Geography Commons^™

Israeli Hasbara And The Nba’S Palestine Exception: The Impossibility Of Capitalist “Social Justice”, Chen Chen, Anthony J. Weems, Roc Rochon, Daniel Sailofsky

Sport Management Collection

Sport is a notable site for the Israeli state in its hasbara (public diplomacy, or “explaining”) effort that seeks to normalize the conditions of ethnic cleansing, illegal settlement, and apartheid practices in historic and occupied Palestine. Against the backdrop of the genocide in Gaza and the lack of international sport sanctions against Israeli teams, this paper maps several hasbara activities/attempts featuring the National Basketball Association (NBA) in the last decade. This is a worthwhile case, not least because of the NBA’s self-branding as a socially “progressive” league composed of a primarily Black/African American athletic workforce. Two major observations are made: …

Linking Climate And Demography To Predict Population Dynamics And Persistence Under Global Change., Jennifer L. Williams, Amy L. Angert, Aldo Compagnoni, Ali Campbell, Megan L. Demarche, Margaret E K Evans, Joshua C. Fowler, Amy M. Iler, Jenna A. Loesberg, Allison M. Louthan, Scott W. Nordstrom, Multiple Additional Authors

Publications, Reports and Presentations

Predicting the effects of climate change on plant and animal populations is an urgent challenge for understanding the fate of biodiversity under global change. At the surface, quantifying how climate drives the vital rates that underlie population dynamics appears simple, yet many decisions are required to connect climate to demographic data. Competing approaches have emerged in the literature with little consensus around best practices. Here we provide a practical guide for how to best link vital rates to climate for the purposes of inference and projection of population dynamics. We first describe the sources of demographic and climate data underlying …

A Big Data Approach To Mitigating The Maup In Measuring Excess Commuting, Cehong Luo, Yujie Hu, Fahui Wang

Faculty Publications

Excess commuting, defined as the inefficiency resulting from spatial mismatches between residential and employment locations, poses significant challenges for urban planning and transportation systems. This study uses big data from individual vehicle trips collected in Tampa, Florida, to quantify excess commuting more accurately than traditional zonal approaches. Through the application of Linear Programming (LP) and Integer Linear Programming (ILP) models, this research measures minimum and actual commuting patterns across different spatial scales—census tract, block group, and individual trip levels. The findings reveal a clear scale effect associated with the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP), as smaller spatial units consistently yield …

Rapid Decline And Mortality Of A Pleistocene-Aged Forest Now Submerged In The Northern Gulf Of Mexico, Usa, Grant L. Harley, Kristine L. Delong, Marcus Lofverstrom, Carl Andy Reese, Ellen V. Bergan, Samuel J. Bentley, Kehui Xu, Kelli Moran, Karen E. King, Alicia Caporaso

Faculty Publications

The Gulf and Atlantic Coastal Plains of the southern United States are characterized by a wide continental shelf that was subaerially exposed for ca. 80,000 years during glacial-interval marine regressions and transgressions. Given their present submergence, little is known about the vegetation dynamics, particularly at annual time scales, of these formerly terrestrial sites due to erosional processes associated with marine transgressions. Here, we present an annually resolved and well-replicated 489-year tree-ring chronology from macrobotanical specimens—anatomically identified as Taxodium distichum (L.) Rich.—collected in situ from a recently exposed submerged forest in 18 m water depth in the northern Gulf of Mexico. …

Evaluating The Preparedness Of Local Zoning Regulations For Flood Risk Reduction In The Most Affected Local Jurisdictions In Nebraska, Md Asaduzzaman Noor

Community and Regional Planning Program: Theses

Flooding has profound social, economic, and environmental impacts on local communities, and zoning plays a critical role in mitigating these risks. The 2019 Nebraska floods, among the most severe in the state’s history, highlighted the urgent need to strengthen local preparedness and mitigation strategies. This study assesses the extent to which local zoning regulations in Nebraska’s most affected jurisdiction, including rural areas, address flood risk reduction. A systematic review of 117 zoning ordinances from counties, cities, towns, and villages, we applied a structured analytical framework encompassing regulatory and permitting policies, voluntary and incentive-based measures, and nature-based solutions. The results show …

Flood Resilience Through Working-Land Conservation: Assessment Of Wetland Inundation Dynamics Across Wrp, Wma, Wpa, Padus And Crp Lands In Nebraska (2018–2024), Pranjay Joshi

Community and Regional Planning Program: Theses

This study first confirms whether Nebraska’s wetlands are still functioning hydrologically in ways that reduce flood impacts. Wetlands are known to lessen flood damage by storing water, slowing runoff, and moderating peak flows, but these benefits depend on the wetlands’ ability to maintain inundation and saturation through time. Many wetlands across the state have undergone drainage, hydrologic alteration, or isolation from surrounding watersheds, raising uncertainty about their present-day functioning. Using seven years of Sentinel-2 imagery processed in Google Earth Engine, this research establishes a clear, long-term record of inundation patterns across thousands of wetland parcels. This analysis verifies which wetlands …

Rainfall-Runoff Modelling In An Indonesian Humid Tropical Area Using Satellite-Based Precipitation Products, Noordiah Helda

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This dissertation explores three rainfall-runoff models in the humid tropical regions of Indonesia using satellite-based precipitation products (SBPPs) and develops integrated machine-learning modeling frameworks. Several ground-based observations from BMKG (Badan Meteorologi, Klimatologi, dan Geofisika (also known as the Indonesian Agency for Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics)) stations across Indonesia (133−165 stations) are compared and evaluated against satellite products, indicating that GPM performs well, with R-squared values ranging from 0.54 to 0.76 and correlation coefficients ranging from 0.45 to 0.69, respectively.

In the Martapura Watershed, South Kalimantan, due to a lack of observational discharge data, streamflow was generated using the FJ Mock …

Advancing Precision Agriculture Through The Application Of Remote Sensing Technologies In Plant Health Assessment, Thomas Wilbur Davis

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Monitoring plant health, including nutritional status assessment, is an important component of crop management decisions. This doctoral document addresses the use of agricultural remote sensing through focused investigations of plant disease detection and nutrient status assessment technologies that advance precision agriculture. The first chapter provides a comprehensive overview of remote sensing technologies in agriculture and examines current capabilities, limitations, and future directions. The final two chapters address studies that evaluated the virus-nitrogen interaction in wheat and compared methods to determine the nitrogen status of midseason field corn.

The first study evaluated the wheat streak mosaic virus (WSMV) × nitrogen interaction …

Pilot-C: Physics-Informed Low-Distortion Optimal Trajectory Compression, Kefei Wu, Baihua Zheng, Weiwei Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Location-aware devices continuously generate massive volumes of trajectory data, creating demand for efficient compression. Line simplification is a common solution but typically assumes 2D trajectories and ignores time synchronization and motion continuity. We propose PILOT-C, a novel trajectory compression framework that integrates frequency-domain physics modeling with error-bounded optimization. Unlike existing line simplification methods, PILOT-C supports trajectories in arbitrary dimensions, including 3D, by compressing each spatial axis independently. Evaluated on four real-world datasets, PILOT-C achieves superior performance across multiple dimensions. In terms of compression ratio, PILOT-C outperforms CISED-W, the current state-of-the-art SED-based line simplification algorithm, by an average of 19.2%. For …

Modeling Flood Risks For Small-Scale Coastal Watershed Across Shared Socioeconomic Pathway Scenarios, Sebastian Loschner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

Coastal flooding, driven by the mixture of natural processes and human activities such as precipitation, waves, sea level rise, and urbanization, remains a growing concern. While recent flood-risk studies use IPCC's Shared Socioeconomic Pathways with climate projections to assess future flood exposure, smaller coastal watersheds, < 120,000 acres, remain insufficiently studied. Projected sea level rise is expected to intensify these impacts in smaller systems, potentially causing more severe flooding than reported for larger watersheds. To address this gap, this study used the SRH-2D model integrated with Aquaveo's Surface-water Modeling System to simulate flooding in the lower Fish River basin, Alabama. A coastal watershed sensitive to both riverine and tidal influences. Simulations tested different sea levels based on SSP scenarios corresponding to low, moderate, and high emissions for the years 2050 and 2100. Results indicate that the midcentury scenarios remained even in inundation extent and volume, between 9.9-10.4% compared to the 2020 baseline, the latter scenarios had a wider range in results of between 25.9-50.3% compared to the same baseline. Across scenarios, the most vulnerable and inundated areas of the smaller coastal watershed were the narrow points where upstream flow convene with downstream backwater. These findings highlight the need for futuristic location-specific flood mitigation strategies.

From Student Project To Research Agenda: How Libraries Facilitate Gis Education And Collaboration, Charidy Paige, Jeanine Finn

Library Staff Publications and Research

Geographic information systems (GIS) have been a tool and methodology deeply
intertwined with academic libraries since the initial efforts of ARL and ESRI to support the development of map librarians into geospatial data experts in the early 1990s.
Although GIS in libraries has been a source of successful collaborations, the demands are often overwhelming for library staff. Over time, the scale, formats, and methods of data sharing have evolved significantly, requiring skills beyond many traditional library competencies.

Addressing Critiques Refines Global Estimates Of Reforestation Potential For Climate Change Mitigation, Kurt A. Fesenmeyer, Erin E. Poor, Drew E. Terasaki Hart, Joseph W. Veldman, Forrest Fleischman, Pooja Choksi, Sally Archibald, Mohammed Armani, Matthew E. Fagan, Evan C. Fricke, César Terrer, Natalia Hasler, Christopher A. Williams, Peter W. Ellis, Susan Cook-Patton

Geography

Reforestation is a prominent climate change mitigation strategy, but available global maps of reforestation potential are widely criticized and highly variable, which limits their ability to provide robust estimates of both the locations and total area of opportunity. Here we develop global maps that address common critiques, build on a review of 89 reforestation maps created at multiple scales, and present eight reforestation scenarios with varying objectives, including providing ecosystem services, minimizing social conflicts, and delivering government policies. Across scenarios, we find up to 195 Mha (million hectares) are available (2225 TgCO2e (teragrams of carbon dioxide equivalent) per year total …

Detecting Prescribed Fire, Haying And Grazing Events Via Remote Sensing To Create Grassland Disturbance Landcovers For The Ring-Necked Pheasant (Phasianus Colchicus), Megan Amy Baldissara

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This dissertation developed disturbance detection models to fulfill the need for remote sensing landcover products describing grassland structure. The use of landcover products derived from remote sensing is increasing over time in pheasant (Phasianus colchicus) research. Such landcover, however, does not provide relevant pheasant structural habitat information (Chapter 1). Pheasants require tall, high-density grassland for nesting, tall grassland with medium density for brood rearing, and tall grassland for wintering. Time since disturbance can serve as a proxy for structure, as it shapes vegetation by removing biomass and resetting succession. Disturbance is easier to detect than structure with current …

Defending The Homeland: An Archaeoethnodemographic (Aed) Analysis Of Population Dynamics And Settlement Patterns In The Navajo Dinétah, Ad 1720–1745, Kurt Mantonya

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This dissertation presents an innovative archaeoethnodemographic (AED) analysis of Navajo population dynamics during the Middle Period (AD 1720−1745) of the Gobernador Phase in the Dinétah, the ancestral Navajo homeland in northwest New Mexico. During this critical quarter-century, intensified Ute and Comanche slave-raiding and Spanish military expeditions forced the Diné to abandon traditional dispersed settlement patterns in favor of defensive aggregation around fortified pueblitos—small masonry defensive structures built on boulder-tops and mesa-rims throughout the region.

The study employs an AED framework that systematically integrates archaeological site analysis, ethnographic household organization data, historical documentation, and demographic modeling to reconstruct population dynamics during …

Global, Continental, And Local Scale Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction Methods For Interpreting The History Of Miocene North America And The Great Plains, Willow Hue Nguy

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

The Miocene of North America is characterized by dynamic changes in herbivore communities, habitat composition, and global climate. Long-term cooling and drying trends influenced large changes in floral and faunal communities. The Great Plains, North America shifted from closed-canopy biomes to open-canopy biomes with C3-grasses to biomes with C4-grasses. This shift affected the herbivore communities as browsing-adapted ungulates were replaced by grazing-adapted ungulates. Much focus has centered on the Great Plains, so it is not well understood how the changes in biomes compare to other regions of North America. The models used for vegetation density indicate open-canopy biomes since at …

Local Problems, Global Solutions? Making It Rain In Hong Kong C. 1890-1930, Fiona Williamson

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

The late nineteenth to early twentieth century saw a small but dedicated rise in experimental rainmaking. The possibility that humanity might one day be able to control the weather – especially to alleviate drought – was very attractive to governments and private investors. The late nineteenth century was an era of scientific optimism and a number of rainmaking experiments across the world had brought the potential for weather control out of the realms of discourse and literature and further into tangible near-future science. There has been a small but thorough historiographical literature on this subject, focusing largely on American, British, …

Navigating Ai-Nature Frictions: Autonomous Vehicle Testing And Nature-Based Constraints, Prerona Das, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

In cities, the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being directed towards transforming different aspects of urban life. These applications take material form in urban spaces, with autonomous vehicles (AVs) providing a prominent example. AI systems rely on large volumes of data on their surroundings to refine the algorithms and enhance the accuracy of prediction for operational efficiency and safety. However, such algorithmic learning and execution can present challenges when dealing with the unpredictable, complex, and dynamic aspects of urban spaces. Nature is a paradigmatic example of such unpredictability, because natural phenomena usually defy consistent patterns and precise data-based modelling. …

The Pluralistic Natural Capital Values Of A Tropical City, Adrienne Gret-Regamey, Et Al.

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Nature in cities is essential for human well-being. Quantifying and valuing the goods and services provided by nature to city dwellers is missing in tropical contexts. Yet, as cities worldwide face similar challenges, understanding the services provided by tropical urban ecosystems becomes imperative for effective management. Here, we present the first Natural Capital Assessment of a tropical city, unveiling three critical insights. Firstly, we demonstrate the vital reliance of a developed tropical city on nature, particularly for climate change mitigation through regulating services. Secondly, we identify intact natural areas as Singapore’s most valuable assets, stressing the significance of the quality …

Mountain Communities During A Time Of War: A Case Study Of The Hutsul Region In The Carpathian Mountains Of Ukraine, Pavlo Rybaruk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the ethno-ecological technologies employed by the Hutsul people within the highland agrarian economy of the Carpathian Mountains. Over centuries, the Hutsuls have developed ethno-ecological technologies that maintain ecological integrity while supporting community livelihoods.

The study addresses three primary research questions: What are the most important ethno-ecological technologies of the Hutsul highland economy? How might these traditional ethno-ecological practices be applied to economic, agricultural, and tourism development in the Hutsul region? How might these traditional ethno-ecological practices be combined with contemporary approaches to encourage sustainable development in the region?

The research explores the devastating impact of the Russian …

A Pan-Amazonian Dataset Integrating 20 Years Of Respiratory, Cardiovascular, Zoonotic And Vector-Borne Disease Cases And Landscape Changes, Julia Rodrigues Barreto, Florencia Sangermano, Ana Filipa Palmeirim, Farah Carrasco-Rueda, Benoit De Thoisy, Adrian González-Chaves, Maria Eugenia Grillet, Victoria Morpurgo-Dest, Catalina Zuluaga Rodríguez, Nerida Nadia H. Valero, Paula R. Prist

Geography

As anthropogenic pressures continue to impact the environment, human health is expected to be subsequently affected. This dataset provides a comprehensive view of the trends and burden of infectious diseases, along with environmental metrics, across the Amazon biome between 2000 and 2019. The dataset includes health indicators for respiratory, cardiovascular, and major zoonotic and vector-borne diseases (Chagas disease, hantavirus, cutaneous leishmaniasis, visceral Leishmaniasis, rickettsial diseases, and malaria), compiled as annual case counts at the municipal level. The innovation of this dataset lies in its unprecedented assembly of data for this transboundary biome—much of it requiring ground-level collection beyond available in …