Geography Commons^™

The Impacts Of Land Use And Land Cover Change On Water Quality In The Big Sioux River: 2007-2016, Dinesh Shrestha

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Between 2006 and 2012, conversion of 485,000 acres of grassland to cropland in eastern South Dakota was reported. In 2012, the Big Sioux River (BSR) running through most of eastern South Dakota was listed among the dirtiest rivers in the nation. This rating convinced state authorities to study trends of land cover changes in the BSR watershed and its association with BSR water quality with respect to increases in nitrate levels. This research i) quantifies spatial and temporal changes in the land cover types within the BSR watershed, and ii) identifies any correlation between these changes and changes in BSR …

Land Cover Changes Within And Around Protected Areas In Côte D’Ivoire From 1986 To 2017: A Case Study Of The Mabi-Yaya-Songan-Tamin Reserved Forests, Olena Boiko

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Tropical forests mitigate climate change, provide habitat for the most biologically diverse terrestrial communities, and yield ecosystem services that support human wellbeing. These forests are some of the most threatened ecosystems because of the increasing human impact on the environment. Côte d’Ivoire has one of the highest deforestation rates in sub-Saharan Africa, and the expansion of agriculture to produce cash crops, such as cocoa and rubber, is presented as the primary reason for forest loss. These changes are apparent even within the boundaries of the protected areas, which raises concerns about the effectiveness of the protection strategies. This project illustrates …

Review Of The Herds Shot Round The World: Native Breeds And The British Empire, 1800—1900, By Rebecca Woods, Andrew Sluyter

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Belonging While Black At Lake Merritt: The Black Spatial Imaginary And Place-Making In Oakland, Ca, Betel Solomon Tesfamariam

Pomona Senior Theses

This thesis aims to demonstrate how the processes of gentrification and displacement are interrelated processes that invent new ways of perpetuating anti- blackness in the U.S. I demonstrate this through an engagement with Christina Sharpe’s (2016) analysis of the imagery of the wake, the ship, the hold, and the weather as axis points that position Black life in the afterlife of slavery—how the conditions of slavery are ongoing today—presenting the racist encounters at Lake Merritt as illustrative examples. In her most recent book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Sharpe (2016) deploys an interdisciplinary approach to critically theorize …

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 …

New Approach For Temporal Stability Evaluation Of Pseudo-Invariant Calibration Sites (Pics), Fatima Tuz Zafrin Tuli

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pseudo-Invariant Calibration Sites (PICS) are one of the most popular methods for in-flight vicarious radiometric calibration of Earth remote sensing satellites. The fundamental question of PICS temporal stability has not been adequately addressed. However, the main purpose of this work is to evaluate the temporal stability of a few PICS using a new approach. The analysis was performed over six PICS (Libya 1, Libya 4, Niger 1, Niger 2, Egypt 1 and Sudan 1). The concept of a “Virtual Constellation” was developed to provide greater temporal coverage and also to overcome the dependence limitation of any specific characteristic derived from …

Empirical Absolute Calibration Model For Multiple Pseudo-Invariant Calibration Sites, Bipin Raut

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work extends an empirical absolute calibration model initially developed for the Libya 4 Pseudo-Invariant Calibration Site (PICS) to five additional Saharan Desert PICS (Egypt 1, Libya 1, Niger 1, Niger 2, and Sudan 1), and demonstrates the efficacy of the resulting models at predicting sensor top-of-atmosphere (TOA) reflectance. It attempts to generate absolute calibration models for these PICS that have an accuracy and precision comparable to or better than the current Libya 4 model, with the intent of providing additional opportunities for sensor calibration. In addition, this work attempts to validate the general applicability of the model to other …

Evaluation Of An Extended Pics (Epics) For Calibration And Stability Monitoring Of Optical Satellite Sensors, Md Nahid Hasan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pseudo Invariant Calibration Sites (PICS) have been increasingly used as an independent data source for on-orbit radiometric calibration and stability monitoring of optical satellite sensors. Generally, this would be a small region of land that is extremely stable in time and space, predominantly found in North Africa. Use of these small regions, referred to as traditional PICS, can be limited by: i) the spatial extent of an individual Region of Interest (ROI) and/or site; ii) and the frequency of how often the site can be acquired, based on orbital patterns and cloud cover at the site, both impacting the time …

Ua66/8/3 Ogden College Of Science & Engineering Geography & Geology Publications, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Publications created by and about the Geography & Geology department.

China In The South China Sea: How Are Chinese Claims Portrayed In Media?, Chase Womack

Geography

No abstract provided.

Maroon Colonies And New Orleans Neutral Grounds: From A Protosuburban Past To A Postsuburban Future, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

This essay examines New Orleans maroon colonies as a precursor to the postsuburban constellations that shape the contemporary urban landscape. These communities served as the original neutral grounds where Africans, Afro-Creoles, and Native Americans created spaces beyond the purview of slave owners and government authorities. These protosuburban enclaves anticipated the vibrancy and prolificacy of the “global urban periphery” that Roger Keil describes in his research. They also inform twentieth- and twenty-first-century efforts by black New Orleanians to carve out their own urban neutral grounds: spaces resistant to the hegemonic forces of neoliberalism and neo-Bourbonism, as manifested in the traditions of …

Youth Visitor Dynamics In Four Pacific Coast National Parks, John Crowell, Michael Pretes

Geography

No abstract provided.

Mapping Populations At Greater Risk Of Malaria Due To Hydroelectric Dams In Ethiopia: A Case Study Of The Gilgel Gibe Iii Hydroelectric Dam, Abigail Smith

Geography

No abstract provided.

Remote Sensing Of Planetary Boundary Layer Height And Particulate Matter 2.5 In New York State Mesonet Network, Bhupal Shrestha

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Abstract:

Open Secrets, Congressional Oversight, And The Geopolitics Of The Cia Drone Program, Marita C. Murphy

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Analyzing four congressional hearings that publicly discuss the CIA’s ‘secret’ drone program, this thesis considers the interaction between publicity and secrecy in facilitating practices of later-modern warfare. Specifically, I examine the content of these drone hearings within the broader context of leaks, Obama administration speeches, and public interest in CIA drones to better understand how open secrecy engages with public oversight. I argue these hearings are deceptively productive. While they largely fail as oversight events, the hearings facilitate numerous unexpected outcomes—including the normalization and entrenchment of the CIA drone program. Paradoxically then, publicity proves essential to the maintenance and acceptance …

Visualizing Barrier Dune Topographic State Space And Inference Of Resilience Properties, Li-Chih Hsu

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

The linkage between barrier island morphologies and dune topographies, vegetation, and biogeomorphic feedbacks, has been examined. The two-fold stability domain (i.e., overwash-resisting and overwash-reinforcing stability domains) model from case studies in a couple of islands along the Georgia Bight and Virginia coast has been proposed to examine the resilience properties in the barrier dune systems. Thus, there is a need to examine geographic variations in the dune topography among and within islands. Meanwhile, previous studies just analyzed and compared dune topographies based on transect-based point elevations or dune crest elevations; therefore, it is necessary to further examine dune topography in …

Tropical Forest Canopy Height And Aboveground Biomass Estimation Using Airborne Lidar And Landsat-8 Data, A Sensitivity Study With Respect To Landsat-8 Data Temporal Availability, In Mai Ndombe Province, Democratic Republic Of Congo, Herve B. Kashongwe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Tropical forests’ structure information, such as forest canopy height, is a key component in any estimate of carbon stock. Tropical rainforests constitute the most forested ecosystems that harbor the largest biodiversity on Earth and store more carbon (above and belowground biomass) than any other ecosystem in the world. However, estimates of forest canopy structure is lacking over most of the regions that host this ecosystem because of both the structure’s complexity of this ecosystems and the incomplete or lack of up-to-date national forest inventory data necessary to derive forest canopy height and aboveground biomass. This study explores the capability of …

An Analysis Of The Effect Of Tooth Wear On Bovid Identification, Juliet K. Brophy, Gregory J. Matthews, George K. Thiruvathukal

Faculty Publications

Previous research provides a method for reducing the subjectivity in taxonomic identification of species in the family Bovidae by quantifying the occlusal surface of molar teeth using elliptical Fourier analysis. In this current study, we specifically test what effect medium to late tooth wear has on the identification of bovids when using the form (size and shape) of the occlusal surface to classify specimens. To achieve this, the classification results of teeth with ≥85% of their occlusal surface (training data set) were compared with the results of teeth with 87% of the time with both Alcelaphini and Reduncini classifying correctly …

Race And Racism In The Historical Imagination: Slavery And Civil Rights In Popular Culture, Denise Lynn, Sakina Hughes, Aimee Adam

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

Because Hollywood films often lack black representation, films on slavery and civil rights often fail to recognize the roles that black Americans have played in their own emancipation from slavery and in the civil rights movement. Our contention is that historically inaccurate films perpetuate inaccurate understandings of Black history and thus inform contemporary race relations. We selected a more and a less accurate film about slavery and about the civil rights movement, discussing these four films in terms of their historical context.

We also conducted an experiment. After watching one of the four movies, or after viewing no movie, participants …