Geographic Information Sciences Commons^™

Keynote Address: Climate Change: From Global To New York Scale, Christopher D. Thorncroft

CHAR

This talk is concerned with the science and impacts of climate change from global to New York scales. It will provide an assessment of how the climate has changed over the past Century based on a purely observational perspective. The scientific basis for anthroprogenic climate change will be explained and discussed including a description of the “greenhouse effect” and why it is important for life on this planet. We will briefly discuss global and local consequences of a warmer climate and what we need to be prepared for going forward in the coming decades.

Opening Keynote Address: Using Data To Understand Cultural Destruction, Brian I. Daniels

CHAR

Brian I. Daniels, Ph.D, Penn Cultural Heritage Center, University of Pennsylvania Museum.

Why is cultural heritage targeted in conflict? Under what circumstances? By whom? Today, due in part to the recent notorious instances of cultural destruction in the Middle East and North Africa, there is perhaps more attention among the broader scientific community than ever before about the phenomenon of cultural loss. At the same time, there are many significant data and analytical gaps. Little social science literature about cultural destruction exists and many critical questions—and avenues of research—are, as of yet, unstudied. A primary reason for this lack …

Spatiotemporal Identification Of Anomalies In A Wildlife Preserve, Bharadwaj Kishan, Jason Guan Jie Ong, Yanrong Zhang, Tin Seong Kam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The datasets released for the VAST Challenge 2017 comprise vehicle movement data captured with RFID sensors, chemical emission data from factories captured by gas sensors, and image attributes of the wildlife plant health obtained from satellites, all pertaining to a fictional wildlife preserve. Using visual analytics, a compelling hypothesis is established to link the spatiotemporal datasets to the phenomenon, where the count of a bird specimen is found to decline over a given year. Anomalies in vehicle traffic patterns are linked to proximal factory emissions, and further associated with satellite imagery that show proof of degradation in plant quality in …

Landsat Sentinel Registration Source Codes: Linux, Lin Yan, David P. Roy

Landsat Sentinel Registration Source Codes

• SSReg is open-source software (coded in C) for precise automatic registration of two Sentinel-2 L1C acquisitions including all 10 m, 20 m and 60 m bands.
• Version 1.1 is a Linux version and includes source codes, manual and test data.
• Major functionalities of the software:
  • Image registration supporting translation, affine and 2^nd order polynomial transformations.
  • Classic implementation of least-squares matching (LSM) with up to 0.02 pixel matching accuracy on medium-spatial-resolution optical-wavelength remote sensing images, including Landsat and Sentinel 2.
  • Implementation of the LSM-based depth-first mismatch detection.
• The development and release of this open-source software is funded by NASA grant …

Gis Spatial Analysis Of Arctic Settlement Patterns: A Case Study In Northwest Alaska, Justin Andrew Junge

Dissertations and Theses

In northwest Alaska, archaeologists hypothesize that environmental variability was a major factor in both growing coastal population density, with large aggregated villages and large houses, between 1000 and 500 years ago (ya), and subsequent decreasing population density between 500 ya and the contact era. After 500 ya people are thought to have dispersed to smaller settlements with smaller house sizes in coastal areas, and perhaps, upriver. This settlement pattern was identified through research at four site locations over 30 years ago. The changing geographic distribution of sites, associated settlement size, and house size has not been examined in detail. A …

Thule Iron Use In The Pre-Contact Arctic, Eileen Colligan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the use of iron by the Thule people, a Neoeskimo culture that lived in the North American Arctic between approximately 1000 AD and 1400 ̶ 1500 AD. The study takes a pan-Arctic perspective to bring together research that has usually been done on a more-limited geographical scale. This viewpoint shows the Thule culture from a view that corresponds to their world.

The study focuses on: (1) revisions in the accepted chronology of the Thule and how these have affected the explanations for the Thule Migration from Alaska to Greenland; (2) new understandings about the iron that was …

Analysis Of Traffic Collisions In Dublin Using Gis Based System, Jagteshwar Singh, Niamh O' Reilly

Conference papers

This study aims to analyse traffic collisions in the Greater Dublin Region between the period 2006-2012, using GIS to identify hotspots and examine the relationship between collisions and a range of contributory factors including vehicular speeds, traffic volume, road curvature, road category and distance from intersection that could enable prediction of traffic collisions. To this end, Road Safety Authority (RSA) collision data for Dublin Region geocoded as point events, road profiles, traffic flow characteristics on which these occur are spatially merged using ArcGIS and FME software to establish if a significant relationship exists between collision frequencies on road links and …

Towards Food Service Sustainability In Suburban Environments By Optimally Locating Shared Anaerobic Digester Units, Rebecca Loraamm, Joni Downs, Robert Alonso Bair, Daniel Yeh

Suburban Sustainability

Anaerobic digestion is an effective method for reducing food waste at the consumer level. Drawbacks associated with this strategy include high construction costs for multiple digester units and limited public awareness of the method’s commercial potential. Given the large scale problem of food waste, an approach establishing community partnerships between local businesses and primary schools is offered to combat the problem of food waste. Optimizing the placement of shared digester units enabling utilization by multiple stakeholders is the suggested mitigation method. This research explores application of the p-median problem to determine the set of optimal sites for shared anaerobic digester …

Utilizing A Consumer-Grade Camera System To Quantify Surface Reflectance, Joseph J. Lehnert

Department of Geography: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Consumer-grade camera systems are often employed in aerial remote sensing to provide insight into patterns and processes of interest to science and industry, a trend that has largely been encouraged by the rapid growth of the small unmanned aircraft system (sUAS) industry. However, little research exists on the ability of these systems to accurately measure surface reflectance in specific wavebands, a crucial consideration for many remote sensing applications. This research was conducted on the premise that with proper equipment and calibration techniques consumer-grade cameras would be capable of accurately measuring surface reflectance in user-defined wavebands of interest. A stereo-pair, Fujifilm …

Using The 500 M Modis Land Cover Product To Derive A Consistent Continental Scale 30 M Landsat Land Cover Classification, Hankui Zhang, David P. Roy

GSCE Faculty Publications

Classification is a fundamental process in remote sensing used to relate pixel values to land cover classes present on the surface. Over large areas land cover classification is challenging particularly due to the cost and difficulty of collecting representative training data that enable classifiers to be consistent and locally reliable. A novel methodology to classify large volume Landsat data using high quality training data derived from the 500 m MODIS land cover product is demonstrated and used to generate a 30 m land cover classification for all of North America between 20°N and 50°N. Publically available 30 m global monthly …

Landscape-Scale Geophysics At Tel Shimron, Jezreel Valley, Israel, Rachel Grap

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and magnetometry were used at Tel Shimron, an archaeological site in Israel’s Jezreel Valley. GPR primarily measures electric properties while magnetometry measures magnetic properties, making them complementary methods for subsurface prospection. Magnetometry can be collected and processed quickly, making it an ideal landscape-scale reconnaissance tool. It takes more time to collect, process, and interpret GPR data, but the result is a higher resolution dataset. In addition, GPR often works better than magnetometry in desert environments such as the Jezreel Valley. Conventional wisdom suggests that GPR should not be used as a landscape-scale reconnaissance tool unless there is …

The Urban Morphology Of Northwest Arkansas: A Geospatial Analysis, Jason Mccollum

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research on the impacts of transport infrastructure is limited, and most of it is either focused on

rural areas or on developed areas before modern geospatial technologies were available. This study aimed

to fill this gap in transport research by providing a holistic look at the regional changes that occurred due to

new transport infrastructure construction in Northwest Arkansas between 1980 and 2011.

The National Land Cover Database was used to create a time-series of land cover across the

region between 1992 and 2011. These data were then used to predict future growth in the region.

Additionally, growth patterns of …

The Bicycle, The Unsuitable Substitute:A Feasibility Study Based In Fayetteville, Ar Using A Bicycle As A Year-Round Replacement For An Automobile, Jamey Voorhees

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Can a bicycle can be used in place of an automobile for everyday transportation and commuting needs? Fayetteville, Arkansas is a bicycle friendly and they plan continue to expand the current trail system improve other components in the future. Alternative transportation forms like the bicycle are important but only if bikes are integrated into traffic which needs to be done in some way that all involved understand their place in the system. By actively participating in this system I have attempted to show that a bicycle is just not feasible as a form of daily transportation in a city like …

Evaluating Relevance And Reliability Of Twitter Data For Risk Communication, Xiaohui Liu

Dissertations

While Twitter has been touted to provide up-to-date information about hazard events, the relevance and reliability of tweets is yet to be tested. This research examined the relevance and reliability of risk information extracted from Twitter during the 2013 Colorado floods using five different approaches. The first approach examined the relationship between tweet volume and precipitation amount. The second approach explored the relationship between geo-tagged tweets and degree of damage. In the third approach, the spatiotemporal distribution of tweets was compared with flood extent. In the fourth approach, risk information from tweets were compared with survey responses obtained in a …

A Cross-Sectional Exploration Of Household Financial Reactions And Homebuyer Awareness Of Registered Sex Offenders In A Rural, Suburban, And Urban County., John Charles Navarro

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As stigmatized persons, registered sex offenders betoken instability in communities. Depressed home sale values are associated with the presence of registered sex offenders even though the public is largely unaware of the presence of registered sex offenders. Using a spatial multilevel approach, the current study examines the role registered sex offenders influence sale values of homes sold in 2015 for three U.S. counties (rural, suburban, and urban) located in Illinois and Kentucky within the social disorganization framework. Homebuyers were surveyed to examine whether awareness of local registered sex offenders and the homebuyer’s community type operate as moderators between home selling …

Uas As An Inventory Tool: A Photogrammetric Approach To Volume Estimation, Richard Kramer Rhodes

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), also referred to as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or remotely piloted vehicles (RPV), are associated with unmanned aircraft either controlled by a pilot on the ground or pre-programmed with specific flight paths. Small UASs have seen a massive increase in public interest in recent years as hobbyist platforms; they are, however, a potentially powerful tool in remote sensing and geospatial applications. Due to the increased availability of low-cost UAS, this technology could soon revolutionize many industries, including those that require volumetric estimation. Traditionally volumetric inventories have been performed with tape measurements, and in some instances where …

Textural Analysis Of Historical Aerial Photography To Determine Change In Coastal Marsh Extent: Site Of The Present-Day Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (Gbnerr), Mississippi, 1955-2014, Heather Michelle Nicholson

Master's Theses

Coastal marshlands are among the world’s most highly productive ecosystems but they have diminished greatly in the past several decades owing to sea-level rise and direct anthropogenic influences. An effective means of quantifying loss or gain in marsh area is through the use of aerial image data, which offers synoptic views of the landscape at decadal-scale sampling frequencies. However, a potential problem with older panchromatic, or black-and-white, imagery is the absence of multispectral information that might be used otherwise in remote identification of vegetation types. Nevertheless, the analysis of horizontal variability in image brightness values, or image texture, can be …

Introduction To Gis Using Open Source Software, 8th Ed, Frank Donnelly

Open Educational Resources

This tutorial was created to accompany the GIS Practicum, a day-long workshop offered by the Newman Library at Baruch College CUNY that introduces participants to geographic information systems (GIS) using the open source software QGIS. The practicum introduces GIS as a concept for envisioning information and as a tool for conducting geographic analyses and creating maps. Participants learn how to navigate a GIS interface, how to prepare layers and conduct a basic geographic analysis, and how to create thematic maps. This tutorial was written using QGIS version 2.18 "Las Palmas", a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) desktop GIS software package.

The Mobile Monitoring Of Particulate Matter Through Wearable Sensors And Their Influence On Students' Environmental Attitudes, Joseph M. Abbate

DePaul Discoveries

While we have a comprehensive understanding of air pollutants, and their spatiotemporal characteristics across global, and even regional, scales, we are quite limited in our capacity to monitor neighborhood-scale emissions. The mobile monitoring of air pollution is a growing field, prospectively filling in these gaps while personalizing air quality-based tools and risk assessment. In the present study, we developed wearable sensors for particulate matter (PM); and through a citizen science approach, students of partnering Chicago schools monitored PM concentrations throughout their commutes over a five-day period. While their recorded findings would be used to explore the relationship between PM concentrations …

Identifying Nodes Of Transmission In Disease Diffusion Through Social Media, David Sebastian Lamb

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The spread of infectious diseases can be described in terms of three interrelated components: interaction, movement, and scale. Transmission between individuals requires some form of interaction, which is dependent on the pathogen, to occur. Diseases spread through the movement of their hosts; they spread across many spatial scales from local neighborhoods to countries, or temporal scales from days to years, or periodic intervals. Prior research into the spread of disease have examined diffusion processes retrospectively at regional or country levels, or developed differential equation or simulation models of the dynamics of disease transmission. While some of the more recent models …