Geography Commons^™

Quantifying The Impact Of Remapping Floodplains On Residential Property Values In Snohomish County, Washington: A Hedonic Approach, Carson Joseph Risner

All Master's Theses

Flood events are the most common and costly natural disasters. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) quantifies flood risks in the form of Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMS). These FIRMS delineate flood risks and are used to set flood insurance premiums. Changes in land use, the augmentation of the natural environment, is threatening the validity of the Nation’s FIRMS. Therefore, Congress has approved remapping programs to update these FIRMs ensuring that current flood risks are known. This remapping presents another issue, specifically for properties that are remapped into a flood zone. Current literature suggests that properties within flood zones are …

Evaluating The Spatial Trends And Statistical Determinants Of Residential Solar Uptake In Washington State, Caleb Michael Valko

All Master's Theses

Washington State’s Clean Energy Transformation Act and other state and federal policies encouraging solar power make Washington a ripe candidate to examine growth, trends, and potential determinants or barriers to residential solar uptake. In this thesis, residential solar is cumulatively and annually mapped by county (2000-2019) and Census tract (2017-2019) across the state to identify trends over time and space. Each variable (income, age, households, race, education, solar insolation, cost of solar per watt) was isolated individually to analyze the relationship (if any) to the dependent variable (i.e., residential solar installations). The covariates are then combined into a multiple regression …

Transitioning To Legalization Of Cannabis In Washington State: Regulations’ Impacts On Commodification, Metabolism, & Labor Practices, Rob Loewen

All Master's Theses

This thesis provides an ethnographically grounded analysis of how existing regulations shape the legal recreational cannabis industry in Washington State. I examine the processes involved from seed to sale, including cultivation, processing, quality-control testing, and distribution of recreational cannabis. The goal of this research is to provide a greater understanding of how existing regulations were formed and how they shape social relations within the industry. This study seeks to answer the question: “How are the processes of production within the recreational cannabis industry, along with its labor force and its consumers, impacted by societal perceptions about cannabis, encapsulated within state …

Orienting New International College Students During A Global Pandemic: Spatiality’S Contributions To Staff Work Practices, Thomas W. Teague Jr.

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

U.S. colleges must increasingly respond to a wide range of complex forces and simultaneously fulfill their missions and support students. To address many of these forces, some have turned to internationalization efforts like recruiting and enrolling international students. In light of these efforts, critics have called for institutions to better, more appropriately support these students, given their challenges and needs. This call has amplified during the recent COVID-19 global health pandemic.

Traditional student support services tend to center around Tinto’s Theory of Student Departure. Examples of support programming are frequently shared, yet rarely detail how institutional staff actually perform them …

Glacial Deposits, Vol. 46, 2021, Department Of Geography, Geology, And The Environment

Glacial Deposits

Newsletter of the Department of Geography, Geology, and the Environment

Effects Of Training Set Size On Supervised Machine-Learning Land-Cover Classification Of Large-Area High-Resolution Remotely Sensed Data, Christopher A. Ramezan, Timothy A. Warner, Aaron E. Maxwell, Bradley S. Price

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

The size of the training data set is a major determinant of classification accuracy. Neverthe- less, the collection of a large training data set for supervised classifiers can be a challenge, especially for studies covering a large area, which may be typical of many real-world applied projects. This work investigates how variations in training set size, ranging from a large sample size (n = 10,000) to a very small sample size (n = 40), affect the performance of six supervised machine-learning algo- rithms applied to classify large-area high-spatial-resolution (HR) (1–5 m) remotely sensed data within the context of a geographic …

State Changes: Insights From The U.S. Long Term Ecological Research Network, Julie C. Zinnert, Jesse B. Nippert, Jennifer A. Rudgers, Steven C. Pennings, Grizelle González, Merryl Alber, Sara G. Baer, John M. Blair, Adrian Burd, Scott L. Collins, Christopher Craft, Daniela Di Iorio, Walter K. Dodds, Peter M. Groffman, Ellen Herbert, Christine Hladik, Fan Li, Marcy E. Litvak, Seth Newsome, John O’Donnell, William T. Pockman, John Schalles, Donald R. Young

Advanced Science Research Center

Understanding the complex and unpredictable ways ecosystems are changing and predicting the state of ecosystems and the services they will provide in the future requires coordinated, long-term research. This paper is a product of a U.S. National Science Foundation funded Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network synthesis effort that addressed anticipated changes in future populations and communities. Each LTER site described what their site would look like in 50 or 100 yr based on long-term patterns and responses to global change drivers in each ecosystem. Common themes emerged and predictions were grouped into state change, connectivity, resilience, time lags, and …

Time Lags: Insights From The U.S. Long Term Ecological Research Network, Edward B. Rastetter, Mark D. Ohman, Katherine J. Elliott, J. S. Rehage, Victor H. Rivera-Monroy, R. E. Boucek, Edward Castañeda-Moya, Tess M. Danielson, Laura Gough, Peter M. Groffman, C. Rhett Jackson, Chelcy Ford Miniat, Gaius R. Shaver

Advanced Science Research Center

Ecosystems across the United States are changing in complex ways that are difficult to predict. Coordinated long-term research and analysis are required to assess how these changes will affect a diverse array of ecosystem services. This paper is part of a series that is a product of a synthesis effort of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network. This effort revealed that each LTER site had at least one compelling scientific case study about “what their site would look like” in 50 or 100 yr. As the site results were prepared, themes emerged, and the case …

Atmospheric Carbon And Transport – America (Act-America) Data Sets: Description, Management, And Delivery, Y. Wei, R. Shrestha, S. Pal, T. Gerken, S. Feng, J. Mcnelis, D. Singh, M. M. Thornton, A. G. Boyer, M. A. Shook, G. Chen, B. C. Baier, Z. R. Barkley, J. D. Barrick, J. R. Bennett, E. V. Browell, J. F. Campbell, L. J. Campbell, Y. Choi, J. Collins, J. Dobler, M. Eckl, A. Fiehn, A. Fried, J. P. Digangi, R. Barton-Grimley, H. Halliday, T. Klausner, S. Kooi, J. Kostinek, T. Lauvaux, B. Lin, Christopher A. Williams

Geography

The ACT-America project is a NASA Earth Venture Suborbital-2 mission designed to study the transport and fluxes of greenhouse gases. The open and freely available ACT-America data sets provide airborne in situ measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane, trace gases, aerosols, clouds, and meteorological properties, airborne remote sensing measurements of aerosol backscatter, atmospheric boundary layer height and columnar content of atmospheric carbon dioxide, tower-based measurements, and modeled atmospheric mole fractions and regional carbon fluxes of greenhouse gases over the Central and Eastern United States. We conducted 121 research flights during five campaigns in four seasons during 2016–2019 over three regions …

Encoding A Categorical Independent Variable For Input To Terrset’S Multi-Layer Perceptron, Emily Evenden, Robert Gilmore Pontius

Geography

The profession debates how to encode a categorical variable for input to machine learning algorithms, such as neural networks. A conventional approach is to convert a categorical variable into a collection of binary variables, which causes a burdensome number of correlated variables. TerrSet’s Land Change Modeler proposes encoding a categorical variable onto the continuous closed interval from 0 to 1 based on each category’s Population Evidence Likelihood (PEL) for input to the Multi-Layer Perceptron, which is a type of neural network. We designed examples to test the wisdom of these encodings. The results show that encoding a categorical variable based …

Debtor Spaces: Austerity, Space, And Dispossession In Michigan’S Emergency Management System, Melissa Heil

Faculty Publications - Geography, Geology, and the Environment

In recent years, debt has become a major focus of geographic research as debt relations have become increasingly central to today’s financialized capitalist economy. This paper bridges two aspects of the debt literature: (1) the emergent literature on debt spatiality, which argues that space plays an active role in the creation and maintenance of debt relations, and (2) the broader literature examining processes of debt-driven dispossession (e.g., foreclosure, eviction, austerity, etc.). Recent literature in geography, led by Harker’s work on debt spaces, has argued that debt should not only be understood as a temporal relation (a promise of future labor) …

Volunteer Urban Environmental Stewardship, Emotional Economies Of Care, And Productive Power In Philadelphia, Alec Foster

Faculty Publications - Geography, Geology, and the Environment

Recent efforts to increase urban forests and greenspaces rely on the volunteer labor of individuals and environmental nonprofits. The estimation of market values has often justified urban greening. These neoliberal approaches to urban environmental governance have been heavily critiqued, revealing the uneven power relationships and urban environments that result. This paper aims to move beyond such critiques by exploring how the reproduction of urban nature can be valued outside of the market. Fieldwork with volunteers participating in environmental stewardship in Philadelphia revealed their participation was motivated by intense emotional attachments to their neighborhoods, other participants, and nonhuman others, leading me …

Hmong In The Twin Cities: Diaspora Experiences And Personal Identities, Anisha Rajbhandary

Geography Honors Projects

Asian Americans as a whole have been portrayed as “model minorities” due to their higher degree of socioeconomic success compared to the average population. However, this “model minority” stereotype primarily based upon the voluntary immigration experiences of East and South Asians with greater socio-economic resources, hardly accounts for the immigration experiences of other Asian groups such as Hmong Americans. Utilizing extensive literature review, first person interviews and collected survey data, this paper explores Hmong diaspora and identity in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, analyzing how Hmong Americans reconcile with the stereotypes set for Asian “model minorities” and construct their own …

Can Stable Isotopes From Tree Rings Improve Our Understanding Of Past Variability In The Southern Annular Mode?, Zachary Grzywacz

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Few annually dated stable isotope records exist across Oceania. In mid- to high-latitude locations in South America, tree-ring stable isotopes provide information about past climate dynamics such as the Southern Annular Mode (SAM). The SAM drives latitudinal shifts in Southern Hemisphere westerly winds, influencing temperature and moisture delivery across the mid- to high-latitudes, including Tasmania. Combinations of paleoclimate proxies from across the Southern Ocean might provide insight into dynamic processes like the SAM that are difficult to measure with a single proxy. Measuring stable carbon and oxygen isotope ratios from tree rings in Tasmania could provide complementary data to contribute …

Effects Of States’ Laws On Youth Physical Activity Participation And Obesity Prevalence, Chae Young Chang

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

The alarming prevalence of obesity and lack of physical activity among adolescents led to immediate policy action to address these concerns. Accordingly, many states introduced and enacted their own legislation to encourage physical activity in schools. Few studies have explored the effectiveness of the new legislation, however, especially at the state level. To answer the fundamental question of whether policy is effective and to describe the varying effects of state obesity policies, this study analyzed the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System from 2007 to 2017. Using the difference-in-differences method, this study found that legislative efforts to encourage physical activity had …

Profitable Retail Customer Identification Based On A Combined Prediction Strategy Of Customer Lifetime Value, Yinglu Sun, Dong Cheng, Subir Bandyopadhyay, Wei Xue

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

As a fundamental concept of customer relationship management, customer lifetime value (CLV) serves as a crucial metric to identify profitable retail customers. Various methods are available to predict CLV in different contexts. With the development of consumer big data, modern statistics and machine learning algorithms have been gradually adopted in CLV modeling. We introduce two machine learning algorithms—the gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) and the random forest (RF)—in retail customer CLV modeling and compare their predictive performance with two classical models—the Pareto/NBD (HB) and the Pareto/GGG. To ensure CLV prediction and customer identification robustness, we combined the predictions of the …

Advancing The Spatial Turn In History Through Deep Mapping: Ghost Maps, Neogeography, And Frederick Jackson Turner, Jessica L. Mathai

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The permeation of the spatial turn into the humanities, and in particular history, has both imbued scholarship and opened up new areas for research. This dissertation examines the conceptual and theoretical implications of advancing the spatial turn in history and evaluating existing approaches such as Historical GIS and ghost mapping as a foundation for deep mapping. The resulting deep map developed in this study utilizes Neogeography and web technology in the form of JavaScript Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to develop a prototype that overcomes many of the limitations that occur when simultaneously integrating multiple sources of data and software functionality, …

O Espaço E O Tempo Do Valor, David Harvey, Artur Renzo

Publications and Research

O artigo discute a lei do valor em Karl Marx como valor em movimento, que se faz valer no espaço e no tempo. Entende-se que o movimento não pode ocorrer no vácuo, sendo necessário abandonar a visão do valor que se move sem estar ancorado em nenhum lugar e passar a enxergá-lo criando geografias de cidades e redes de transportes; formando paisagens agrícolas para a produção de alimentos e matérias-primas; englobando fluxos de pessoas, bens e informações; determinando configurações territoriais de valores fundiários e habilidades de trabalho; organizando espaços de trabalho, estruturas de governo e administração. Conclui-se que há três …

A Systematic Method For Measuring Gentrification Using Building Permits Data: A Washington D.C Case Study, Andey Fomil

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Gentrification can significantly alter the socioeconomic, demographic, and commercial aspects of a city. It is a complex process that transforms the characteristics of entire neighborhoods, modifying not only the observable physical aspects, but also the community structure. Traditional quantitative gentrification measurement approaches assess the process through analysis of Census demographic indicators coupled with field visit analysis of the physical built environment. This study proposes a new gentrification measuring approach that combines traditional Census indicators with a new indicator in the form of City Building Permits. Two GIS spatial analysis techniques are utilized to evaluate the effectiveness and accuracy of the …

Three Essays On “Energy , Environment, And Developmental Economics”, Bolarinwa Ajanaku

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation examines topics related to renewable energy development and investment planning, energy markets, environment degradation and economic development. The substantial ecological costs of deforestation are well known and considered globally important due to biodiversity loss, land degradation, soil erosion, and contributions to climate change. The first essay focuses upon understanding the tradeoff between development and deforestation in Africa. In the second essay, spatial analysis and Geographic Information System (GIS) are applied to determine potential locations for wind farms development in the state of West Virginia. Lastly, the third essay examines the role of wind power penetration on wholesale electricity …