Geography Commons^™

Mineral Exploration Investigation In The Northern Sierra Madre Occidental, Mexico, Labdan Nijr Alqahtani

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Sierra Madre region is rich in mineralized deposits, but it is hard to access because of the rugged terrain. Remote sensing and GIS can help in mineral exploration and regional structural analysis. The purpose of this project is to study linear, curvilinear, arcuate, and circular features in the Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico in order to improve exploration possibility. It is of great interest to know the relationship between lineament intersections, caldera features because of the location of potential mineral occurrences. In this study, 4,445 lineaments were mapped manually using directional filters applied to satellite images. A total of …

Gis Analysis Of The Mid-Nineteenth Century Emigration Of The Old Lutherans From Prussia, Joel Seewald

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The Old Lutherans constituted fewer than 20% of the Germans who emigrated from Prussia between 1835 and 1854. In this study, more than 483 cities and villages of origin of 6,911 Old Lutherans were mapped. These origins were in the central provinces of Brandenburg, Pomerania, Posen, Saxony, and Silesia. More emigrants came from Pomerania overall and during every time period except 1849-54. The areas with the most emigrants were north central Pomerania, northern Brandenburg, southeast Brandenburg, and western Silesia. Emigrant destinations were primarily America and Australia. American destinations included New York, Wisconsin, and Texas, but the state that many went …

Whitewater Ecotourism Development In Bhutan: Opportunities And Challenges For Local Communities, Kira E. Tenney

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Whitewater raft and kayak ecotourism can provide environmental, social-cultural, and economic benefits and opportunities to local communities, but can also result in respective challenges. Globally, adventure ecotourism is seen as a potent win-win strategy for conservation and local community development; however, there is a significant proportion of adventure and whitewater tourism that do not meet ecotourism tenets, and there is a call for incorporating greater investment in local community involvement. Whitewater ecotourism is particularly significant because of the unique opportunities and challenges associated with rivers, the resource upon which the industry directly depends. Clean, free-flowing rivers provide a range of …

Understanding Tourism Within A Social-Ecological System: Ometepe Island, Nicaragua, Chelsea Leigh Leven

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Tourism endures as a major component of development strategies worldwide, despite a dearth of documented successes. Tourism failures arise in part from simplistic and reductionist approaches to sustainability and tourism. Successfully implementing tourism to support sustainable futures requires, at a minimum, a more holistic and complex conceptualization than tourism currently receives, including recognition of how human values shape a system. To achieve a more complex understanding of tourism, I analyzed tourism through a social-ecological system (SES) perspective using the paradigm of resilience thinking. Through a case study in Ometepe, Nicaragua, my research considered opportunities for tourism contributions to sustainable futures …

Glacial Deposits, Vol. 44, 2019, Department Of Geography, Geology, And The Environment

Glacial Deposits

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

Crafting Stone Discoidals On The Frontier: Production And Identity In Southwest Virginia, Hamilton Hastie Bryant

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Stone discoidals are widely recognized as a class of artifacts associated with Mississippian cultural traditions and even some of its various descendant communities. Excavations at the Carter Robinson site a Fourteenth Century Mississippian frontier site in Lee County Virginia have revealed evidence of the production of stone discoidals. Although craft production in Mississippian societies has been the subject of much debate little to no attention has been given to the production of stone discoidals. The purpose of this thesis is to explicate the method of stone discoidal production at Carter Robinson and to explore how this production was organized overtime …

Improving The Interstate Highway System, Chase Minor

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The Interstate Highway System is the primary transportation network of the United States. The Interstate Highway System has succeeded and failed in certain ways in connecting the United States. It is important that new interstate highways are added so that the United States will be better connected. Several criteria are involved in placing new interstates. New interstates should follow the grid pattern of the existing interstates, with one end of the interstate in between existing interstates so that the interstate starts/ends west of one interstate and east of another (odd-numbered), or north of one interstate and south of another (even-numbered). …

Unbundling Property In Boston’S Urban Food Commons, Oona Morrow, Deborah Martin

Geography

Households and community organizations are involved in the creation, use, care, and management of urban spaces, including through food practices such as planting, foraging, harvesting, weeding and pruning at the ambiguous edges of public and private property. Drawing on case studies in Boston, Massachusetts, we examine how commons are articulated through these practices, particularly in relation to multiple dimensions of property rights. Specifically, we ask how food practices can open urban spaces to negotiations around access, responsibility, care, and ownership, especially when (property) ownership is not an end-goal, but a circumstance shaping other practices. Using interviews and participant observation of …

Residential Household Yard Care Practices Along Urban-Exurban Gradients In Six Climatically-Diverse U.S. Metropolitan Areas, Dexter H. Locke, Colin Polsky, J. Morgan Grove, Peter M. Groffman, Kristen C. Nelson, Kelli L. Larson, Jeannine Cavender-Bares, James B. Heffernan, Rinku Roy Chowdhury, Sarah E. Hobbie, Neil D. Bettez, Sharon J. Hall, Christopher Neill, Laura Ogden, Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne

Geography

Residential land is expanding in the United States, and lawn now covers more area than the country’s leading irrigated crop by area. Given that lawns are widespread across diverse climatic regions and there is rising concern about the environmental impacts associated with their management, there is a clear need to understand the geographic variation, drivers, and outcomes of common yard care practices. We hypothesized that 1) income, age, and the number of neighbors known by name will be positively associated with the odds of having irrigated, fertilized, or applied pesticides in the last year, 2) irrigation, fertilization, and pesticide application …

Ngos As Innovators In Extractive Industry Governance. Insights From The Eiti Process In Colombia And Peru, Elisa Arond, Anthony J. Bebbington, Juan Luis Dammert

Geography

This paper explores NGO participation within the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a multi-stakeholder governance arrangement focused on generating greater transparency in the governance of extractive industries, and in particular in fiscal arrangements around mining, oil and gas operations. Using the cases of Peru and Colombia, we examine what motivates NGO participation in EITI, how NGOs have pursued innovations within EITI, the extent to which they have succeeded in achieving their goals, and the factors limiting or shaping their achievements. We draw on interviews conducted between 2013 and 2018, participation in global EITI meetings, and secondary material. The paper examines …

@Yourlocation: A Spatial Analysis Of Geotagged Tweets In The Us, Ocean Mckinney

CMC Senior Theses

This project examines the spatial network properties observable from geo-located tweet data. Conventional exploration examines characteristics of a variety of network attributes, but few employ spatial edge correlations in their analysis. Recent studies have demonstrated the improvements that these correlations contribute to drawing conclusions about network structure. This thesis expands upon social network research utilizing spatial edge correlations and presents processing and formatting techniques for JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data.

The Mortality Response To Absolute And Relative Temperature Extremes, Scott C. Sheridan, Cameron C. Lee, Michael J. Allen

Political Science & Geography Faculty Publications

While the impact of absolute extreme temperatures on human health has been amply studied, far less attention has been given to relative temperature extremes, that is, events that are highly unusual for the time of year but not necessarily extreme relative to a location's overall climate. In this research, we use a recently defined extreme temperature event metric to define absolute extreme heat events (EHE) and extreme cold events (ECE) using absolute thresholds, and relative extreme heat events (REHE) and relative extreme cold events (RECE) using relative thresholds. All-cause mortality outcomes using a distributed lag nonlinear model are evaluated for …

Application Of Geodetector Method And Other Statistical Methods To Study Groundwater Vulnerability To Nitrate Contamination In The Central Valley Aquifer, California, Anil Shrestha

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The Central Valley (CV) Aquifer, California is one of the most productive regions of the United States, where large amount of nitrogen fertilizer has been applied for the last few decades to increase the crop productivity. The application of excessive fertilizer has increased the level of nitrate (NO3-N) in the groundwater to above EPA’s maximum contamination level (MCL) of 10 mg/L in several domestic, public and monitoring wells. The concentration of nitrate in the groundwater can vary spatially depending on the local nitrogen sources, aquifer characteristics and geochemical condition of the area. The changing hydrogeological conditions of the valley due …

Unmanned Aerial-Vehicle-Based Measurement Of Urban Forests, Earle W. Isibue

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Human and natural forces continually act on urban forests to producing changes that leading to trees being removed or replanted. Therefore, to manage the urban forest effectively, periodic inventories are needed to ensure that information about the urban forest is current and comprehensive. This task has traditionally been accomplished by manual ground-based field surveys, or more recently by lidar; however, these methods are expensive, either in terms of time, labor, or cost. This project proposes a novel method of using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to more accurately measure urban tree height and trunk diameter than is currently possible using conventional …

The Short-Term Effects Of Interstate Highways On Small Rural Communities: A Case Study Of I-39, I-49 And I-72, 1990 To 2000, John Paul Metelko

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The presence of interstate highways in rural areas improves access to nearby rural

communities and changes those communities’ spheres of influence. Research into

understanding how improved access from interstate highways affects rural communities

is needed. This case study was designed to investigate how rural communities changed

on the basis of population, vacancy, median home value, and median contract rent in the

short term after an interstate highway was completed nearby in the early 1990s.

The communities included in this study are incorporated cities, towns, villages

and census-designated places in non-metropolitan counties with at least one incorporated

city, town, village and …

A Climatology Of Quasi-Linear Convective Systems In The U.S., Jacob Adam Strohm

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Quasi-linear convective systems, or QLCSs, are a common, organized thunderstorm mode in the U.S. Over the last fifty years, severe weather research has focused on the supercell, but, recently, QLCSs have become an increasingly important area of study. Researchers and operational meteorologists realize that this morphology is difficult to forecast and may be responsible for a large proportion of the severe weather reports in the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. This study seeks to determine the degree to which QLCSs threaten humans and their assets by, first, assessing their climatology and, second, measuring their contribution to the severe report record. …

Long-Term Urban Forest Cover Change Detection With Object Based Image Analysis And Random Point Based Assessment, Raoul Blackman

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The urban forest provides various ecosystem services. Urban tree canopy cover measurement is the most basic quantification of ecosystem services. There have been few studies focused on long-term high-resolution urban forest change analysis. Further, few if any of these studies have compared object based image analysis (OBIA) and random point based assessment for determination of urban forest cover. The research objective is to define the urban forest canopy area, location, and height within the City of St Peter, MN boundary between 1938 and 2019 using both the OBIA and random point based methods with high spatial-resolution aerial photographic images and …

Adaptation Under The Canopy: Coffee Cooperative And Certification Contributions To Smallholder Livelihood Sustainability In Santa Lucía Teotepec, Oaxaca, Meghan C. Montgomery

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The collapse and reorganization of global coffee markets associated with the “coffee crisis” have had profound, negative impacts on smallholder producer livelihoods throughout the world. In Mexico, the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement (ICA) coincided with withdrawal of government support for agriculture, which devastated producers dependent on coffee for their livelihoods. Smallholders responded by shifting livelihood strategies to diversify income, migrating, and converting primary forest cover to subsistence crops and pasture to support household livelihood security. In some instances, producers also joined or formed cooperative organizations to access specialty certifications that offer higher priced markets, extension information, and other …

Middle To Late Holocene (7200-2900 Cal. Bp) Archaeological Site Formation Processes At Crumps Sink And The Origins Of Anthropogenic Environments In Central Kentucky, Usa, Justin Nels Carlson

Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology

Though some researchers have argued that the Big Barrens grasslands of Kentucky were the product of anthropogenic land clearing practices by Native Americans, heretofore, this hypothesis had not been tested archaeologically. More work was needed to refine chronologies of fire activity in the region, determine the extent to which humans played a role in the process, and integrate these findings with the paleoenvironmental and archaeological record. With these goals in mind, I conducted archaeological and geoarchaeological investigations at Crumps Sink in the Sinkhole Plain of Kentucky. The archaeological record and site formation history of Crumps Sink were compared with environmental …

การประยุกต์ใช้ภาพถ่ายจากอากาศยานไร้คนขับเพื่อการทำแผนที่การปกคลุมแหล่งหญ้าทะเลและประมาณค่ามวลชีวภาพแหล่งหญ้าทะเล: กรณีศึกษา หมู่บ้านร็อคการ์เด้นท์ จังหวัดระยอง, ปิยะพร ประกอบผล

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

หญ้าทะเลมีบทบาทสำคัญต่อระบบนิเวศทางทะเลและทรัพยากรชายฝั่ง เพราะหญ้าทะเลเป็นแหล่งอนุบาลสัตว์ทะเล เป็นแหล่งอาหารของสิ่งมีชีวิตในทะเล นอกจากนี้หญ้าทะเลช่วยให้มีการตกตะกอนจึงช่วยลดปัญหาการกัดเซาะชายฝั่งได้ อย่างไรก็ตามปัจจุบันพื้นที่หญ้าทะเลทั่วโลกกำลังลดลง การพัฒนาพื้นที่บริเวณชายฝั่ง ทำให้น้ำทะเลมีคุณภาพลดลงและส่งผลต่อการเจริญเติบโตของหญ้าทะเล การศึกษานี้มีวัตถุประสงค์เพื่อใช้ภาพถ่ายจากอากาศยานไร้คนขับในการจำแนกพื้นที่หญ้าทะเล ประเมินพื้นที่ปกคลุม และประมาณค่ามวลชีวภาพเหนือพื้นดินของหญ้าทะเล โดยมีพื้นที่ศึกษาอยู่บริเวณชายฝั่งทะเลหมู่บ้านร็อคการ์เด้นท์ จังหวัดระยอง ผลการศึกษาพบว่า การจำแนกประเภทข้อมูลแบบควบคุมด้วยเทคนิค Maximum Likelihood มีความถูกต้องโดยรวมสูงกว่าการจำแนกประเภทข้อมูลแบบไม่ควบคุมด้วยเทคนิค Iso Cluster เมื่อนำค่าการสะท้อนของช่วงคลื่นที่ได้จากภาพถ่ายจากอากาศยานไร้คนขับไปวิเคราะห์ถดถอยพหุคูณ โดยคัดเลือกตัวแปรแบบอิสระด้วยวิธี Stepwise เพื่อหาช่วงคลื่นที่มีความสัมพันธ์กับค่ามวลชีวภาพเหนือพื้นดินที่ได้จากภาคสนาม พบว่า ค่าการสะท้อนของช่วงคลื่นขอบแดง (Red Edge) มีความสัมพันธ์กับค่ามวลชีวภาพเหนือพื้นดินอย่างมีนัยสำคัญทางสถิติ จากนั้นจึงนำข้อมูลไปสร้างสมการเพื่อใช้ทำนายค่า พบว่า ค่ามวลชีวภาพเหนือพื้นดินที่คำนวณได้จากพื้นที่ 6.56 ไร่ คือ 3,363.76 kgDW ผลการศึกษาสรุปได้ว่า สามารถใช้ภาพถ่ายจากอากาศยานไร้คนขับในการจำแนก ประเมินพื้นที่หญ้าทะเล และประมาณค่ามวลชีวภาพเหนือพื้นดินของหญ้าทะเลได้ ผลการวิจัยนี้ สามารถนำไปใช้เป็นแนวทางในการพัฒนาการประยุกต์ใช้ภาพถ่ายจากอากาศยานไร้คนขับเพื่อติดตามการเปลี่ยนแปลงของหญ้าทะเลในพื้นที่อื่นที่มีลักษณะทางระบบนิเวศใกล้เคียงได้