Geography Commons^™

Elephants At Work, Jamie Lorimer, Khatijah Rahmat

Animal Sentience

Baker & Winkler (B&W) propose rewilding Asian elephants in a model in which they are rescued, rehabilitated and then given work with their mahouts in ecological restoration and ecotourism. In a sympathetic critique, we explore the status that B&W’s analysis accords to work. Types of work and working conditions need to be differentiated. We caution against a model of conservation that would make the future of life conditional on participating in the workforce.

Places Of Memory And Meaning: The Eastern Sierra And Mojave Desert, Glenn Pascall

Eastern Sierra History Journal

A long-time lover of the Eastern Sierra, Glenn Pascall recalls in words and photographs how and why this region of staggering beauty has resonated so deeply with him.

The Ever-Changing World Of The Paiute, Joseph Lent

Eastern Sierra History Journal

In this important article, Joseph Lent offers a counter-narrative to settler-colonial conceptions of what we now call the Eastern Sierra that derives its power from the oral histories of the Paiute nation.

Crucible Of The Modern Republic: The Yosemite Grant And Environmental Citizenship, Jen A. Huntley

Eastern Sierra History Journal

The Yosemite Grant, which established the basis for the state, later national park in the central Sierra, initiated a powerful new force that constituted a tipping point in American environmental history, Jen A. Huntley argues. A moment in US history when the right combination of people and politics and ideas hit a nerve in the broad social psyche of a time and launched a new environmental understanding.

Eastern Sierra Water: Historic Choices That Shaped California, David Carle

Eastern Sierra History Journal

The story of Los Angeles' legendary water grab in the Eastern Sierra is well and often told. David Carle reengages compellingly with this history in this reflective essay that condenses a century's worth of battles over the flow and distribution of what some have called "white gold."

Horse Meadows And Bohler Canyon Arborglyphs: History Recorded On The Trees, Nancy Hadlock, Richard Potashin

Eastern Sierra History Journal

In this close reading of Arborglyphs in canyons above the Mono Basin, the authors discuss how and why Basque shepherds and others carved their names with knives into (mostly) Aspens. Documenting these expressive markings is one way to reclaim the shepherd-artists' names and something of their experiences in the High Sierra tending their flocks.

Making The Past Present: Editor's Note, Char Miller

Eastern Sierra History Journal

For this inaugural volume of the ESHJ, editor Char Miller discusses the formative role that writer Mary Austin (1868-1934) has had in identifying many of the Eastern Sierra's key features, natural and human. This new journal hopes to add to the intellectual work that she launched, serving as a window into this complex, fascinating, and contested region.

State Park Selection As Determined By User Health, Connor Phelan

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

The purpose of this study was to determine whether state park difficulty affected location of travel. This study was conducted at three state park locations within the United States. Surveys and on-site examinations were made at the following locations; Wilson State Park, Kansas, Petit Jean State Park, Arkansas, and Kiholo State Park, Hawaii. Park locations were chosen by varying levels of terrain difficulty, as well as a rating from the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum. Participants were asked to report data via iPads on exercise habits, mobility limiting impairments, and frequency of exercise so a ranking of the healthiest participants could be …

Use Of Gis Spatial Analysis, Remote Sensing, And Unmanned Aerial Systems In Determining The Susceptibility To Wildfires In Barber County, Kansas, Kara Sill

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

Wildfires are becoming more frequent each year not only in the United States, but throughout the world. Barber County, Kansas experienced a devastating wildfire in March 2016, and continues to be at risk of wildfires during the fire season months. This study involved creating a functional GIS Database with layers corresponding to communication, transportation, and infrastructure throughout the county. This will allow responders and officials to have one unified reference space, which will facilitate communication and navigation. Within the ArcGIS environment, route maps can be created to show potential routes and quickest drive time to the scene of the emergency. …

Protecting Biodiversity On National Forests: The Evolution And Implementation Of Forest Planning Regulations, Anna Wearn

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In 2012, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) promulgated new forest planning regulations that significantly altered national forest management. One of the most controversial and important advancements was the inclusion of what were meant to be stronger biodiversity protections. An analysis of USFS’s rationale in revising the biodiversity regulations provides insights into how to interpret the substantively and procedurally new ecosystem and species protections. Examining this regulatory history reveals three key changes to the manner in which national forests are required to manage and monitor biodiversity: 1) a greater reliance on science to inform planning, 2) a new emphasis on ecological …

Water For Fish And Farms: An Examination Of Instream Flow Programs In Montana Using Spatially-Explicit Water Rights Data, Anna Leigh Crockett

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The state-level institutions governing water use in the western United States have increasingly come under pressure and scrutiny related to their inability to navigate water use conflicts in recent decades. Rapid population growth and shifting public values towards leaving water instream for recreational and environmental purposes pose challenges to Montana water supplies which are predominantly allocated for irrigated agriculture. Additionally, while water scarcity and unpredictable availability are not new dilemmas in Montana, the rate at which climate change is driving shifts in the distribution, timing, and availability of water supplies is unprecedented. Current water policies may not be nimble enough …

A Photometric Study Of The South Polar Terrain Of Enceladus, Bereket Daniel Mamo

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Saturn's moon, Enceladus, is a unique body in the Solar System. It is an icy world with ongoing geologic activity that spews out jets of ice particles, water vapor, and other gases from active tectonic fractures (called sulci) near its south pole. Emission from these jets is the dominant source of particles for Saturn's diffuse E ring, which envelops other icy satellites. The south polar fractures are also sources of tidally generated high heat flow. Accurate determination of this endogenic thermal output requires knowledge of the thermophysical properties of the surface, which are reliably estimated by modeling the photometric behavior …

Tropical Cyclone Vulnerability Of Atlantic Coastal Counties In The United States, Zachary Alexander

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

1. Abstract

   Coastal populations along the Atlantic Coast of the United States face a persistent threat of tropical cyclones. Tropical cyclones of any strength can cause significant damages and losses to both life and property. As coastal populations continue to rise in a changing climate, the power of knowing which communities are the most and least vulnerable to future tropical cyclone events can assist in mitigating some of the losses. This paper explores the factors that make a coastal community more or less vulnerable to tropical cyclones based on prior natural hazards research and creates a relative index that will tell …

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Deep Learning For Overhead Imagery: Algorithms And Applications, Anthony Manuel Ortiz Cepeda

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Remote sensing using overhead imagery has critical impact to the way we understand our environment and offers crucial information for scene understanding, climate change research, disaster response, urban planning, forest management, and many other applications. At present, deep learning is increasingly used in remote sensing, but mostly borrowing algorithms developed for natural images in the computer vision community. Specific challenges arise while applying deep learning to remote sensing. These challenges include issues related to the high dimensionality and limited labeled data, security and robustness to adversarial attacks, and model generalization. In this Thesis we focus on tackling these key challenges. …

Glacier Segmentation In Satellite Images For Hindu Kush Himalaya Region, Bibek Aryal

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Climate change poses a risk to individuals whose livelihoods depend on the health of glacier ecosystems. Monitoring glaciers in the Himalayan Hindu Kush (HKH) region is of high importance especially when we consider the impact of recent climate change on them. Our work aims to provide an automated method to outline glaciers using machine learning techniques and publicly available remote sensing imagery.In this work, we present ways to delineate glaciers from Landsat-7 imagery using various machine learning and computer vision techniques. The multi-step methodology that we present in this work is generalizable across different types of satellite and overhead imagery, …

Glacial Deposits, Vol. 45, 2020, Department Of Geography, Geology, And The Environment

Glacial Deposits

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

Prototyping A Social Media Flooding Photo Screening System Based On Deep Learning, Huan Ning, Zhenlong Li, Michael E. Hodgson, Cuizhen Wang

Faculty Publications

This article aims to implement a prototype screening system to identify flooding-related photos from social media. These photos, associated with their geographic locations, can provide free, timely, and reliable visual information about flood events to the decision-makers. This screening system, designed for application to social media images, includes several key modules: tweet/image downloading, flooding photo detection, and a WebGIS application for human verification. In this study, a training dataset of 4800 flooding photos was built based on an iterative method using a convolutional neural network (CNN) developed and trained to detect flooding photos. The system was designed in a way …

Restructuring Legal Geography, Reecia Orzeck, Laam Hae

Faculty Publications - Geography, Geology, and the Environment

We argue that legal geography’s ability to produce holistic knowledge about law and legal relations is hampered by the qualified dominance in the field of what we refer to as a contingency orientation. This phrase refers to both the belief that law, legal relations, and legal outcomes are more open and contingent than they appear to be, and to an empirical interest in bringing to light moments when law, legal relations, and legal outcomes appear to depart from dominant representations of these as closed, determinate, aspatial, and wholly formal. Because holistic accounts of the social world require attention to both …

Using Unmanned Aerial Systems (Drones) With A Thermal Sensor To Map And Count Deer Population, Maxwell C. Ott

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The number of deer in an area is an important statistic for land managers to know, as overabundance has many negative effects. There are many methods that have been used to count deer in the past, such as using manned helicopters and airplanes, walking on foot, and conducting controlled hunts. UAS (unmanned aerial systems) is a growing field that provides many benefits over traditional methods of counting deer, such as lower cost and missions being less time consuming. Using a thermal sensor attached to a UAS makes it simple to spot any deer during a flight. Two main methods of …

The Impacts Of Accessibility On Vulnerability Of Place In Comfort Castle, Jamaica, Heather Thole

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Jamaica experiences meteorological, hydrological, and geological natural hazards that can produce island-wide impacts. The island’s exposure to multiple hazard types requires effective and sustainable mitigation and disaster risk management to lessen potential impacts, especially for vulnerable populations and communities. Comfort Castle, a small rural farming community, sits in the upper Rio Grande Valley of Portland parish and experiences earthquakes, landslides, hurricanes, heavy rainfall, and floods. Steep terrain and remoteness due to geographic location affect the community’s geophysical vulnerability. Their social vulnerability results from a lack of employment, health, educational, and livelihood resources within the community. Together, geophysical, and social factors …