespread adoption. This paper investigates barriers to implementation of BGI in Portland, Oregon, using the Relevant Dominant Uncertainty (RDU) approach. Two types of RDU are identified: scientific RDUs related to physical processes that affect infrastructure performance and service provision, and socio-political RDUs that reflect a lack of confidence in socio-political structures and public preferences for BGI. We find that socio-political …