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Geospatial Information Technology, Rural Resource Development, and Future Geographies
Abstract
Geospatial information technologies, particularly as they relate to remote sensing and geographic information science (GIScience) are providing new perspectives for understanding rural systems. By utilizing geospatial technologies with more integrative research approaches, geographers can ask more socially relevant and innovative questions about the human–environmental system. Within remote sensing alone, there has been a significant leap forward in usable sensor systems for analyzing human dimensions of rural areas through high spatial and spectral resolution approaches. The impact of various forcing factors (e.g., water availability) in Kansas and Botswana, for example, within the context of human–environmental interactions can be more fully understood using such geospatial technology approaches. At the same time, through new infospheres, cybergeography, and sensitivity to new attitudes in learning by millinneals, future geographies are created that demand more geographic management systems (GMSs). At the center of such evolving trends, geographers are poised to provide important leadership in more fully understanding the human–environmental system as we begin the Association of American Geographers' next century.
... Generally subject helps to develop significant elements of the skills frame with a firm emphasis on utilization of maps and visual images as well as new geospatial technologies including geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing (RS). In many ways, emerging technologies and related developments in discipline geography offered new exciting opportunities that must be grasped and carried on to move ahead (Nellis, 2005). These transferable geographical skills help to equip people for effective and applicable lifelong learning and experiences. ...
Geography invites us to comprehensively participate in the excitement, enjoyment and meet the challenges of this dynamic globe. The present study was conducted in two higher institutes of Bahawalpur, Pakistan namely The Islamia University, Bahawalpur (IUB) and Government Sadiq Egerton College (GSEC), Bahawalpur, where geography is being offered at masters' level. The main objectives of the study were, to find out the students perceptions about selecting of geography as masters subject, to get the opinion of masters students relating to subject's scope and applications and to draw useful suggestions for the improvement of the subject in Pakistan in future. For this, data were collected through a structured questionnaire survey using quota sampling during the month of March 2017. The number of students was high in the Geography Department (IUB) than in the GSEC. Therefore, 90 enrolled students (both male and female) were selected as samples, wherein 67 students were from the Geography Department (IUB) and 23 students from GSEC. The collected data was arranged, tabulated and analyzed by applying descriptive statistics and chi-square test using MS Excel and SPSS 20.0 software. Results demonstrated that geography has gained increasing importance and adoption as maters subject. Students have developed self-interest in the discipline and were recorded deep affiliations in human geography and applied fields like remote sensing (RS) and geographic information system (GIS). Respondents argued that geography has a wide area of applications and the future of geography is bright in Pakistan. Chi-square results also verified the students' perceptions and views about the discipline's scope and applications. Based on collected data few suggestions were made to make the discipline more effective, applicable and innovative i.e. geography should be recognized as a science subject, the syllabus at intermediate and degree levels should be modified and updated, the vacant posts of geography teachers should be filled. Geospatial branches of the discipline like RS and GIS should be emphasized.
... The selection of which disciplinary features and structuring aspects to choose from was grounded on a literature survey and on drawing from existing research agendas. Based on a structured literature survey six major research fields were identified (mainly based on Armstrong, 2000;Batty et al., 2010;Blaschke and Strobl, 2010;Bodenhamer et al, 2010;Brown et al, 2004;Burrough and Frank, 1996;Couclelis, 1999;Craglia et al., 2008;Crampton, 2009;de Smith et al., 2009;diBiase et al., 2006;Dobson and Fisher, 2003;Duckham et al., 2003;Egenhofer and Mark, 1995;Fabrikant and Buttenfield, 2001;Goodchild, 1992;2009a;Goodchild and Janelle, 2010;Grossner et al., 2008;Jones, 2007;Kemp, 2010;Kraak, 2003;Kwan, 2009;Kwan and Schwanen, 2009;Kuhn, 2003;Longley et al., 2010;Mark, 2000;Nellis, 2005;Sui, 2004a;Sui and Goodchild, 2003;Taylor and Johnston, 1995;Zhang and Goodchild, 2002), as: ...
Geographic Information Science (GIScience) seeks to understand the nature of geographic phenomena and geo-spatial information. It provides theoretical foundations for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the rationale for research and development in GIS and their applications. In this article, we analyse the role of GIScience as a common denominator among and between various disciplines, acting as a facilitator for interdisciplinary research. Starting from the development of a coordinated and structured doctoral programme,ten senior university faculty members from different disciplines examine the commonalities of spatial (Because of limited space we focus in this paper on the spatial domain and will only briefly reflect the spatio-temporal complexity) concepts in their respective fields in three interdisciplinary research clusters. Since the educational rationale was published recently, we focus on the role of GIScience in building an interdisciplinary and inter-departmental research alliance and conclude that the university-wide visibility has increased and opens new changes for another ‘spatial turn’.
... These commercial data, some with less than one-metre spatial resolution, create new opportunities for understanding some social dimensions of urban areas, detail analysis of natural hazard impacts or more detail analysis of agricultural areas. Rural-urban migration is an important social and ecological process that remote sensing can help to understand by considering the pattern-process relationships of people and the environment at source and destination locations (Nellis, 2005). ...
The interaction between physical and human geography is obvious as both are two sub disciplines of parent subject Geography. But it has been felt that the gap between the two sub disciplines has been increasing as time passed. It has been tried to seek answer of the question that why the gap between these two sister disciplines has been increasing day by day putting the Tobler's first law of Geography, 'Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things' as the base statement in the growth of specialization also. If we follow the first law of Geography, physical and human geography place nearest of each other than the subject of sociology, political science, economics etc. as they bifurcated from the same discipline. But most probably it's the geographers attitudes due to which the gap between physical and human geography has been increasing. The development of Geospatial Technology opens up new vistas to the geographers for the spatial or geographical analysis of the infinitely complex earth. It helps improve the data acquisition, analysis, interpretation and storing irrespective to physical or human geography. This paper will try to analyse the role of Geospatial Technology in dislocating or bridging the gap between physical and human geography as a holistic science for the people and place.
... GIS has also enabled resource managers to track and predict drought conditions (Steinemann & Cavacanti, 2006;Garrote et al., 2007), organize rural development (Nellis, 2005) and optimize reservoir location (Annor et al., 2009). Geographic information systems can optimize water storage while minimizing environmental impact for small and medium-sized reservoirs (McCartney et al., 2005). ...
Dams and reservoirs in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) Rivers have been associated with significant hydrologic change including water quality decline, habitat loss through stream fragmentation and habitat conversion, temperature alteration, disrupted riparian zone function, modified sediment distribution, and loss of water through evaporation. As this river basin is both an international hotspot of biodiversity and one of the fastest growing areas of the country, the implications of these alterations are of great importance both economically and environmentally.
While the basin’s few large government and public utility owned reservoirs have been examined extensively, the cumulative impact of the tens of thousands of small reservoirs is less well known. To assess the impact of these small reservoirs, a geographic database of reservoirs was constructed for the ACF basin for a range of reservoir sizes. The initial framework for this reservoir database was generated through inspection, standardization, and synthesis of data from several agencies. The database was edited using high-quality aerial photography from 2005 through 2008, topographic maps, and landcover data and then assessed for accuracy. The creation of this dataset confirmed over 24,500 small reservoirs throughout the basin.
Trends for a variety of reservoir characteristics were observed within reservoir size categories (small, medium, and large based on reservoir volume). Small and medium reservoirs were unevenly distributed throughout the basin with fewer found in the flat and more southerly regions of Florida. More small and medium reservoirs were found in the agricultural belt of southern Georgia, but the highest densities were found in the steeper and more populated region between the northern Georgia cities of Columbus and Atlanta. Examination of purpose and ownership trends confirmed that larger reservoirs are owned by federal and state governments and public utilities and provide recreation, hydropower, water supply, navigation, and flood control. Smaller reservoirs are local or privately owned and are typically recreation, farm, irrigation, or stormwater retention ponds.
Only 5% of the total volume of reservoirs in the ACF basin is contained in small reservoirs because water depths in small reservoirs are relatively shallow compared to depths in medium and large reservoirs. In terms of surface area, however, small reservoirs contribute 25% of the total surface area of all reservoirs in the basin. Surface area is an important measure with regard to impacts on downstream flow because of the potential for evaporative losses from reservoir surfaces. In addition, small reservoirs have clearly had a major impact on stream integrity through fragmentation and conversion of riverine habitat to lacustrine-type habitat. Based on an analysis of the intersection of reservoirs with flowlines, over 11,000 small reservoirs intersect streams, with the result being conversion and fragmentation of extensive riverine habitat throughout the basin. Of the 6 percent (3,900 kilometers) of the total linear stream distance in the ACF basin covered by reservoirs, approximately half (1,900 kilometers) is covered by small reservoirs. In summary, small reservoirs have had multiple impacts throughout the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river basin, and based on the results of this research, habitat conversion, stream fragmentation, and the potential for decreasing downstream flows through evaporative losses appear to be the most important of those impacts.
... However, the variables tend to moving along random different paths that are simultaneously constrained to a regular and geometric region of the graph. Nellis (2005) has pointed out in his presidential address on "Geospatial Information Technology, Rural Resource Development and Future Geographies" presented at the Centennial Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, that "the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but having new eyes." One of the fundamental issues associated with having "new eyes" is to look at the development of a new space-time representation that can allow us to "see" the future evolution of complex networks on the surface of the Earth. ...
In the United States, higher education institutions and structures governing higher education are going through dramatic change. The implications of new technology and changing modes of course structure, and evolving federal and state policies have the potential for significant impact on higher education. The historic federal mandates regarding university systems, including land-grants, and renewal of the U.S. Higher Education Act, for example, have impacts related to higher education regulations, performance expectations, accreditation, and student success. In addition, there are new research questions related to student learning. Several of the key themes impacting higher education also have implications and expectations for university geography programs. Geographers and geography programs in many universities are contributing toward addressing these changes in ways that contribute toward programs and universities that are more committed to new learning paradigms, as well as curricula that enhance engagement, concepts of sustainability, innovation, entrepreneurship, and efforts at more integrated scholarship, among others.
Monitoring land-cover change and understanding the dynamics of forest cover is critically important for the management of forest ecosystems. This study assesses land cover change (1990–2015) in the Jigme Dorji National Park, one of the largest national parks in Bhutan, using Landsat imageries. Overall changes in forest cover, as well as the fragmentation of dense forests within the park, were analyzed using landscape metrics. The results show that total forest area, dense forest area, and moderately dense forest area decreased while open forest area and shrub area increased. During the 25-year study period, the annual deforestation rate was 821 ha year⁻¹, equivalent to 0.63% year⁻¹. The total number of patches of all type increased by 176%, from 250,353 to 691,811, while the mean patch size of forest patches decreased from 1.7 ha to 0.6 ha. The number of smaller patches (0–100 ha size class) in dense forest increased rapidly, indicating that a more fragmented landscape accrued over time, a trend that does not bode well for the maintenance of biodiversity in the national park.
In this article I summarize the status and trends in physical geography over the first 100 years of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Drawing on the original papers and recent literature that reviews biogeography, climatology, and geomorphology, I describe the change in the focus of physical geographers over the last century and anticipate future developments in physical geography. Physical geographers have always responded to changes in methodologies and to broader developments in earth and environmental sciences. Their work currently explores environmental systems developing process-based understanding. Recent methodological and conceptual developments include the adoption of approaches from complexity science to understand dynamic and nonlinear behaviors of environmental systems. There is also a growing move toward the challenge of addressing coupled human and natural systems in an integrated and holistic manner. This is not only a challenge for physical geography but also for geography as a whole, reflecting the capacity of the discipline to analyze and understand complex behaviors and dynamics using a diversity of quantitative and qualitative methods; methodologies that span social, economic, behavioral, and biophysical systems; and an ability to link basic and applied research to use geographic expertise to address contemporary environmental issues of importance.
This study examines the interface between groundwater hydrology and ecology, and addresses a scientific grand challenge to develop a comprehensive, systematic understanding of continental water dynamics by linking the hydrosphere and biosphere. There exists a current lack of data interoperability between groundwater modeling tools due to differences in numerical techniques – Analytic Element Method (AEM), Finite Difference Method (FDM), and Finite Element Method (FEM) – which lend themselves well to either vector or raster data, and legacy input/output file formats that are not well suited across models. Nonetheless, investigative computational tools are all founded in the same conceptualization of hydrologic properties associated with mass, flux, pathways and residence time. A consistent framework is developed using modern Geographic Information Science (GIScience) methods to organize and archive important information from international datasets and previous groundwater ecohydrology studies organized around aquifer and water point, line, polygon and raster features. Case studies illustrate the efficacy of this platform to address existing data interoperability issues for representative groundwater ecohydrology problems of global significance including the impact of human-induced forcings, change in species, and forcings by natural processes on groundwater ecohydrology. In North America, we study the relationships between groundwater pumping in the Ogallala Aquifer and changes in riparian habitat and phreatophyte species composition. In Europe, we study the impacts of changes in forest species composition on groundwater recharge and baseflow to biologically diverse fens and wetlands in the Veluwe sand hill region of The Netherlands. In Africa, we study the wetlands of the Okavango Delta in Botswana that forms an oasis in the midst of the Kalahari Desert and the role of groundwater in flushing salts from this freshwater ecosystem. In each study, we document the current state of knowledge, identify pertinent datasets and previous studies, develop new conceptual and computer models, and summarize findings. This computational platform provides a framework to study sustainability, to forecast the impacts of changes in forcings, and to provide a scientific underpinning that informs management and public policy debate.
The Great Plains region, North America's grassland and breadbasket, is a vast, beautiful, charismatic place with a volatile settlement history. Since the end of the Civil War, the Plains has suffered three large cycles of population, economic and environmental boom and especially bust. Seventeen years ago the present authors proposed a solution for the region's difficulties, a vision of the Plains' land-use future that we called the Buffalo Commons. Our idea took hold in the Plains, has lasted and promises to affect the region's development. The Great Plains occupies almost a sixth of the Lower 48 United States' land area. By conventional definition its east edge is the 98th meridian, where Oklahoma City and San Antonio lie (Webb 1981 [1931], 3-9). Its west edge is the Rockies. The region consists of parts of ten US states, from North Dakota and Montana in the north to Texas and New Mexico in the south, plus parts of three Canadian provinces, Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The Plains are the burnt right flank of the Western desert. The region has high winds and few trees, and the climate is semiarid, with average rainfall of 12 to 20 inches annually. The vegetation is mainly midgrass in the east, shortgrass in the west. The topography rolls in the north, flattens in the south. The prime crops are cattle, corn, wheat, sheep and, in the south, cotton. The prime minerals are coal, oil and natural gas. The Plains once were nearly entirely deep-rural and small-town, but these areas have long been losing population to cities in the Plains and elsewhere. Still, the largest city in the northern half of the US Plains is Billings, Montana, with a population of only 90,000 in 2000. The region's total US population is under 6 million people, about that of a mid-size state such as Indiana.
This paper is a selected overview of the contribution of American geographers in the development of remote sensing, highlighting the role of the Remote Sensing Specialty Group (RSSG) of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), on the occasion of the centennial of the AAG. The RSSG was formed in the late 1970s, with Benjamin Richason, of Carroll College, as the first Chair. The RSSG grew rapidly from approximately 200 members in 1981, to just under 500 members in 1988, a level at which it has subsequently remained relatively stable. The RSSG was the fourth largest specialty group in the AAG throughout much of the late 1980s, and since 1999 has consistently been the third largest group, behind the GIS and Urban Geography Specialty Groups. The RSSG Outstanding Contributions in Remote Sensing Award has been presented annually since 1992. In 2004, in honor of the centennial of the AAG, the RSSG is instituting a new award, the Early Career Award in Remote Sensing.
Although the GIS community has been quick to exploit the advantages of virtual reality (VR) for display and analysis of spatial data, VR does not appear to have been exploited widely for remote sensing data analysis. A case study of high resolution lidar data acquired over a deciduous forest near Morgantown, WV was used to investigate the potential and limitations of current VR software for remote sensing analysis. The functionality within a standard remote sensing software package was found to provide a good overview of interpolated, smoothed lidar data, but was less useful for gridded data that had not been interpolated. With gridded data, it was possible to drape orthophotographs or other images over the lidar data, providing a useful method for investigating relationships between lidar and other data. Alternatively, using a commercial VR package, it was possible to view the original lidar point data, and thus visualize the multiple returns from within the canopy of each tree. The point data were preferable for identification of surfaces within the data cloud, especially the ground surface. For a fully integrated remote sensing VR package, functionality will be needed to link point and interpolated coverages, and also to enhance the interactive selection of data for further statistical analysis.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) photographs taken by astronauts from low Earth orbit can provide information relevant to conservation biology. This data source is now more accessible because of improvements in digitizing technology. Internet file transfer, and availability of image processing software. We present three examples of conservation-related projects that benefited from the use of astronaut photographs. First, NASA scientist requested that astronauts photograph the area of the controversial Isahaya Bay reclamation project in Japan. Japanese researches used photograph from before and after the reclamation as a tool for communication with the public about the effects of tidal-flat loss. The newly acquired images and the availability of high-resolution digital images from NASA archives provided timely public information on the observed changes. Second, we digitally classified and analyzed a Space Shuttle photograph of Chobe National Park in Botswana to identify the locations of woodlands affected by elephants. Field validation later confirmed that area identified on the image showed evidence of elephant damage. Third, we used a summary map from intensive field surveys of seagrasses in Shoalwater Bay, Australia, as reference data for a supervised classification of a digitized photograph taken from orbit. The classification distinguished seagrasses, sediments and mangroves with accuracy approximating that in studies using other satellite remote-sensing data. Astronaut photographs are in the public domain, and the database of nearly 400,000 photographs from the late 1960s to the present is available as a single searchable location on the Internet (http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop). These photographs can be used by conservation biologists as a source of general information about the landscaped and for quantitative mapping.
At the center of the United States, between the Rockies and the tallgrass prairies of the Midwest and South, lies the shortgrass expanse of the Great Plains. The region extends over large parts of 10 states and produces cattle, corn, wheat, sheep, cotton, coal, oil, natural gas, and metals. The Plains are endlessly windswept and nearly treeless; the climate is semiarid, with typically less than 20 inches of rain a year. The country is rolling in parts in the north, dead flat in the south. It is lightly populated. A dusty town with a single gas station, store, and house is sometimes 50 unpaved miles from its nearest neighbor, another three-building settlement amid the sagebrush. As we define the region, its eastern border is the 98th meridian. San Antonio and Denver are on the Plains' east and west edges, respectively, but the largest city actually located in the Plains is Lubbock, Texas, population 179,000. Although the Plains occupy one-fifth of the nation's land area, the region's overall population, approximately 5.5 million, is less than that of Georgia or Indiana. The Great Plains are America's steppes. They have the nation's hottest summers and coldest winters, greatest temperature swings, worst hail and locusts and range fires, fiercest droughts and blizzards, and therefore its shortest growing season. The Plains are the land of the Big Sky and the Dust Bowl, one-room schoolhouses and settler homesteads, straight-line interstates and custom combines, prairie dogs and antelope and buffalo. The oceans-of-grass vistas of the Plains offer enormous horizons, billowy clouds, and somber-serene beauty. During America's pioneer days and then again during the Great Depression, the Plains were a prominent national concern. But by 1952, in his book The Great Frontier, the Plains' finest historian, the late Walter Prescott Webb of the University of Texas, could accurately describe them as the least-known, most fateful part of the United States. We believe that over the next generation the Plains will, as a result of the largest, longest- running agricultural and environmental miscalculation in American history, become almost totally depopulated. At that point, a new use for the region will emerge, one that is in fact so old that it predates the American presence. We are suggesting that the region be returned to its original pre-white state, that it be, in effect, deprivatized.
In 2001, National Academy Press published Grand Challenges in Environmental Sciences in response to National Science Foundation’s request of the National Research Council to identify the most important environmental research agenda items for the next decade that would have the greatest practical bearing on science and policy. Not long afterward, the 2001 Open Meeting of the Humans Dimensions of Global Change community was convened in Rio de Janeiro to ascertain their own priorities for the global agenda. Not coincidentally, a number of emergent themes voiced in these two organizations have also increasingly been discussed by researchers studying human-environment interactions as pressing agenda items for further understanding the interactions between people and the landscape as influencing and being influenced by policy. The NAP 2001 report, for instance, cited land-use dynamics as not only one of the eight (out of 200) most pressing issues facing environmental scientists and policymakers, but moreover recommended land-use dynamics as one of the four areas most likely to achieve significant and practical gains over the next decade given adequate scholarly attention and support. Most important for this work was the continued development of a suite of techniques that have come to be referred to as GIScience. Geographic Information Science (GISc) refers to the integration of two components: scientific theory and information systems.
The 1985 U.S. Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) was modified in the 1996 Farm Bill, which authorized a total enrollment of up to 14.8 million ha, an early termination of certain CRP contracts, and additional new enrollments. This study used soil, land-use, groundwater, and other environmental layers from currently available sources of information for Finney County, Kansas. By using a geographic information system (GIS), we found that aquifer thickness, coinciding with gas or oil fields, was closely associated with the distribution of CRP land while other factors such as soil, aquifer depth, physiography, or slope had little effect on the CRP. We generated a map that outlined those CRP lands eligible for early termination. By using the state soil geographic database to designate the conservation priority areas and soil erosion index as the criterion to rank potential CRP lands, we created another map showing areas best suited for new CRP bids.
Technology has played a fundamental role in mapping, monitoring, and modeling land-use/land-cover (LULC) dynamics across a range of spatial and temporal scales and local, regional, and global extents. Spatial technologies, including remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS), global positioning systems (GPS), data visualizations, spatial and statistical analyses, and models have combined to position people, place, and the environment within a spatially and temporally explicit context. These technologies help characterize the rate, pattern, and composition of LULC dynamics so that associated drivers of land-use change can be related to socioeconomic, demographic, geographic, and environmental dynamics. Special challenges exist because of inherent differences in how people and the environment are characterized in both space and time. Theories and practices from the social, natural, and spatial sciences are integrated to study LULC dynamics within the context of human-environment interactions. The goal has been to characterize the composition and spatial organization of LULC through its structure, function, and change and to relate the drivers of change to observed or simulated LULC patterns at different scales of analysis. Here we emphasize the use of technology for characterizing LULC dynamics, collecting and linking data from households, communities, regions, and nations with spatially explicit data collected, managed, and integrated within a Geographic Information Science (GISc) perspective. We discuss how technology aids in (1) mapping, monitoring, and modeling LULC dynamics by considering remote-sensing systems for LULC mapping, (2) image change-detection approaches for monitoring land-cover dynamics, (3) socioeconomic and demographic surveys linked to place through GPS technology and other approaches for characterizing the human dimension, (4) GIS for deriving and integrating disparate data, and (5) land-cover models for creating multilevel and spatial simulation of LULC dynamics. We describe how technology is being used to consider human behavior and agency in conjunction with a wide variety of processes associated with land-use/land-cover change.
Geographic information systems (GIS) and cartography have traditionally been regarded as fields for the study of techniques. Yet the past ten years have witnessed geographers' increasing intellectual engagement with GIS and cartography. This essay recaps the recent intellectual discourses on GIS and cartography and speculates on possible development in the near future. Geocomputation, spatially integrated social sciences, social informatics, information ecology, and humanistic GIScience are identified as five areas of intensive new research, and it is argued that creative imaginations under the milieu of the "third culture" are urgently needed to address the challenging issues in this new technological era. Whether geography will become an intellectually more vibrant discipline hinges on the extent to which we can rekindle geographic imaginations in this computer age via GIScience to address issues of great societal concern.
The integration of GIS into the secondary curriculum can aid student learning of geography. Through a partnership between a local high school and our university, high school students received nine hours of classroom instruction and field-based training on GIS and GPS to complete a mapping project. Upon completion, a test based on seven geography core curriculum units was administered to these students and to a group of university students who did not receive GIS training. Results of the test revealed that high school students significantly outperformed the university students, suggesting that GIS does aid in the learning of geographic principles.
From the Publisher:
Interoperating Geographic Information Systems is about efforts to improve the ability of GISs to interoperate, and has been assembled through a collaboration between academic researchers and the software vendor community under the auspices of the US National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis and the Open GIS Consortium Inc. It includes chapters on the basic principles and the various conceptual frameworks that the research community has developed to think about the problem. Other chapters review a wide range of applications and the experiences of the authors in trying to achieve interoperability at a practical level. Interoperability opens enormous potential for new ways of using GIS and new mechanisms for exchanging data, and these are covered in chapters on information marketplaces, with special reference to geographic information. Institutional arrangements are also likely to be profoundly affected by the trend towards interoperable systems, and nowhere is the impact of interoperability more likely to cause fundamental change than in education, as educators address the needs of a new generation of GIS users with access to a new generation of tools. The book is suitable as a secondary text for graduate level courses in computer science, geography, spatial databases, and interoperability and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry, commerce and government.
Geographers at the AAG's centennial are challenged with exceptional opportunities to create a more central place for geography in society and in the university. Realizing these opportunities requires identifying and leveraging key emerging trends in the formation and uses of geographic knowledge. Better integration of geography's profound technological innovations with its core traditions also is necessary to strengthen the discipline's research capacity, and to more effectively engage with and contribute to the needs of society. Trends toward multidisciplinary research and integrative science, and the heightened need for geographic understanding in today's world, hold further promise for advancing the discipline while sustaining its historic strengths and diversity.
The “tragedy of the commons” is a concept familiar to students of resource management, and many academic disciplines have devoted considerable attention to its understanding and solution. Despite a long tradition of concern with issues directly related to the problem, the field of geography has been relatively silent in the commons literature, especially on the theoretic front. The present article attempts to address this shortcoming by applying geographic methodologies—particularly as related to scale and space—to an understanding of the phenomenon. The article first demonstrates the role of sociopolitical scale in defining the commons problem and then develops a typology classifying common resources into one of three categories—open access, fugitive, and migratory—based on spatial relationships between resources and resource users. The article shows that the geographic nature of the commons problem for any particular resource depends on the sociopolitical scale at which it is assessed, and suggests that solutions to commons problems should vary both by scale and by spatial nature.
Space-based sensors are giving us an ever-closer and more comprehensive look at the earth's surface; they also have the potential to tell us about human activity. This volume examines the possibilities for using remote sensing technology to improve understanding of social processes and human-environment interactions. Examples include deforestation and regrowth in Brazil, population-environment interactions in Thailand, ancient and modern rural development in Guatemala, and urbanization in the United States, as well as early warnings of famine and disease outbreaks. The book also provides information on current sources of remotely sensed data and metadata and discusses what is involved in establishing effective collaborative efforts between scientists working with remote sensing technology and those working on social and environmental issues.
System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. Mode of access: Available through the Internet. Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains xi, 107 p. : ill. (some col.), maps (some col.). Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 2002. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 100-107).
INTRODUCTION Geographic information systems (GIS) and geographic information technologies (GIT) are increasingly employed in research and development projects that incorporate community participation. For example, there are now applications involving indigenous natural resource mapping in arctic and tropical regions within the Americas (Marozas, 1993; Cultural Survival Quarterly, 1995; Bond, this volume). There is also a rapidly growing network of planning professionals interested in how GIS can merge with community participation in the context of neighborhood revitalization and urban planning (Aitkin and Michel, 1995; Craig and Elwood, 1998; Leitner et al., this volume; Sawicki and Peterman, this volume; Talen, 1999, 2000). Environmental groups are experimenting with community GIS applications to promote environmental equity and address environmental racism (Sieber, 2000; Kellog, 1999). Furthermore, NGOs, aid organizations, and governmental agencies are linking communities with geogr
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Creating a central place for geography in society and the university
- D. Richardson
GIS, cartography, and the “third culture”
- D. Sui
The Chestnut Ridge Anticline
- M. D. Nellis
- T. Warner
- R. Landenberger
- J. McGraw
- J. S. Kite
- F. Wang
Conservation applications of astronaut photographs of Earth
- J. Robinson
- K. Lulla
- M. Kashiwagi
- M. Suzuki
- M. D. Nellis
- C. Bussing
- W. Lee Long
- L. McKenzie
10-year industry forecast
- C. Mondello
- G. Hepner
- R. Williamson
- Kromm D.