Geography Commons^™

Extreme Cold Event Perception And Preparedness Of Western Michigan University Students, Connor J. Landeck

Masters Theses

Preparing for disasters at universities differs throughout the country but taking preventative measures is the first step in reducing loss of life and recovery measures. This research examined differences among undergraduate students regarding perceptions when it comes to extreme cold events at Western Michigan University (WMU). The main focus of the thesis was to determine if there is a lack of awareness and/or preparation measures of extreme cold events. Data were collected online using a specially designed questionnaire through Qualtrics. Survey questions were coded and analyzed using SPSS software using standard univariate descriptive statistics and/or multivariate statistical tests deemed appropriate. …

Effects Of Bin Proximity And Informational Prompts On Recycling And Contamination, Sonny Rosenthal, Noah Linder

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This between-subjects experiment manipulated the proximity of a waste bin relative to a recycling bin and the presence of information about why and how to rinse recyclables. After completing a yogurt taste test, 272 undergraduate students disposed of their plastic tasting cups in either a waste bin or a recycling bin. Binary logistic regression showed use of the recycling bin roughly tripled when the waste bin was made less convenient by moving it away from the tasting area (p R2 = 0.54). Univariate ANOVA showed the contamination level of recycled items was lower when an informational prompt indicated how clean …

Spatial Assessment Of Urban Growth In Cities Of The Decapolis; And The Implications For Modern Cities, Wade A. Pierson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Levant’s Decapolis was a network of ten cities in Greco-Roman Israel, Jordan, and Syria that established a thriving economic community. The Decapolis was home to ancient and modern cities like Damascus (Dammásq) and Amman (Philadelphia). Despite the various origins of these cities, Roman administration and their city planners oversaw the implementation of idealized Roman city form throughout the region. Three Decapolis cities represent intriguing examples of the larger confederation. Philadelphia (Amman), Gerasa (Jerash), and Gadara (Umm Qais) represent cities of common original urban form which developed drastically diverse urban morphologies over time.

Spatial analyses of these cities required working …

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 …

Using Immersive Data Visualization To Highlight Changing Travel Patterns In Maine Due To Covid 19, Colleen Metcalf, Charlotte Aucoin

Thinking Matters Student Research Symposium

The impacts of COVID 19 are of top concern to tourism policy makers and stakeholders across Maine, as tourism plays a vital role in the state’s economy. This project shows the value of the Storymap to present, in an accessible and visually appealing way, the continuing research on how volunteered geographic information from social media can track changes in tourist’s movement and spending in Maine. The metadata from Flickr photos was used to examine where visitors spent time in the summer of 2020, revealing new patterns of tourism activity due to Covid-19 travel restrictions. In addition, we incorporate the results …

Socastee Interview, Participant #16, April 29, 2021, Jennifer Mokos, Jaime Mccauley

Flood Survivor Interviews

A community member of the Rosewood neighborhood in Socastee is interviewed by a CCU student.

Mapping Renewal: How An Unexpected Interdisciplinary Collaboration Transformed A Digital Humanities Project, Elise Tanner, Geoffrey Joseph

Digital Initiatives Symposium

Funded by a National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Foundations Grant, the UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture’s “Mapping Renewal” pilot project focused on creating access to and providing spatial context to archival materials related to racial segregation and urban renewal in the city of Little Rock, Arkansas, from 1954-1989. An unplanned interdisciplinary collaboration with the UA Little Rock Arkansas Economic Development Institute (AEDI) has proven to be an invaluable partnership. One team member from each department will demonstrate the Mapping Renewal website and discuss how the collaborative process has changed and shaped …

Ownership Is A Habit Of Mind: How Community Land Trusts Expose Key Consensual Fictions Of Urban Property, Deborah Martin

Geography

Community land trusts (“CLTs”) have garnered attention as a novel,
non-state organizational mechanism for enabling permanently
affordable homeownership. In canonical form, they separate
a home from the land upon which it sits, holding the land in trust
and selling the home for its value without the land. Additionally,
CLTs use ground lease restrictions to constrain the resale process
and enforce long-term reproduction of affordability. Herein, we
argue that given the “actually existing” character of CLT practices,
the legal vocabulary CLTs use is not most directly nor most accu-
rately descriptive. The nature of the present intervention is empha-
tically not …

The Hidden Safety Net: Wild And Semi-Wild Plant Consumption And Nutrition Among Women Farmers In Southwestern Burkina Faso, Jane Servin

Geography Honors Projects

Mainstream development thinking suggests that increasing agricultural production will increase wealth and lead to improved diets. However, this perspective does not account for the complexities of food access, gender, and household dynamics. In Burkina Faso, development initiatives focus on increasing agricultural yield to alleviate hunger, but relatively wealthy areas are still experiencing widespread food insecurity. Wild plants play a key role in rural diets and serve as a nutritional safety net. This research investigates the use of wild plants for nutrition among women rice farmers and their households in Southwestern Burkina Faso. I examine the connections between native plant consumption, …

Pulling The Food System Up By The Roots: How Do We Build An Equitable Food System In The Twin Cities?, Aubrey A. Hagen

Geography Honors Projects

Prior to 2020, food insecurity was already a pervasive problem in the United States, with limited access to adequate, nutritious foods being linked to numerous poor physical and psychological outcomes. With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and civil uprisings in response to police brutality and state-sanctioned violence, the Twin Cities communities are facing overlapping crises that threaten individual and community wellbeing and food security. How do we build a just, equitable, and “crisis-proof” food system? Drawing from theoretical frameworks in social epidemiology and radical food geography, this paper assesses how the local food system and community food insecurity in …

Covid Conspiracy Narratives: Dissecting The Origins Of Misinformation In Digital Space, Finn Odum

Geography Honors Projects

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the role of digital spaces in the dissemination of health information. These online spaces present legitimate dangers for the future of global health, as they perpetuate COVID-19 conspiracies and promote the rejection of health authority. This thesis asks how digital social spaces allow for the spread of COVID-19 misinformation. Through a discourse analysis of conspiracy narrative news coverage, I study the development of three COVID-19 conspiratorial narratives: the Wuhan Lab theory, the Plandemic theory, and the 5G-Coronavirus theory. I aim to understand how these discourses took advantage of the unique character of digital social spaces …

268— Nature Centers In New York State, Allison Menendez

GREAT Day Posters

Nature centers provide an informal education to the public about wildlife, ecology, and the environment. They can be owned privately or be run by parks. The purpose of this project was to create a GIS layer that maps the location of New York nature centers and holds information about them. The main vector layer of this project is a point layer representing the locations of nature centers in the state with fields including the name of the nature center, the park in which it is located, the county in which it is located, its website, its owner, the year it …

331— Temporal Trends In The Receding Glaciers In Glacier National Park, Montana, 1904 To 2020, Emily Keenan

GREAT Day Posters

Glacier National Park, located in Montana along the Canadian border, was comprised of approximately 80 glaciers following the Little Ice Age. During this time, the glaciers hit their peak; however, over the years, many of these glaciers have decreased drastically in size. As of 2015, only 26 of these glaciers still remain and meet the requirement to be considered an active glacier (being larger than 0.1 km²). As a result of climate change, both natural and anthropogenic, the glaciers are shrinking and the number is decreasing more and more each year. The purpose of this research was to …

330— Spatial Trends Of Green Burial Grounds, U.S., Emma Ranney

GREAT Day Posters

"Green" burial was the standard form of interment in the United States prior to the late 1800s. During the Civil War, the rate of chemical embalming grew out of necessity, as the deceased often had to be transported considerable distances to arrive in their home state. Chemical embalming quickly became one of the most common and accepted funeral practices in the nation. In 1993, however, the natural burial movement began in the U.K., and by 1998, the U.S. had its first green-burial-friendly cemetery. The purpose of this project is to analyze spatial, temporal, and additional significant trends regarding green burial …

427— Understanding The Spatial Distribution Of Avalanche Fatalities In Utah, 2010-2020, Jackson Ferguson

GREAT Day Posters

This project continues the work of building knowledge about avalanches by creating a database that maps avalanche fatalities in Utah. The primary vector layer is a point layer that marks the precise location of avalanche fatalities, which has the potential to capture spatial trends in such occurrences.The mapping in this project confirms that there is a strong spatial pattern to avalanche fatalities in Utah, with a high density of accidents in the Salt Lake county. A likely explanation for why there are higher numbers of fatalities in this region is simply population density. A statistical analysis exposes the complexity of …

333— Analyzing The Geography Of The Salem Witch Trials: Studying The Distribution Of People And Places Involved In This 17th Century Witch Hysteria, Hannah Dorn

GREAT Day Posters

Through this research project, I analyzed and studied geographical elements associated with the Salem Witch Trials throughout towns in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the years 1692-1693. With this research, and the data that I collected and mapped throughout the reseach process, I was able to gain a better understanding of when and where the hysteria of the trials spread. Additionally, I was able to uncover where this hysteria of accusations was most concentrated, and how many people were affected as a result of this puzzling and mysterious phenomenon.

213— Deadly Summers: Infant And Child Deaths In 19th Century Rochester, New York, Nykole Nevol

GREAT Day Posters

During the 19th century, Rochester, NY, became a bustling city full of potential. Although there were many benefits to living in Rochester, the prevalence of infectious disease was not one of them. At this point in history, short lives were very common, and many people did not live past childhood. Therefore, children and infants were the most affected by these diseases. During the summer months, fever and diarrhea, likely due to contaminated food or water, took the lives of many infants and children. This study will explore these diseases, which were commonly referred to as cholera infantum and summer complaint, …

A Site Suitability Analysis Of A Book Store/Coffee Shop In Seattle, Washington, Hannah Paul, Jennifer Hahn

ONU Student Research Colloquium

This research presents the utility of a Site Suitability Analysis to help determine the viability of a business venture in a particular location. Specifically, we present the results of a case study that focuses on the area immediately around Seattle, WA as providing a sufficient number of customers to warrant a new and sustainable used book store/ coffee shop. Site Suitability Analysis provides a variety of statistical and analytical methods of analysis, which is commonly used in market research. This research presents the results of some of these methods, as applied to commonly-used datasets, and concludes that Site Suitability Analysis …

Identifying Appropriate Strategies To Sell Tesla Automobiles In Ohio, Trever Maughmer

ONU Student Research Colloquium

Segmentation data serves as an important resource used in business research. It encapsulates people who live in certain areas according to similar demographic traits, behaviors and habits, and consumer trends. Companies such as ESRI make their segmentation data available for a price, along with highly-specialized analysis tools. This project is a case study that examines the utility of ESRI segmentation data and tools to identify a suitable marketing strategy for potential customers in specific locations in Ohio. It further identifies population segments in certain geographic areas according to consumer trends and demographic characteristics. Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar (B&M) dealerships, this project …

A Site-Suitability Analysis Of An Indoor Snow Ski Park Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Ethan Falsone, Austin White

ONU Student Research Colloquium

This research presents the utility of a Site Suitability Analysis to help determine the viability of a business venture in a particular location. Specifically, we present the results of a case study that focuses on the area immediately around Harrisburg, Pennsylvania as providing a sufficient number of customers to warrant a new and sustainable Indoor Snow Ski Slope. Site Suitability Analysis provides a variety of statistical and analytical methods of analysis, which is commonly used in market research. This research presents the results of some of these methods, as applied to commonly-used datasets, and concludes that Site Suitability Analysis can …