Spatial Science Commons^™

Geospatial Analysis Of Droughts, Rice And Wheat Production, And Agrarian Vulnerability: A District-Level Study Of The Self-Calibrated Palmer Drought Severity Index In India, Aaron Michael Shew

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Droughts have affected more people than any other natural disaster in the last century, causing billions in economic damages and millions of deaths. As the Sea Surface Temperatures (SST) have heated in the Indian Ocean, drought patterns across South Asia have changed; the Indian monsoon has become more volatile and less predictable. In this study, monthly self-calibrated Palmer Drought Severity Index (sc-PDSI) data for the time period between 1950 and 2009 were interpolated to India’s districts; then the data were analyzed for changes in frequency and severity. The data were further evaluated using Anselin’s Local Moran’s I Statistic to elicit …

Using Technology To Serve The Agricultural Community In The Western Cape Province Of South Africa, Pavarni Naidoo, Lise Sandenbergh, Maud Bonato, Johann Strauss, Mike Wallace, Andre Roux, Shaheed Martin, Ilse Trautmann, Schalk Cloete

Professional Agricultural Workers Journal

Abstract

The Western Cape Department of Agriculture has a team of agricultural experts using novel approaches to address the challenges faced by South African agriculture. The objective of this paper is to describe some of the innovative research and technologies, and methods of technology transfer, used to better serve the agricultural community. The spectrum of technologies implemented includes new research on breeding (biotechnology); new approaches to conservation agriculture; remote sensing satellite and spatial information for improved decision making, such as the spatial intelligence project and FruitLook; Agricultural Integrated Management System; and technology to manage and disseminate information, such as smart …

Kompa As A Lesson In Value Or A Semi-Voyeristic Appreciation Of The Bamboo Basket In Dolpa, Maxwell Shaw-Jones

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This “study” explores two central topics: 1.) The logistics and details of basket weaving as both a skill and a business in Dolpa and 2.) The cultural value of the woven bamboo basket, also in Dolpa. My fieldwork started in lower Dolpa, (Dunai and Bysagar), peregrinated north into the Tarap Valley, and then returned back down to Dunai. From my research I attempt to provide an insight into the way people, of all walks of life in Dolpa, think and relate to this tool (kompa), and then attempt to derive larger moral implications from what I have observed. …

Past Meets Future: Combining Gis, 3d Technologies, And Legacy Data To Reanalyze Ceramics At Copan, Honduras, Stephanie Sterling, Heather Richards-Rissetto, René Viel

UCARE: Research Products

The archaeological site of Copán—a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Honduras—was a primary center for cultural and economic exchange in the Maya world from the fifth to ninth centuries. Our research investigates the sociopolitical climate of the city immediately preceding this collapse. This poster presents the results of a pilot study intended to evaluate the potential of using a combination of digital technologies and legacy data to reanalyze a subset of diagnostic ceramics from select sites outside of Copan’s urban core. Our methods involved:

(1) Applying photogrammetry to generate 3D models for approximately 30 potentially temporally-diagnostic ceramic types

(2) Digitizing, …

Park Management Gis Intern In New York City Department Of Park & Recreation, Dongjun Zhou 3125032

Sustainability and Social Justice

My park management GIS internship with New York City Department of Parks & Recreation took place during June and August 2015, where I primarily worked under the guidance of Terese Flores, the park manager for the borough of Manhattan. My internship responsibility was assisting the Park Manager with park improvement project that primarily involved asset mapping for park properties, field data collecting and entry, budget devising as well as park staff coordinating. According to the requirement of GISDE program at Clark University, the content of this report mainly covers three aspects of this internship: the introduction for the mission and …

Cruising The Canal: A Methodological Approach To Assessing Trail Conditions Along The Hennepin Canal Parkway, Alyssa Clarida

Geography: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

Trail conditions in the United States are degrading and trail systems do not receive enough funding to repair them in a timely manner. Park managers often conduct trail assessments to collect trail condition data. They use this data to make timely and judicious decisions regarding trail repairs. However, many trail assessments are time consuming, costly, and require high levels of expertise. This project creates a trail assessment methodology that can be applied to a trail with limited funds. The final methodology was efficient, succinct, accurate, and simple to conduct. It uses a problem based methodology where every instance of degradation …

Airborne Lidar Acquisition, Post-Processing And Accuracy-Checking For A 3d Webgis Of Copan, Honduras, Jennifer Von Schwerin, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Fabio Remondino, Maria Grazia Spera, Michael Auer, Nicolas Billen, Lukas Loos, Laura Stelson, Markus Reindel

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Archaeological projects increasingly collect airborne LiDAR data to use as a remote sensing tool for survey and analysis. Publication possibilities for LiDAR datasets, however, are limited due to the large size and often proprietary nature of the data. Fortunately, web-based, geographic information systems (WebGIS) that can securely manage temporal and spatial data hold great promise as virtual research environments for working with and publishing LiDAR data. To test this and to obtain new data for archaeological research, in 2013, the MayaArch3D Project (www.mayaarch3d.org) collected LiDAR data for the archaeological site of Copan, Honduras. Results include: 1) more accurate archaeological maps, …

Documenting Spatial And Temporal Information For Heritage Preservation: A Case Study Of Sri Lanka, Chiranthi Wijesundara, Shigeo Sugimoto, Bhuva Narayan

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Cultural Heritage Properties (CHPs) around the world have been altered or destroyed due to various unforeseen factors, both natural and human-made. Consequently, as a preparedness approach around such disasters, documenting the CHPs are crucial to any efforts to repair, rebuild or relocate them. With advancements in digital technologies, integrating them into our documentation to improve heritage preservation has become a common approach. Here the main concern is on Spatial and Temporal (ST) information and the paper proposes that with recent developments in the field of Geospatial technologies, heritage preservation can be enhanced and improved by documenting ST information parallel to …

Spatiotemporal Meta-Analysis: Reviewing Health Psychology Phenomena Over Space And Time., Blair T. Johnson

CHIP Documents

This supplemental material is meant to support this article:

Johnson, B. T., Crowley, E., & Marrouch, N. Spatiotemporal meta-analysis: Reviewing health psychology phenomena over space and time. Health Psychology Review.

Specifically, it is a database of GDPs per capita for nations in the world between 1800 and 2015. It is archived here to support an online supplement to this article.

GDP per capita

Accuracy Assessment Of Pictometry® Height Measurements Stratified By Cardinal Direction And Image Magnification Factor, Daniel Unger, David Kulhavy, I-Kuai Hung, Yanli Zhang

Faculty Publications

The aim of this project was to ascertain if Pictometry^® estimated height could be used in lieu of field-based height estimation. Height of a light pole measured with a telescopic height pole was compared to Pictometry^® hyperspatial 4-inch (10.2 centimeters) multispectral imagery estimated light pole height on the campus of Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, Texas. Average percent agreement between light pole height and Pictometry^® estimated light pole height summarized by Pictometry^® image magnification factors at 100%, 125%, 150%, 200%, and 300% magnification were within 98% of light pole height with percent disagreement ranging from …

Computationally Inexpensive Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (Oli) Pansharpening, Hankui Zhang, David P. Roy

GSCE Faculty Publications

Pansharpening algorithms fuse higher spatial resolution panchromatic with lower spatial resolution multispectral imagery to create higher spatial resolution multispectral images. The free-availability and systematic global acquisition of Landsat 8 data indicate an expected need for global coverage and so computationally efficient Landsat 8 pansharpening. This study adapts and evaluates the established, and relatively computationally inexpensive, Brovey and context adaptive Gram Schmidt component substitution (CS) pansharpening methods for application to the Landsat 8 15 m panchromatic and 30 m red, green, blue, and near-infrared bands. The intensity images used by these CS pansharpening methods are derived as a weighted linear combination …

Reaching The Water's Edge: Assessing Riverfront Accessibility In The Quad Cities Area, Lorraine Stamberger

Geography: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

In river towns across the United States, a slow transformation is taking place as aging and abandoned industrial infrastructure is being replaced by new riverfront uses. Consequently, the urban American riverfront has become a battleground, with municipalities, developers, and large corporations fighting over this contested land. Although riverfronts offer a wealth of benefits for the public such as therapeutic river views and abundant recreational opportunities, studies have shown that public interests and access are often overlooked in the waterfront development process. The purpose of this research is to understand the level of access people in the Quad Cities community have …

Nuisance And Call For Service Data Analysis, Dr. Jennifer Burnham, Kristin Schoenecker, Irene Mekus, Melisa Ribikawskis

2015-2016: Clinton, Iowa

No abstract provided.

The Global Landsat Archive: Status, Consolidation, And Direction, Michael A. Wulder, Joanne C. White, Thomas R. Loveland, Curtis E. Woodcock, Alan S. Belward, Warren B. Cohen, Eugene A. Fosnight, Jerad Shaw, Jeffrey G. Masek, David P. Roy

GSCE Faculty Publications

New and previously unimaginable Landsat applications have been fostered by a policy change in 2008 that made analysis-ready Landsat data free and open access. Since 1972, Landsat has been collecting images of the Earth, with the early years of the program constrained by onboard satellite and ground systems, as well as limitations across the range of required computing, networking, and storage capabilities. Rather than robust on-satellite storage for transmission via high bandwidth downlink to a centralized storage and distribution facility as with Landsat-8, a network of receiving stations, one operated by the U.S. government, the other operated by a community …

Comparing Remotely Sensed Pictometry® Web Based Slope Distance Estimates With In Situ Total Station And Tape Slope Distance Estimates, David Kulhavy, Daniel Unger, Yanli Zhang, Phillip Bedford, I-Kuai Hung

Faculty Publications

Slope distance was measured between the top of 30 light poles and their respective ground level coordinate identified within a central parking lot on the campus of Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, Texas. Slope distance measured using Pictometry^® hyperspatial 4-inch (10.2 centimeters) multispectral imagery within a web based interface was compared to in situ total station and tape measured slope distance. The range for mean slope distance for Pictometry^®, total station, and tape measured slope distance was 0.05 meters. Mean slope distance was 15.36 meters, 15.37 meters, and 15.41 meters for Pictometry^®, total station, …

Integrating Faculty Led Service Learning Training To Quantify Height Of Natural Resources From A Spatial Science Perspective, Daniel Unger, David Kulhavy, Kai Busch-Peterson, I-Kuai Hung

Faculty Publications

Arthur Temple College of Forestry and Agriculture (ATCOFA) faculty members were trained how to integrate service learning activities within senior level classes at Stephen F. Austin State University (SFASU) in Nacogdoches, Texas. The service learning training, taught under the acronym Mentored Undergraduate Scholarship (MUGS), involved meeting with fellow faculty members over the course of an academic year during the fall semester to first learn how to incorporate service learning activities in a senior level class followed by its incorporation into a class the following spring semester. The service learning model was applied to students in GIS 420, a senior level …

Comparing Unmanned Aerial Systems (Uas) Structure-From-Motion Digital Surface Modeling To Laser Imaging Detection And Ranging (Lidar), Joshua D. Schane

Geography Masters Research Papers

UAS (unmanned-aerial systems) mapping is an emerging technology in spatial science. UAS, more informally referred to as “drones,” are small, radio-controlled or autonomous aerial platforms outfitted with camera sensor systems that can be deployed to fly missions for mapping terrain and structures. With the use of a photogrammetry technique called structure-from-motion, overlapping aerial images can be developed into high-resolution spatial data (< 5-cm). These data are georeferenced by GPS location information assigned to aerial targets which act as ground-control points (GCPs). This research explores the accuracy of the UAS-derived digital surface model (DSM) as it relates to a LIDAR DSM of the same study area in St. Helens, Oregon.

The site that was chosen to be mapped was a large wastewater treatment plant, with surrounding natural areas, residential, and industrial properties. The site was mapped using a small quadcopter-style UAS which was programmed autonomously; the overlapping aerial …

Identifying Data Centers From Satellite Imagery, Adam Buskirk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We develop two different descriptors which can be utilized to describe satellite imagery. The first, the differential-magnitude and radius descriptor, describes a scene by computing the directional gradient of the scene with respect to a vector field whose solutions are circles around a pixel to be described, and then counts pixels in a descriptor matrix according to the magnitude of this gradient and the distance at which this magnitude occurs. The second, the radial Fourier descriptor, extracts from the scene a sequence of annuloid sectors, and uses this to approximate the behavior of the image on a circle around the …

Land Cover Land Use Change And Soil Organic Carbon Under Climate Variability In The Semi-Arid West African Sahel (1960-2050), Amadou M. Dieye

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Land Cover Land Use (LCLU) change affects land surface processes recognized to influence climate change at local, national and global levels. Soil organic carbon is a key component for the functioning of agro-ecosystems and has a direct effect on the physical, chemical and biological characteristics of the soil. The capacity to model and project LCLU change is of considerable interest for mitigation and adaptation measures in response to climate change. A combination of remote sensing analyses, qualitative social survey techniques, and biogeochemical modeling was used to study the relationships between climate change, LCLU change and soil organic carbon in the …

Missing The Trees For The Forest: The Socioecological Significance Of Dispersed Farmland Trees In Northern Ethiopia, Jacob A. Wall, Travis W. Reynolds

Honors Theses

Scattered trees are prominent features in the agricultural landscape of the Ethiopian highlands. The dry Afromontane forests of the Amhara Region in northern Ethiopia have faced centuries of deforestation - the FAO estimates only 3% of the region is forested today. The remaining landscape has been largely converted into agricultural and grazing lands, with the exception of some limited government-protected lands, as well as thousands of small forest fragments left around Orthodox Churches (“church forests”). But while a growing body of scholarship has highlighted the ecological and cultural importance of church forests and other natural forest fragments, the roles of …