Geography Commons^™

Surveys Of The Street And Private Dog Population: Jamnagar, Gujarat India, Tamara Kartal, Amit Chaudhari

Stray and Feral Animal Populations Collection

Humane Society International (HSI) conducted two dog population surveys in all 4 Zones of Jamnagar (human population of 609,613). One was a street dog survey and the other was a survey of the private (pet) dog population.

Geopolitical Relations: Uganda’S Role In The Development Of The River Nile, Jordan Williams

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This study examined the geopolitical relations of the Nile Basin by looking at Uganda as a case study, and analyzed Uganda’s use and development of the River Nile. It reviews the history of transboundary politics and treaties along with Uganda’s development projects in the region. The paper then discusses modern relations and agreements, with a focus on the most recent agreement between the Riparian States, the Cooperative Framework Agreement, and how Uganda fits into them with regards to their interest in hydropower development within their borders on the Nile. It then explores possible future developments on the river and the …

Data Limitations In The American Community Survey: The Impact On Rural Disability Research, Lillie Greiman, University Of Montana Rural Institute

Independent Living and Community Participation

The American Community Survey (ACS) provides disability data across a wide range of variables and geographies. In fact, the ACS provides county-level disability data for variables such as gender, race, veteran status, poverty status and employment for people with disabilities. This is beneficial to rural disability researchers as rural is most commonly classified at the county level. However, though the ACS is a rich and comprehensive data source it is not without limitations. Rural researchers in particular are acutely aware of these limitations. The ACS provides data estimates for disability in rural counties but because of the survey design these …

A Framework For Evaluating Stay Detection Approaches, Cornelia Schneider, Simon Gröchenig, Verena Venek, Michael Leitner, Siegfried Reich

Faculty Publications

In recent years, sensors of mobile devices are increasingly used in the research field of Active and Assisted Living (AAL), in particular, for movement analysis. Questions, such as where users typically stay (and for how long), where they have been or where they will most likely be going to, are of utmost importance for implementing smart AAL services. Due to the plethora of application scenarios and varying requirements, the challenge is the identification of an appropriate stay detection approach. Thus, this paper presents a comprehensive framework covering the entire process from data acquisition, pre-processing, parameterization to evaluation so that it …

A Spatial Critique Of Intellectual Property Law And Policy, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

Although geography has had an important and lasting impact on the development of intellectual property law and policy, at both the domestic and international levels, geographical perspectives and spatial analysis have thus far not attracted much attention from policymakers and commentators. Only recently have we seen greater linkage between these two undeniably connected fields. Even with such linkage, the discussion tends to focus narrowly on specific issues, such as the parallel importation of pharmaceuticals, the protection of geographical indications and the treatment of traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions.

This article aims to provide a systematic analysis of the linkage …

The Political Cost? Religious Segregation, Peace Walls, And House Prices, John A. Mccord, Michael J. Mccord, Peadar T. Davis, Martin E. Haran, Sean Macintyre

Peace and Conflict Studies

The longstanding issue of discrimination and segregation in housing markets has enveloped housing market analysis and particularly the understanding of house price determination. Whilst the relationship of segregation in residential space is diverse and encompasses numerous taxonomies, in Northern Ireland, the high level of market segregation is compounded by the addition of tactile barriers such as Peace walls. The existence of these tactile barriers serves to physically segregate communities and have the capacity to prevent the restoration of normal community interactions and market processes. This paper attempts to quantify and measure the disamenity implications and costs of these hard structures …

Public Transportation In The Middle East: A Study On The Sustainability And Efficacy Of Taxis In Amman And The Future Of Public Transportation, Henry Nieberg

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This research aims to explore the current public transportation status in the city of Amman, Jordan. Many Middle Eastern cities in the Levant are under critical urban transformations. This is due to both the increasing investment in infrastructure from countries located mostly in the Gulf States and through the mass destruction and neglect from internal conflicts. Amman is the only city in the Levant Region that is growing, and with a population of roughly 4 million, there is no adequate public transportation system in the city. This research includes a review of literature in urban studies and transportation, drawing on …

Man And Land: Competing Ontologies, Colonial Legacies, And The Quest For Food Sovereignty, Savannah Smith

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Land is an ontological reality, which is at the center of different relationships to land. These relationships are situated in and a product of historical and spatial process that have an under lying power geometry. These different understandings of land tenure can create conflict when they intersect with competing interests in the same space. In Cameroon, this is currently the case in the form of large-scale land acquisitions, which often conflict with local communities as multinational corporations and local elites acquire land concessions with facilitation by the government in the name of development. This paper aims to understand this issue …

Land Insecurity In Gulu, Uganda: A Clash Between Culture And Capitalism, Zachary Slotkin

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This paper presents the causes and consequences of land insecurity in Gulu, Uganda. In order to address this important and often sensitive issue, the paper analyzes the role of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) insurgency and the government’s policy of forced encampment during the insurgency in contributing to land insecurity, causing widespread displacement among former internally displaced persons (IDPs). It further explores the importance of land ownership in providing economic productivity to rural landowners, as well as the nature of customary land tenure in Acholi culture and the government’s efforts to privatize communal land, to give a background on the …

Quantifying Resilience Of Multiple Ecosystem Services And Biodiversity In A Temperate Forest Landscape, Elena Cantarello, Adrian C. Newton, Phillip A. Martin, Paul M. Evans, Arjan Gosal, Melissa S. Lucash

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Resilience is increasingly being considered as a new paradigm of forest management among scientists, practitioners, and policymakers. However, metrics of resilience to environmental change are lacking. Faced with novel disturbances, forests may be able to sustain existing ecosystem services and biodiversity by exhibiting resilience, or alternatively these attributes may undergo either a linear or nonlinear decline. Here we provide a novel quantitative approach for assessing forest resilience that focuses on three components of resilience, namely resistance, recovery, and net change, using a spatially explicit model of forest dynamics. Under the pulse set scenarios, we explored the resilience of nine ecosystem …

Values Mapping And Counter-Mapping In Contested Landscapes: An Olympic Peninsula (Usa) Case Study, Rebecca J. Mclain, Lee Cerveny, Kelly Biedenweg, David Banis

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Indigenous peoples, local communities, and other groups can use counter-mapping to make land claims, identify areas of desired access, or convey cultural values that diverge from the dominant paradigm. While sometimes created independently, counter-maps also can be formulated during public participation mapping events sponsored by natural resource planning agencies. Public participation mapping elicits values, uses, and meanings of landscapes from diverse stakeholders, yet individuals and advocacy groups can use the mapping process as an opportunity to make visible strongly held values and viewpoints. We present three cases from the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State to illustrate how stakeholders intentionally used …

Spatiotemporal Identification Of Anomalies In A Wildlife Preserve, Bharadwaj Kishan, Jason Guan Jie Ong, Yanrong Zhang, Tin Seong Kam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The datasets released for the VAST Challenge 2017 comprise vehicle movement data captured with RFID sensors, chemical emission data from factories captured by gas sensors, and image attributes of the wildlife plant health obtained from satellites, all pertaining to a fictional wildlife preserve. Using visual analytics, a compelling hypothesis is established to link the spatiotemporal datasets to the phenomenon, where the count of a bird specimen is found to decline over a given year. Anomalies in vehicle traffic patterns are linked to proximal factory emissions, and further associated with satellite imagery that show proof of degradation in plant quality in …

Finding Water Scarcity Amid Abundance Using Human–Natural System Models, William K. Jaeger, Adell Amos, Daniel P. Bigelow, Heejun Chang, David R. Conklin, Roy Haggerty, Christian Langpap, Kathleen Moore, Philip Mote, Anne W. Nolin, Andrew J. Plantinga, Cynthia L. Schwartz, Desiree Tullos, David P. Turner

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Water scarcity afflicts societies worldwide. Anticipating water shortages is vital because of water’s indispensable role in social-ecological systems. But the challenge is daunting due to heterogeneity, feedbacks, and water’s spatial-temporal sequencing throughout such systems. Regional system models with sufficient detail can help address this challenge. In our study, a detailed coupled human–natural system model of one such region identifies how climate change and socioeconomic growth will alter the availability and use of water in coming decades. Results demonstrate how water scarcity varies greatly across small distances and brief time periods, even in basins where water may be relatively abundant overall. …

Environmental Influences On Forest Fire Regime In The Greater Hinggan Mountains, Northeast China, Qian Fan, Cuizhen Wang, Dongyou Zhang, Shuying Zang

Faculty Publications

Fires are the major disturbances in the Greater Hinggan Mountains, the only boreal forest in Northeast China. A comprehensive understanding of the fire regimes and influencing environmental parameters driving them from small to large fires is critical for effective forest fire prevention and management. Assisted with satellite imagery, topographic data, and climatic records in this region, this study examines its fire regimes in terms of ignition causes, frequencies, seasonality, and burned sizes in the period of 1980–2005. We found an upward trend for fire occurrences and burned areas and an elongated fire season over the three decades. The dates of …

Making A Case For Social Innovation As A Structural Counterpart To Public Participation In Regional Planning, Manju A. Adikesavan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Multi-locational living – working, shopping, playing, learning and commuting across administrative and, sometimes even political boundaries is an essential aspect of metropolitan living. Although it is anticipated that everyday experiences of the physical, social and economic inter-connectedness between urban communities and peri-urban hinterlands would automatically engender a regional outlook in planning and governance, it is currently not the case. In the New York City region, a lived regional experience does not translate into support for a regional governance structure.

While strong legislative support has ensured the public its rightful place within metropolitan regional planning, it has regrettably bred a procedural …

A Modified Normalized Difference Impervious Surface Index (Mndisi) For Automatic Urban Mapping From Landsat Imagery, Zhongchang Sun, Cuizhen Wang, Huadong Guo, Ranran Shang

Faculty Publications

Impervious surface area (ISA) is a key factor for monitoring urban environment and land development. Automatic mapping of impervious surfaces has attracted growing attention in recent years. Spectral built-up indices are considered promising to map ISA distributions due to their easy, parameter-free implementations. This study explores the potentials of impervious surface indices for ISA mapping from Landsat imagery using a case study area in Boston, USA. A modified normalized difference impervious surface index (MNDISI) is proposed, and a Gaussian-based automatic threshold selection method is used to identify the optimal MNDISI threshold for delineating impervious surfaces from background features. To evaluate …

Making Software, Making Regions: Labor Market Dualization, Segmentation, And Feminization In Austin, Portland And Seattle, Dillon Mahmoudi

Dissertations and Theses

Through mixed-methods research, this dissertation details the regionally variegated and place-specific software production processes in three second-tier US software regions. I focus on the relationship between different industrial, firm, and worker production configurations and broad-based economic development, prosperity, and inequality. I develop four main empirical findings.

First, I argue for a periodization of software production that tracks with changes in software laboring activity, software technologies, and wage-employment relationships. Through a GIS-based method, I use the IPUMS-USA to extensively measure the amount and type of software labor in industries across the US between 1970 and 2015. I map the uneven geography …

Detecting Change In Rainstorm Properties From 1977-2016 And Associated Future Flood Risks In Portland, Oregon, Alexis Kirsten Cooley

Dissertations and Theses

In response to increased greenhouse gases and global temperatures, changes to the hydrologic cycle are projected to occur and new precipitation characteristics are expected to emerge. The study of these characteristics is facilitated by common indices to measure precipitation and temperature developed by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI). These indices can be used to describe the likely consequences of climate change such as increased daily precipitation intensity (SDII) and heavier rainfall events (R95p). This study calculates a subset of these indices from observed and modelled precipitation data in Portland, Oregon. Five rainfall gages from a …

Landsat Sentinel Registration Source Codes: Linux, Lin Yan, David P. Roy

Landsat Sentinel Registration Source Codes

• SSReg is open-source software (coded in C) for precise automatic registration of two Sentinel-2 L1C acquisitions including all 10 m, 20 m and 60 m bands.
• Version 1.1 is a Linux version and includes source codes, manual and test data.
• Major functionalities of the software:
  • Image registration supporting translation, affine and 2^nd order polynomial transformations.
  • Classic implementation of least-squares matching (LSM) with up to 0.02 pixel matching accuracy on medium-spatial-resolution optical-wavelength remote sensing images, including Landsat and Sentinel 2.
  • Implementation of the LSM-based depth-first mismatch detection.
• The development and release of this open-source software is funded by NASA grant …

Desert Pool {If Every Desert Was Once A Sea}, Karen Miranda Abel

The Goose

Desert Pool {If every desert was once a sea} is a site-specific art project by Canadian artist Karen Miranda Abel completed in 2016 while artist-in-residence at Joya: arte + ecología, an arts-led research centre situated in an alpine desert within a national park in southern Spain. The elemental installation represents an envisioning of the ancient sea that occupied the Sierra de María-Los Vélez Natural Park millions of years before the current desert ecology, a time when its highest mountain peaks may have been islands.