Geography Commons^™

Understanding The Influencers Of Second-Hand Apparel Shopping Behavior, Robyn Hobbs

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Shopping for second-hand apparel is rapidly growing and has become a notable segment of the retail market. The purpose of this study is to determine what influences consumers when shopping second-hand for apparel products in-store and online. According to the existing literature, a number of key factors play significant roles for second-hand apparel shopping consumer decisions. They include: social, costs, trends and environmental influencers. Past research has not concentrated in-depth on the hedonistic and social influences of second-hand apparel shopping, financial factors, and time spent shopping for second-hand apparel. This study has observed the socio-demographic profile of second-hand shoppers, what …

Space-Time Modelling Of Emerging Infectious Diseases: Assessing Leptospirosis Risk In Sri Lanka, Cameron C F Plouffe

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

In this research, models were developed to analyze leptospirosis incidence in Sri Lanka and its relation to rainfall. Before any leptospirosis risk models were developed, rainfall data were evaluated from an agro-ecological monitoring network for producing maps of total monthly rainfall in Sri Lanka. Four spatial interpolation techniques were compared: inverse distance weighting, thin-plate splines, ordinary kriging, and Bayesian kriging. Error metrics were used to validate interpolations against independent data. Satellite data were used to assess the spatial pattern of rainfall. Results indicated that Bayesian kriging and splines performed best in low and high rainfall, respectively. Rainfall maps generated from …

Debt Financed Migration To Consumption Smoothing: Tracing The Link Between Migration And Food Security In Bangladesh, Mohammad Moniruzzaman

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation is primarily focused on migration and food security linkages, more specifically the impact of migrants’ remittances on household food security, and the role of debt in financing migration. Using a multi-methods approach the dissertation focuses on the household level, but also sheds light on the related policy landscape linked to these resource issues. The dissertation consists of seven chapters, with four research finding chapters that are each self-contained and interdisciplinary. Each of these four chapters adds conceptually and empirically to the existing literature on migration and development.

Chapters one and two provide the introduction and literature review. Chapter …

Acculturation And Post-Immigration Changes In Obesity, Physical Activity, And Nutrition: Comparing Hispanics And Asians In The Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada., Michele Vitale Mr., Sean Doherty

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

OBJECTIVES: The acculturation hypothesis speculates that as new immigrants get exposed to more obesogenic environments, they progressively acquire the unhealthy lifestyles of the host society, and their obesity risk gradually increases since time of arrival. However, the consistency of the presumed acculturation effect across immigrant groups and gender, and the reasons behind individual changes in lifestyle behaviors remain unclear. Thus, this study investigated the acculturation hypothesis in the Canadian context by comparing two foreign groups, Hispanics and East/Southeast Asians, which present contrasting post-settlement obesity patterns and behavioral trends.

Methods: A 41-item questionnaire (including open-ended questions) was administered with 100 first-generation …

Collaborative Approaches To The Management Of Geospatial Data Collections In Canadian Academic Libraries: A Historical Case Study, Leanne Trimble, Cheryl Woods, Francine Berish, Daniel Jakubek, Sarah Simpkin

Western Libraries Publications

Special Issue: Geospatial Data Management, Curation, and Preservation - Part 2

The Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) is a consortium of the twenty-one university libraries in Ontario, Canada. Since 1967, OCUL member institutions have worked together to share costs and workload through collective purchasing and licensing of information resources and more recently through the establishment of a shared digital infrastructure known as Scholars Portal. Under the auspices of OCUL, Ontario's university map librarians formed the OCUL Map Group in 1973 to seek opportunities to communicate and collaborate to improve the collections and services they offer their users. The opportunities …

Which Came First, People Or Pollution? A Review Of Theory And Evidence From Longitudinal Environmental Justice Studies, Paul Mohai, Robin Saha

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

A considerable number of quantitative analyses have been conducted in the past several decades that demonstrate the existence of racial and socioeconomic disparities in the distribution of a wide variety of environmental hazards. The vast majority of these have been cross-sectional, snapshot studies employing data on hazardous facilities and population characteristics at only one point in time. Although some limited hypotheses can be tested with cross-sectional data, fully understanding how present-day disparities come about requires longitudinal analyses that examine the demographic characteristics of sites at the time of facility siting and track demographic changes after siting. Relatively few such studies …

Claudio Perna, Ca. 1970: The Impossibility Of Wholeness, Silvia Benedetti

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis identifies two main themes in Claudio Perna’s (1938–1997) work: his use of technology to explore self-representation and his interrogation of mapping as means of knowledge. This study also situates Perna’s conceptual work in relation to his field of human geography, in the specific Venezuelan context.

The Environmental Impacts Of Colonialism, Lawrence Wood

Honors Program Theses and Projects

The politics of the global imperial era are having real-world environmental consequences globally, especially in the former colonies. Indifferent administration by overseas imperial powers transparently sought to enrich their home country with little to no thought about the long term environmental or political consequences for the colony. One of the main objectives of global imperialism, from the first Spanish colonies to the last of the British and Portuguese colonies, was the enhanced profitable extraction of resources. The industrial revolution fueled the need for colonial resource extraction. Industrialization and imperialism formed a positive feedback loop, in which one created a greater …

Grain Sorting In The Morphological Active Layer Of A Braided River Physical Model., Pauline Leduc, Peter Ashmore, James T. Gardner

Geography & Environment Publications

A physical scale model of a gravel-bed braided river was used to measure vertical grain size sorting in the morphological active layer aggregated over the width of the river. This vertical sorting is important for analyzing braided river sedimentology, for numerical modeling of braided river morphodynamics, and for measuring and predicting bedload transport rate. We define the morphological active layer as the bed material between the maximum and minimum bed elevations at a point over extended time periods sufficient for braiding processes to rework the river bed. The vertical extent of the active layer was measured using 40 hourly high-resolution …

Using Landsat Tm Imagery To Monitor Vegetation Change Following Flow Restoration To The Lower Owens River, California, Lesley Crandell Bross

Dissertations and Theses

Rehabilitating river corridors to restore valuable riparian habitat consumes significant resources from both governments and private companies. Given these considerable expenditures, it is important to monitor the progress of such projects. This study evaluated the utility of using Landsat Thematic Mapper remotely-sensed data from 2002 and 2009 to monitor vegetation change induced by instream flow restoration to the Lower Owens River in central California. This study compared the results of an unsupervised classification with an NDVI threshold classification to appraise the resources required and effectiveness of each analysis method. The results were inspected by creating standard remote sensing accuracy error …

Coyotes On The Web: Understanding Human-Coyote Interaction And Online Education Using Citizen Science, Zuriel Anne Rasmussen

Dissertations and Theses

Coyote (Canis latrans) numbers are increasing in urban areas, leading to more frequent human-coyote interactions. Rarely, and particularly when coyotes have become habituated to humans, conflicts occur. Effective education about urban coyotes and how to prevent habituation reduces conflict. Citizen science, in the form of online education, can be used to engage and educate city dwellers about urban coyotes. In this research, I explore Portland Metropolitan Area (PMA) residents' baseline experiences with, and attitudes toward, urban coyotes. Next, I investigate citizen science as a tool for education. Using the Portland Urban Coyote Project (PUCP), a citizen science project, as a …

Object-Based Crop Classification With Landsat-Modis Enhanced Time-Series Data, Qingting Li, Cuizhen Wang, Bing Zhang, Linlin Lu

Faculty Publications

Cropland mapping via remote sensing can provide crucial information for agri-ecological studies. Time series of remote sensing imagery is particularly useful for agricultural land classification. This study investigated the synergistic use of feature selection, Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA) segmentation and decision tree classification for cropland mapping using a finer temporal-resolution Landsat-MODIS Enhanced time series in 2007. The enhanced time series extracted 26 layers of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and five NDVI Time Series Indices (TSI) in a subset of agricultural land of Southwest Missouri. A feature selection procedure using the Stepwise Discriminant Analysis (SDA) was performed, and 10 optimal …

Advances In Autonomous-Underwater-Vehicle Based Passive Bottom-Loss Estimation By Processing Of Marine Ambient Noise, Lanfranco Muzi

Dissertations and Theses

Accurate modeling of acoustic propagation in the ocean waveguide is important to SONAR-performance prediction, and requires, particularly in shallow water environments, characterizing the bottom reflection loss with a precision that databank-based modeling cannot achieve. Recent advances in the technology of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) make it possible to envision a survey system for seabed characterization composed of a short array mounted on a small AUV. The bottom power reflection coefficient (and the related reflection loss) can be estimated passively by beamforming the naturally occurring marine ambient-noise acoustic field recorded by a vertical line array of hydrophones. However, the reduced array …

Reconstruction Of Daily 30 M Data From Hj Ccd, Gf-1 Wfv, Landsat, And Modis Data For Crop Monitoring, Mingquan Wu, Xiaoyang Zhang, Wenjiang Huang, Zheng Niu, Changyao Wang, Wang Li, Pengyu Hao

GSCE Faculty Publications

With the recent launch of new satellites and the developments of spatiotemporal data fusion methods, we are entering an era of high spatiotemporal resolution remote-sensing analysis. This study proposed a method to reconstruct daily 30 m remote-sensing data for monitoring crop types and phenology in two study areas located in Xinjiang Province, China. First, the Spatial and Temporal Data Fusion Approach (STDFA) was used to reconstruct the time series high spatiotemporal resolution data from the Huanjing satellite charge coupled device (HJ CCD), Gaofen satellite no. 1 wide field-of-view camera (GF-1 WFV), Landsat, and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data. Then, …

Estimating The Water Quality Condition Of River And Lake Water In The Midwestern United States From Its Spectral Characteristics, Jing Tan

Open Access Dissertations

This study focuses on developing/calibrating remote sensing algorithms for water quality retrieval in Midwestern rivers and lakes. In the first part of this study, the spectral measurements collected using a hand-held spectrometer as well as water quality observations for the Wabash River and its tributary the Tippecanoe River in Indiana were used to develop empirical models for the retrieval of chlorophyll (chl) and total suspended solids (TSS). A method for removing sky and sun glint from field spectra for turbid inland waters was developed and tested. Empirical models were then developed using a subset of the field measurements with the …

Spatial Analysis Of Distributions And Habitat Conditions Of Fallopia Japonica (Japanese Knotweed) Invasive Species Applying Unmanned Helicopter Remote Sensing, Jiazhen Zhang

Great Lakes Center Masters Theses

Abstract:

Fallopia japonica (Japanese knotweed) is a perennial herbaceous plant that is native to East Asia. It is considered as one of the worst invasive species worldwide because of its serious impact on biological diversity and human activities (Lowe et al., 2001). Once established, Japanese knotweed forms dense stands that shade and crowd out native plant species. The objectives of this research were to verify and confirm the distribution of Japanese knotweed as published online by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) – iMap and to identify the geographic areas of spreading and the local habitat conditions. In …

Feeding The South: An Assessment Of Food Availability In Rural Mississippi, Nicole Baiza Lawrence

Master's Theses

The overall goal of this project is to investigate Mississippi’s rural food environment by assessing the food resources available to rural Mississippians. The primary objectives were to identify sample locations in each of the four cultural regions of Mississippi and determine the food resources available to residents of those counties. The intellectual merit of this research lies in its in-depth exploration of food accessibility in rural areas. Though there is a wealth of literature on the topics of urban food access and food deserts, very little research has been done in rural areas. Most studies focus on urban environments which …

Tree Inventory Report: Soma District, Cody Graham, Jeremy Bigelow, Gary Shaw, Andrew Bailey, Katelynn Bisso, David Dunnington, Joshua Emmons, Morgan Farber, Cody Graham, Ryan Guidry, Max Joyner, Roger Klingelhoffer, Jonathan Newman, Nicholas Scarpelli, Geoffrey Duh

Asset Mapping: Community Geography Project

The SOMA tree inventory project was taken on by a group of fourteen students as a senior capstone at Portland State University, in September of 2015. Many of us came to this class with GiS background, however, there are others representing the diverse collection of studies offered at PSU, such as film, communication, and general sciences. Capstone courses are PSU’s requirement for all seniors that allow each student to take part in helping those in the surrounding community, by providing a benefit to organizations in need of a large group of volunteers. Our capstone course was designed to impart the …

Delivering Green Streets: An Exploration Of Changing Perceptions And Behaviours Over Time Around Bioswales In Portland, Oregon, Glyn Everett, Jessica Lamond, Anita T. Morzillo, Annie Marissa Matsler, Faith Ka Shun Chan

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Green Infrastructure (GI) is an increasingly popular means of dealing with flooding and water quality issues worldwide. This study examines public perceptions of, and behaviour around, bioswales, which are a popular GI facility in the United States. Bioswales are highly visible interventions requiring support from residents and policy-makers to be implemented and maintained appropriately. To understand how the residents’ perceptions and attitudes might develop over time, we interviewed residents of Portland, Oregon, living near bioswales installed 1–2, 4–5 and 8–9 years ago, to determine awareness, understanding, and opinions about the devices. We found no consistent patterns across time periods, but …

Characterizing The Sediment Bed In Terms Of Resistance To Motion: Toward An Improved Model Of Saltation Thresholds For Aeolian Transport, Brandon L. Edwards, Steven L. Namikas

Faculty Publications

Models of aeolian transport thresholds generate a wide range of predictions, and error in threshold modeling leads to uncertainty in predicting aeolian events. This paper proposes a new characterization of the representative grain size for use in prediction of transport thresholds. This characterization is based on the distribution of resistance to motion in the sediment bed. The traditional grain size distribution uses a mean diameter to represent the sediment bed. However, the distribution of inertial forces resisting motion is not linearly proportional to the distribution of grain diameters, so that an arithmetic mean does not adequately represent the distribution of …