Geography Commons^™

Differentiating Fissure-Fed Lava Flow Types And Facies Using Radar And Lidar: An Example From The 2014–2015 Holuhraun Lava Flow-Field, Gavin Douglas Tolometti, Catherine D. Neish, Christopher W. Hamilton, Gordon R. Osinski, Antero Kukko, Joana R.C. Voigt

Earth Sciences Publications

Distinguishing between lava types and facies using remote sensing data is important for interpreting the emplacement history of lava flow-fields on Earth and other planetary bodies. Lava facies typically include a mixture of lava types and record the collective emplacement history of material preserved at a particular location. We seek to determine if lava facies in the 2014–2015 Holuhraun lava flow-field are discernible using radar roughness analysis. Furthermore, we also seek to distinguish between lava types using high resolution Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data. We extracted circular polarization ratios (CPR) from the Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar and …

Evaluation Of Measurement Data Across Eight Gis Basemaps Using Drumlins: Combining Basemaps Is Optimal, Gretchen A. Wambach, Alexander K. Stewart

The Compass: Earth Science Journal of Sigma Gamma Epsilon

Choosing the best basemap for landform data collection and analysis is fundamental for accurate measurements and usability. Different types of basemaps may affect how we perceive relief through a map (Phillips et al., 1975); thereby, affecting the precision of data collected. This project collected length and azimuth data of 60 drumlins in Western, NY from four different, ArcGIS online (AGOL)-provided basemaps, as well as two parallel-to-strike and two perpendicular-to-strike hillshades (n=4). Testing the mean length (1,662m, ±529) and azimuth (171°, ±0.3) data for uniformity across basemaps determined if any basemap is more or less reliable for data collection. The Terrain …

Gigapan® Photogrammetry For Outcrop Description, 3d Modeling, And 3d Printing, Preston Liles, Logan Pearson, Samantha Barnett, Dakota G. Simpson, David B. Fitzpatrick, Erik B. Larson, Maurice Testa

The Compass: Earth Science Journal of Sigma Gamma Epsilon

The collection of 3D information on geological media is fundamental for field geology, however it can be both time consuming and expensive. This report proposes a new method for the collection of 3D information of outcrops using simple to use and inexpensive technology. GigaPan® systems can be used to take high resolution images of outcrops and these images then be either left in 2D for additional description of the outcrop in the lab, or they can be processed in Autodesk 3ds Max® to create realistic 3D models of the outcrops which can then be 3D printed. The collection of this …

Borders: A Story Of Political Imagination, Miriam Ticktin

Publications and Research

This article traces three different political imaginaries about borders, suggesting that the dominant imaginary—the one of border walls, driven by a fear of invasion—is only one way to live in the world. The goal is to make space in our political imaginations to rethink how we live together, including thinking beyond nation-states as containers that keep people in or out. By first showing how the vision of invasion is built and maintained with intersecting transnational technologies and ideologies, I open the way to thinking otherwise. Second, I trace the counterpolitics of borders developed by artists and activists, resisting borders and …

Machine Learning With Kay, Lasith Niroshan, James Carswell

Conference Papers

Computational power is very important when training Deep Learning (DL) models with large amounts of data (Wooldridge, 2021). Hence, High-Performance Computing (HPC) can be leveraged to reduce computational cost, and the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) provides significant infrastructure and services for research and development to both academia and industry. A portion of ICHEC's HPC system has been allocated for institutional access, and this paper presents a case study of how to use Kay (Ireland's national supercomputer) in the remote sensing domain. Specifically, this study uses clusters of Kay Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for training DL models to extract …

Intersecting Mobilities: Beyond The Autonomy Of Movement And Power Of Place, Miriam Ticktin, Rafi Youatt

Publications and Research

It is widely understood that we live in a world where people, goods, species, and things of all sorts are on the move, and that the politics around mobility and its regulation and meaning are critical to contemporary political and social life. Human migration has been globally intensive for well over a century; industrial economic production, consumption, and trade move goods around the world; transportation infrastructure moves all sorts of cargo around, human and nonhuman; regular and irregular ecological processes and changes are creating new patterns of nonhuman movement; variants of viruses race around the world; even geological elements are …

Regional And Elevational Patterns Of Extreme Heat Stress Change In The Us, Colin Raymond, Duane E. Waliser, Bin Guan, Huikyo Lee, Paul Loikith, Elias C. Massoud, Agniv Sengupta, Deepti Singh, Adrienne Wootten

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Increasing severity of extreme heat is a hallmark of climate change. Its impacts depend on temperature but also on moisture and solar radiation, each with distinct spatial patterns and vertical profiles. Here, we consider these variables' combined effect on extreme heat stress, as measured by the environmental stress index, using a suite of high-resolution climate simulations for historical (1980–2005) and future (2074–2099, Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5)) periods. We find that observed extreme heat stress drops off nearly linearly with elevation above a coastal zone, at a rate that is larger in more humid regions. Future projections indicate dramatic relative …

Mapping Narrations, Narrating Maps: Concepts Of The World In The Middle Ages And The Early Modern Period, Ingrid Baumgartner, Daniel Gneckow, Anna Hollenbach, Phillip Landgrebe

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

This volume offers the author's central articles on the medieval and early modern history of cartography for the first time in English translation. A first group of essays gives an overview of medieval cartography and illustrates the methods of cartographers. Another analyzes world maps and travel accounts in relation to mapped spaces. A third examines land surveying, cartographical practices of exploration and the production of Portolan atlases.

Prisoners Of Scale: Downscaling Community Resilience Measurements For Enhanced Use, Sahar Derakshan, Leah Blackwood, Margot Habets, Julia F. Effgen, Susan L. Cutter

Faculty Publications

As improved data availability and disaster resilience knowledge help progress community resilience quantification schemes, spatial refinements of the associated empirical methods become increasingly crucial. Most existing empirically based indicators in the U.S. use county-level data, while qualitatively based schemes are more locally focused. The process of replicating resilience indices at a sub-county level includes a comprehensive study of existing databases, an evaluation of their conceptual relevance in the framework of resilience capitals, and finally, an analysis of the statistical significance and internal consistency of the developed metrics. Using the U.S. Gulf Coast region as a test case, this paper demonstrates …

"We've Created Cheap Energy Off The Backs Of Salmon": Dam Removal Politics And Alliances In The Lower Snake River Basin, Krista Harrington

Dissertations and Theses

Dams, once considered by many to be good for water development in the Western U.S., might not be a part of a climate resilient future. Dams have come under increasing scrutiny due to undesirable ecological implications. Although dam removal proposals are growingly popular in recent decades, they are controversial since they impact different stakeholders in different ways. In the Pacific Northwest, the Lower four Snake River dams have long been criticized for their negative impacts on salmon. In February 2021, US Congressman Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) proposed a comprehensive framework to deconstruct the Lower four Snake River dams as an attempt …

A Raft To Coastal Resilience: Odu Researchers Collaborate To Help Rural Communities Combat Flooding Impacts, News @ Odu

News Items

No abstract provided.

Examining Elementary School Children’S Knowledge About Food And Nutrition In Southwestern Ontario, Canada, Paige Colley, Jamie A. Seabrook, Sarah J. Woodruff, Jason Gilliland

Geography & Environment Publications

Purpose: Knowledge is fundamental to helping children make nutritional choices that support lifelong healthy behaviours. This study (i) investigates elementary school children’s knowledge about food and nutrition and (ii) identifies sociodemographic factors influencing children’s reported knowledge. Methods: In 2017–2019, a survey was administered to 2443 students (grades 5–8) at 60 schools across southwestern Ontario, Canada, and a parent survey was used to validate self-reported sociodemographics. Multiple regression was used to analyse children’s knowledge scores and related sociodemographic factors. A total knowledge score was calculated by summing correct responses derived from 46 individual questions in the student …

College Of Natural Sciences Newsletter, May & June 2022, College Of Natural Sciences

College of Natural Sciences Newsletters and Reports

Volume 3, Issue 4

Page 1 Dean's Message
Page 2 Awards and Recognition
Page 3-4 The path to a Doctorate Degree
Page 4 American Indian Student Center Native Graduate Honoring Ceremony
Page 5 Celebrating the lives of those who touched the College
Page 6 Media coverage of CNS
Page 7 Open PRAIRIE
Page 8-10 CNS Graduation Festivities
Page 11-14 Spring 2022 Dean's List
Page 16 Richard and Janice Vetter Endowed Professorship in Biotechnology.position

An Assessment Of The Extremes And Impacts Of The February 2021 South-Central U.S. Arctic Outbreak, And How Climate Services Can Help, Rebecca A. Bolinger, Vincent M. Brown, Christopher M. Fuhrmann, Karin L. Gleason, T. Andrew Joyner, Barry D. Keim, Amanda Lewis, John W. Nielsen-Gammon, Crystal J. Stiles, William Tollefson, Hannah E. Attard, Alicia M. Bentley

Faculty Publications

In February 2021, a widespread cold-air outbreak, with two associated winter storm systems, impacted the South-Central United States. After a comprehensive summary of the synoptic setup and a day-by-day analysis of the event, we assess the significance of the storm from a climatological perspective. Concerning winter precipitation, there were isolated instances of record snowfall accumulations. While freezing rain and freezing drizzle both occurred, total freezing precipitation accumulations did not exceed a one-in-50 year event. The duration of the cold was notable — many stations across the region broke records for the highest number of consecutive days below freezing. When analyzing …

Cityengine As A Tool For Visualizing Neighborhood Change: An Initial Study, Zach Noyes

City and Regional Planning

Urban planning is reliant upon genuine public engagement to ensure that planning and policy decisions reflect the ideas shared by the public. Because planning is a profession largely focused on the physical and built implications of more abstract planning concepts, effective graphic communication is critical to securing public support and understanding of policy decisions. ESRI's CityEngine uses procedural modeling technology to render personally-tailored scenes to non-planner members of the public, and shows potential to positively change the way that planners generate graphic representations of physical impacts of policy changes. This initial study establishes a methodology for determining the efficacy of …

Building The Revolution: Ideology, Affect And Gender In Bolivarian Caracas, Andreina I. Torres A.

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Building the Revolution: Ideology, Affect and Gender in Bolivarian Caracas,” examines the Bolivarian Revolution (1998-present) as a heterogenous shifting political process, and terrain of struggle in which a multiplicity of actors disputed the meanings and direction of socialism in Venezuela. During three years of ethnographic and archival research in Caracas (between 2014 and 2017) I researched one of the many Campamentos de Pioneros (Pioneer Camps) that was part of the Movimiento de Pobladores y Pobladoras de Venezuela (Venezuela’s Settlers’ Movement). The pioneers sought to “rescue” and occupy centrally located land in the national capital in order to build housing for …

Why, New York City? Gauging The Quality Of Life Through The Thoughts Of Tweeters, Sheryl Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As a resource for social data, Twitter’s platform has been used to measure the quality of life through sentiment analysis. This capstone project explores another methodological technique—querying Twitter data around specific keyword terms to determine dominant topics, word patterns, and sentiment leanings in a geographical area. Focusing on New York City and Los Angeles for comparative analysis, the keyword term “why” will be used to build a Python analysis around topic modeling and sentiment analysis. Using this approach, the analysis reveals social and cultural differences, the overall sentiment of tweets, and subjects of interest to tweeters.

GitHub Repository for all …

Where Gunshots Turn Fatal: A Geographic Examination Of The Spatial Patterning Of Gun Violence, David Hatten

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation contributes fundamental work to the examination of gun violence through an investigation of prevalence, trends, and likely place-based dynamics that explain the spatial patterning of gun violence in Kansas City, MO over a 5-year period (2015-2019). Specifically, this dissertation assesses 1) the degree to which separate shooting typologies (fatal and non-fatal) concentrate in micro-places, 2) whether they co-locate at micro-places, and 3) the likely community characteristics and place-based dynamics that explain these observed patterns. Importantly, the role of place-based dynamics related to the post-incident operational response to gun violence is tested (e.g., a street segment’s proximity to trauma …

Falling Forward: The Governance Of School Reform, Race, And The Contest For A Dignified Future In Newark, N.J., Claire Cahen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Following the Great Recession, a two-pronged policy agenda of charter school creation and public school austerity was implemented in many impoverished, multiracial urban school districts in the U.S. The reforms have yet to meet durably effective resistance. The three articles that comprise this dissertation address questions about how school reforms, austerity, and privatization have been made governable, specifically in relation to the: preservation of local Black political machine power, creation of a labor market for charter school teachers, ongoing contestation attempts by public educators in inert unions. These questions correspond to theoretical debates about contemporary forms of racism and the …

Modeling And Predicting Geospatial Teen Crash Frequency, Sonu Mathew, Srinivas S. Pulugurtha, Sarvani Duvvuri

Mineta Transportation Institute

This research project 1) evaluates the effect of road network, demographic, and land use characteristics on road crashes involving teen drivers, and, 2) develops and compares the predictability of local and global regression models in estimating teen crash frequency. The team considered data for 201 spatially distributed road segments in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, USA for the evaluation and obtained data related to teen crashes from the Highway Safety Information System (HSIS) database. The team extracted demographic and land use characteristics using two different buffer widths (0.25 miles and 0.5 miles) at each selected road segment, with the number of …