Dollar stores have quickly become a ubiquitous feature of the American landscape. At present there are more than 41 thousand stores associated with the three major chains and a dollar store for every eight thousand Americans, with striking geographical variations at the state level. There are three thousand people per store in Mississippi but fifty thousand per store in Washington State. The...
Environmental shifts caused by climate change are a major factor in the decline of bird species globally; since the 1970’s, close to 3.0 billion birds (~29%) have been lost in North America. Barn swallows’ niche nesting strategy makes them particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts such as drought. This study seeks to understand the connection between drought the observation density of...
Urban trees within our cities and towns form the green infrastructure on which urban residents depend. As our population continues to grow, smart and data-driven decisions regarding urban forest planning and management are crucial. Urban tree mapping and surveys have been traditionally conducted manually, which is expensive and tedious. Moreover, these surveys are often limited in public space...
Natural Resources are not organized by political boundaries. Problems arise when attempting to construct a geospatial data base for analysis when rivers run through more than one state. Differences in sampling regimes, attribute criteria, and data access can lead to analysis that does not reflect the best representations of reality. This presentation discusses the data challenges encountered...
Turkey’s Southeastern Anatolia (GAP) Project aims to inspire economic growth in an underdeveloped region of Turkey through the construction of 22 dams along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. To address downstream Iraq’s protests concerning their access to water, Turkish officials publicly promised to maintain a “fair and equitable” flow of water into Iraq. However, struggling Iraqi farmers now...
Disaster movies provided an attractive viewing experience beginning in the early 1900s. Several disaster movies were produced from 1910-1930 and 1950-1970 before the market saturated during what is considered the golden age of disaster movies, the 1970s. A social scientific study of 1970s disaster movies was conducted with results published in a 1980 article entitled “The Study of Disaster...
Climate change is causing many significant shifts throughout the world’s ecosystems, including those in oceans. Oceans act as a buffer to climate change but are reaching their tipping point for absorbing an immense amounts of heat and carbon dioxide. Rising ocean temperatures are causing many organisms to relocate to more suitable locations beyond their traditional zones. Great White Sharks,...
Bangladesh has been ranked seventh as the most affected by climate change since 1995 (The Global Climate Risk Index 2020). The urban population was 30% in 532 urban centres (2001), which is likely to be 50 million by 2021 and may exceed 60 million by 2031 (CUS 2008, Bangladesh Urban Forum, 2011). According to an estimate, by 2020, nearly every other man, woman and child will live in an urban...
On February 3rd, 2023, a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, about a quarter mile west of the Ohio-Pennsylvania state line. According to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about 20 of the cars effected by the derailment contained hazardous materials including vinyl chloride, ethylene glycol, ethylhexyl acrylate, butyl acrylate and isobutylene. Some of...
Abstract
The Enabling Crop Analytics at Scale (ECAAS) project aims to produce open-access agricultural maps and ground truth data to enhance the delivery of farm extension services. It creates high-resolution maps of the various crop types and the potential yields relating to them using this data. These maps are used to identify potential production improvement areas and provide farmers...
As renewable energy development continues to grow within the U.S., it brings with it its own opportunities and challenges. In particular, there are concerns about the local environmental impacts that communities will experience at the expense of a national reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. This research focuses on the environmental planning and permitting of renewable energy projects to...
About 12,000 years ago(Ice Age), the climate of south-central plains of America alternately experienced wet and dry periods. The region later transformed itself into a desert plain grassland. Currently, the region is undergoing another megadrought that is predicted to last for centuries in future. From the lens of hydrological and meteorological drought conditions, these prolonged and extreme...
Food access varies widely depending upon the neighborhood of residence. For some neighborhoods, a designation of a food desert has been documented. Food deserts are neighborhoods that have limited access to healthy and affordable foods in the form of supermarkets or grocery stores. The United States Department of Agriculture began to produce a food desert atlas that designated tracts with this...
What is a commercial strip? Is it necessarily motor-vehicle based? What underscores strips' emergence and development, and since when? Are all strips essentially alike, sharing the same initial circumstances? If not, how do those circumstances differ, and do differing strip types arise from different initial contexts? I see little evidence that these questions have been systematically...
The Binghamton University Nature Preserve spans 190 acres of land, with a notable 20-acre wetland, and is a multifaceted space with several missions. It is dedicated to preserving the ecological integrity of this landscape, fostering biodiversity, and facilitating research and environmental education. Furthermore, it serves as a recreational space for students, athletes, and community members,...
A primary goal of working landscape conservation is to protect large blocks of farmland. This pattern supports the long term interests of farmers and farm support industries. There are a variety of metrics a community could use to track success in this area, with dollars spent and acres preserved among the most common. Less common, but particularly important for communities like Lancaster...
The need for proactive and sustainable strategies is paramount in the ever-evolving landscape of climate change and its profound impact on businesses worldwide. Our presentation highlights the critical significance of location data in developing practical solutions for ensuring business continuity using the Area Business Continuity Management (A-BCM) framework, particularly in the context of...
Abstract
Historical appraisal of gasoline stations has previously been limited primarily to their growing association with Big Oil in the twentieth century. Research emphasis has included: branding, architecture, place-product packaging, and the attrition of small independent operators, a withering which reached a crescendo in the 1970s. The middle ground of multiple station independent...
Protests erupted in Rochester, NY in September, 2020, following the death of Daniel Prude, a Black man who died after being restrained by Rochester police. Video footage of the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests went viral, making national and international news. This presentation maps the video footage created by one Rochester based journalist that went viral for all the wrong reasons: it...
Scholarly interest in mapping and GIS is both increasing and broadening. Coming from a university with solid traditions in cartography and GIS, I was interested to observe what the situation was at the University of Pittsburgh when I accepted a position there two years ago. As seen from two documents produced by the University Library System, the importance of these trends was recognized in...
Many times local governments, are tasked to look at changes in employment patterns over a specific time period at a localized level , often where a comparative analysis is required. A Shift-share Analysis measures the movement (shift) of the local economy into faster or slower growth sectors and the community’s larger or smaller portion (share) of the growth occurring in a given economic...
While there's a clear trend towards the widespread collection and storage of data, there is still uncertainty around the precise impact that Spatial Big Data has had within the retail sector. Spatial Big Data provides a wealth of interconnected spatio-temporal data, enhancing our understanding of consumer behavior with greater sophistication. As the industry increasingly moves towards...
For the majority, our experience of landscape is driven by the visual. While we often use visibility models built into geospatial software to capture viewsheds, these only represent portions of the landscape that can be seen and do not take into account other environmental and physiological aspects that limit what we can perceive. In 1975, landscape architect Tadahiko Higuchi offered a set of...
The genesis of “Powerful Geography”—a new concept in teaching and learning—began in the 1980s, during the building of the Applied Geography program in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Texas State University. This presentation discusses the evolution, relevance and importance of the concept of “Powerful Geography,” emanating from five distinct time periods: Period 1...
What does the future hold for science and the field of geography more specifically? And how might that future better connect with society? While the answers to these questions are quite complex, here, we will discuss how community geography partnerships can drive support for the next generation of science. Public and private partnerships in learning and research are increasingly important,...
Business geographers devote considerable effort to develop models of space to answer complex spatial questions. Unfortunately, little thought is given to the accuracy of the input data in most of these models. This paper examines the accuracy of tract level population and income data reported for the second quarter of 2020 from five spatial-demographic data vendors (Experian,...
This poster will focus on the development of an immersive virtual landscape platform for the exploration of local stories and knowledge documented as part of the Gullah Geechee Digital Project. This project, led by the Athenaeum Press at Coastal Carolina University, brings together South Carolina Gullah Geechee archival collections held by a number of national and regional partners for the...
What impact does the history of redlining have on forest composition in neighborhoods of cities in upstate New York State? The practice of redlining, or discriminatory lending practices, as evidenced by the 1930’s era Homeowners Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps is well known to have affected neighborhood property values. The web GIS tools from the Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal...
This presentation is part of my Geography and Science Education series: “Meteorology and Myth”. Red Sprites, Elves, and Pixies are types of Transient Luminous Events (TLEs). SPRITE stands for Stratospheric/Mesospheric Perturbations Resulting from Intense Thunderstorm Electrification. These ephemeral bursts of electricity in the upper atmosphere were previously thought of as being...
Toronto is Canada’s largest urban market. Located on the shoreline of Lake Ontario, the city has an extensive waterfront that has transformed from industrial to mixed-use over recent decades. Beyond converting the Toronto skyline, the redevelopment of Toronto’s Waterfront has resulted in a marked increase in employment and residential population. Various forms and functions of retail and...
Going from the basic understanding of the alignment needs for multi-county/regional planning and programming and the great number of possible alignments, "A Solution to the OMB recognized Geographic Need: 'a territorially exhaustive classification that covers all of the United States and Puerto Rico,' State Determined Sub-State Districts" will be presented. The fact that each State will have...
Identifying your career across the evolving professional landscape of options for the geographer can be both daunting and exciting. Geographers hold a rich set of transferable and specialized skills and knowledge that make us highly suited and adaptable in emerging and traditional work environments. Whether you are embarking on your career or are considering making a mid-career transition,...
The shopping centre industry is undergoing a rapid transformation, with many centres showing evidence of redevelopment to other land-use types. The types of redevelopment range from complete transformations to non-commercial use, complete redevelopment to mixed-use that includes new retail construction, to pad densification and anchor space redevelopment. These emerging redevelopment patterns...
In 2022, a citizen-sponsored initiative to substantially increase the City of Los Angeles property transfer tax for higher priced properties passed with 57% of the vote. The measure, which took effect on April 1, 2023, increased the property transfer tax from the long-standing rate of 0.45% of the property sale price to 4.0% for properties selling for between $5 million and $10 million. The...
For decades, geographers have acknowledged the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to inform geographical problem solving (Couclelis, 1986; Openshaw & Openshaw, 1997; Smith, 1984). More recent applications have demonstrated the ability of AI to assist in analyzing remote sensing, GIS, and other geographic data (Hu, 2018; Janowicz, et al., 2019). The advent of generative AI feels...
For 7 years, I have worked with our Binghamton University President, Harvey Stenger, and with our faculty and staff . Three cities in Broome County, N.Y. were selected as rust communities by NYS. Johnson City, one of three of i-Districts (Innovation Districts, particularly Main Street and certain adjacent streets), won funds from New York by Governor Cuomo -drawn from the $1 billion funds for...
This study examines the spatial distribution pattern and socioeconomic determinants of poverty in the United States between 1990 and 2020. Drawing on data from the decennial census and American Community Survey, we use the Local Indicators of Spatial Association (LISA) statistics to analyze the detailed changes in county level poverty rate over the last three decades and identify the...
The population of Chinese immigrants in the United States has undergone progressive growth in the past 50 years and has reached an epidemic number. As minorities, the Chinese immigrants move into receiving places to adapt and succeed in a new social structure while not losing their own identity. Previous studies highlight the role of local contexts that lead to an internal moving decision....
Twenty years ago, Chester Hartman and David Robinson (2003) urged scholars to focus their attentions on the “hidden housing problem” of eviction, at the time under-studied and attended to in comparison to homeowner issues. Since, social science research on eviction has exploded, with special issues being drafted entirely around the subject (Howell and Immergluck, 2021). National databases of...
This presentation showcases a successful collaboration between two professors in Urban Sustainability and Data Visualization. They designed a cross-course exercise centered on the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 11 - "Sustainable Cities and Communities." This innovative approach aimed to leverage the strengths of both disciplines for a comprehensive analysis of Pittsburgh's sustainable...
This presentation examines the variability in horizontal accuracy results in the photogrammetric processing and production of orthophotos from mosaiced drone-acquired aerial photographs, comparing imagery processed with ground control, without ground control, and onboard real-time kinematic (RTK) global navigation satellite system (GNSS) position derivation. The implementation of ground...
Neighborhoods in small and medium sized legacy cities often struggle to deal with a vast array of problems, including vacant land. Top-down approaches to managing vacant land, including aggressive enforcement campaigns against tax delinquent property owners, and more recently, the creation of land banks, have largely failed to help local communities. Vacant land management strategies...
The temporal dimension of geographic data is often ignored such that outcomes from analysis of geographic objects or events are often misleading. Researchers often apply spatial analysis to identify hot/cold spots of geographic events, such as crime or diseases occurrences. However, hot/cold spots do not remain constant over time. There may be hot/cold spots that are just emerging or slowly...
Vague places are places that lack a certain and unambiguous boundary to their spatial regions. People's perception of vague places' spatial extent is often subjective and is based on their experience and understanding of the geographic context. Such subjective understandings of places might cause ambiguities and inefficiencies when communicating and sharing geographic information, especially...
Invasive pests have long been recognized for the various threats they pose to natural ecosystems and the major economic damages they cause. If invasive pests left unchecked, it can result in a reduction in natural biodiversity, harm to specific populations, and a loss of overall ecosystem function from local to regional scales. Public awareness is the key for the prevention, early detection,...
This panel session investigates how the fields of economic geography, regional economics and regional science have evolved, changed, and intersected over time, and where synergies exist moving forward. More importantly, is the role “location” has taken in recent years, as regional economic data (sub state level) has become more readily available. We are also now seeing more powerful...
As digital technology produces a culture of accessibility to modern day maps and digital data, this this panel explores the state of Map Libraries in Public institutions, how they may be changing, how they should or could change and why they are still important. An open discussion is invited from the audience.
The Geography Division of the Census Bureau has developed an automated change detection process using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) to perform updates and maintenance to the Master Address File/Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (MAF/TIGER) System. Using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and Google Earth Engine, data scientists can apply large-scale...
Understanding the processes and mechanisms of the spatial spread of epidemics is essential for making reasonable judgments on its development trends and for adopting effective containment measures. Using multi-agent network technology and big data on population migration, this research constructed a city-based epidemic and mobility model (CEMM) to stimulate the spatiotemporal of COVID-19....
Geospatial data underpin all of the Census Bureau’s operations and analytical activities. The availability of new spatial and address source data has opened an opportunity for the U.S. Census
Bureau's Geography Division to apply new methods to update and maintain the Master Address File/Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (MAF/TIGER) System. National parcel files,...
When used as directed, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) lowers the risk of contracting the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Improving access to PrEP is a successful strategy for reducing HIV exposure among at-risk populations, including queer-identifying people, black and transgender women, and drug users. However, only a quarter of the 1.2 million people recommended for PrEP in Pennsylvania...
Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is a rising method that provides new topological and geometric tools that can detect non-linear features, such as loops, in multidimensional data. Our study aims to apply this novel method to find data patterns of COVID-19 spreads in selected thirteen representative countries on six continents of the world and compare results among them. Briefly, TDA methods are...
The use of grid cells for data presentation and analysis has increased worldwide in recent years and offers several advantages over traditional small geographic units, including comparability, temporal stability, and uniformity. In this presentation, I discuss the Census Bureau Geography Division's Grids Project, which is focused on research and development leading to adoption of one or more...
The Census Bureau’s Frames Program envisions enterprise-wide frames that are linkable in nature, agile in structure, accessible for production or research on a need-to-know basis and that adhere to best practices in terms of technology usage, data management, and methodology. The overarching goals of increasing utility and efficiency of data management for the variety of Census Bureau...
This study examines the mechanisms of spatial variation in intergenerational mobility (IM) and mental health in United States (US) counties. We explicitly emphasized the effects of four aspects of urban sprawl—density, mix of uses, centering, and accessibility, and natural environment and their interaction with socioeconomic factors. We found that while employment centering negatively affected...
In the past 5 years, Philadelphia has seen economic boom, COVID-19 and its concurrent economic bust, and the subsequent, if halting, recovery. Has the recovery been equitable? What economic sectors are still strong in this "new normal?" What issues in infrastructure building and transportation have been seen since the recovery began in 2021? And what does this mean for larger cities as they...
Planning requires the alignment of geographic data. GIS was a tool that should have helped in meeting this need, but that promise has not been met. The first Roundtable will look at the alignment problems which relate to the Red-Blue division in the US, essentially matters of scale.
Native Canadians are the fourth pan ethnic group (6.1%) in Canada. As a minority ethnic group, they exhibit unique population characteristics. Using the 2021Canadian Census Data, this paper explores the population characteristics of Native Canadians. Canadian Natives are broadly classified into three groups: Indians, Inuit, and Métis. Indians are believed to have entered North America through...
Every year, over a million Ohio drivers have their license suspended for reasons that have nothing to do with being a bad driver. Known as debt-related suspensions (DRS), they severely limit personal mobility, create a nearly inescapable cycle of debt, and are not spread evenly across communities. We address two fundamental research questions relating to DRS.
First, we analyze the...
Simple and powerful location analytics to identify, test, and map the significance of geographical disparity in urban hazards is developed. Specifically, at a spatial granular unit, a minority’s relative proportion to its general proportion across a region is defined as location amplitude index (LAI). A significant LAI indicates abnormal aggregation of a minority at a location, which...
Research increasingly links the HOLC neighborhood rankings of the 1930s (a process colloquially known as redlining) with continued inequality and uneven patterns of disinvestment that negatively impact communities of color in many U.S. cities. Less research has examined how the HOLC neighborhood rankings might affect neighborhood level variations in sustainability across individual cities....
In recent years, innovations in GIS technology and an increase in accessibility of those technologies has led to greater intersectionality between geography and other fields in science and the humanities. In an age where STEM fields increasingly pull funding from humanities programs in universities around the country, staying on top of modern methods and practices is critical for the survival...
The use of Social Index Matrixes to help predict market value of products such as green energy adoption and understanding the impact of regional adaptations of technology that may reduce the carbon footprint of the trucking industry are two examples of reserch areas where "unstructured data" holds the key to uncovering underlying driving forces that may lead to improvments in specific...
This I start 1 of a 3-hour workshop (offered in three parts) will introduce attendees to several unusual and unique geocoded historical data resources on land snails held at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and other museums across the United States. The workshop will be led by Tim Pearce (Assistant Curator of Mollusks at Carnegie Museum of Natural History), Susan Lucas (faculty member...
This part 2 of a 3-hour workshop (will introduce attendees to several unusual and unique geocoded historical data resources on land snails held at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and other museums across the United States. The workshop will be led by Tim Pearce (Assistant Curator of Mollusks at Carnegie Museum of Natural History), Susan Lucas (faculty member in the Urban Studies...
This 3-hour workshop will introduce attendees to several unusual and unique geocoded historical data resources on land snails held at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and other museums across the United States. The workshop will be led by Tim Pearce (Assistant Curator of Mollusks at Carnegie Museum of Natural History), Susan Lucas (faculty member in the Urban Studies program) and Josh...
This study explores the available data sets for city weather stations across inland Washington and Northern Idaho with the following questions in mind: 1) to what degree are Inland Northwest summers heating up? 2) are Inland Northwest summers drying out? 3) do temperature and moisture trends exhibit any spatial patterns? Statistical correlative tests were conducted for temperature variables...
TBD
