Contemporary Maps Research Articles

Processes and driving forces in changing cultural landscapes across Europe

ContextCultural landscapes evolve over time. However, the rate and direction of change might not be in line with societal needs and more information on the forces driving these changes are therefore needed.ObjectivesFilling the gap between single case studies and meta-analyses, we present a comparative study of landscape changes and their driving forces based in six regions across Europe conducted using a consistent method.MethodsA LULC analysis based on historical and contemporary maps from the nineteenth and twentieth century was combined with oral history interviews to learn more about perceived landscape changes, and remembered driving forces. Land cover and landscape changes were analysed regarding change, conversions and processes. For all case study areas, narratives on mapped land cover change, perceived landscape changes and driving forces were compiled.ResultsDespite a very high diversity in extent, direction and rates of change, a few dominant processes and widespread factors driving the changes could be identified in the six case study areas, i.e. access and infrastructure, political shifts, labor market, technological innovations, and for the more recent period climate change.ConclusionsGrasping peoples’ perception supplements the analyses of mapped land use and land cover changes and allows to address perceived landscape changes. The list of driving forces determined to be most relevant shows clear limits in predictability: Whereas changes triggered by infrastructural developments might be comparatively easy to model, political developments cannot be foreseen but might, nevertheless, leave major marks in the landscape.

Landslide susceptibility mapping using analytic hierarchy process and information value methods along a highway road section in Constantine, Algeria

This research work deals with the landslide susceptibility assessment using Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and information value (IV) methods along a highway road section in Constantine region, NE Algeria. The landslide inventory map which has a total of 29 single landslide locations was created based on historical information, aerial photo interpretation, remote sensing images, and extensive field surveys. The different landslide influencing geoenvironmental factors considered for this study are lithology, slope gradient, slope aspect, distance from faults, land use, distance from streams, and geotechnical parameters. A thematic layer map is generated for every geoenvironmental factor using Geographic Information System (GIS); the lithological units and the distance from faults maps were extracted from the geological database of the region. The slope gradient, slope aspect, and distance from streams were calculated from the Digital Elevation Model (DEM). Contemporary land use map was derived from satellite images and field study. Concerning the geotechnical parameters maps, they were determined making use of the geotechnical data from laboratory tests. The analysis of the relationships between the landslide-related factors and the landslide events was then carried out in GIS environment. The AUC plot showed that the susceptibility maps had a success rate of 77 and 66% for IV and AHP models, respectively. For that purpose, the IV model is better in predicting the occurrence of landslides than AHP one. Therefore, the information value method could be used as a landslide susceptibility mapping zonation method along other sections of the A1 highway.

ТРАНСФОРМАЦІЯ ВІЙСЬКОВОЇ ПОЛІТИКИ ТА ПОЛІТИКИ БЕЗПЕКИ В ЄВРОПІ НА ТЛІ «УКРАЇНСЬКОЇ КРИЗИ» 2014 Р.

The article touches upon the impact of the Russian aggression in Crimea and in Donbas region in 2014 on the European countries’, as well as the EU and NATO’s revision of their respective military and security policy. The role of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in strengthening the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s contemporary position in Europe has been unfolded. The divergence of the foreign and security policy intercourse of the European states caused by geography, history and military factors has been analyzed. Thus, the article reveals the Central and East Europe’s rising focus on the Russian aggression in Ukraine and the impact thereof on shaping the subregional security policy. On the other hand, the states of West Europe pay way less attention to considering the conflict as an element of their security strategy. However, a series of divergences does exist within the East and Central European political elite when it comes to determination of their respective countries’ situation in the contemporary security map of the continent within the framework of the so-called “Ukraine crisis”. For instance, one can distinguish Bulgaria and Czech Republic as black sheep of the post-socialistic Europe when it comes to the general security and political course of the East and Center when it comes to the Ukrainian issue. The article as well shapes the background and the essence of Germany’s leading role in the common foreign and security policy of the EU. It is concluded that NATO should concentrate on its traditional military activity aspect and thoughtfully cooperate with the EU to succeed in resolving issues of the European collective security.

A Geopolitical and Geovisualization Challenge: Increasing the Awareness of Global Environmental Change through Postage Stamp Issues

Global environmental change is one of the major distinguishing features associated with the contemporary world political map. It is significant not only because it illustrates the intersections between geopolitics and environmental change, but also because identifying the major environmental features and solving existing and future problems are primarily political in nature. Key features of global environmental change include global warming impacts on the poleward shifts in biodiversity and agricultural patterns, rising sea levels and human adjustments, changing coastal habitats, and promoting increased environmental awareness especially in urban clusters, where most people live. In the contemporary geopolitical and environmental world, visualization is a key feature not only used to inform both planetary inhabitants, environmental organizations and governments, but also serves as an effective policy, that is, to “show” or demonstrate effective changes and the need for action. States are key institutions in this thinking as they can both inform and address the impacts of global environmental change through various images: maps, earth-based photographs, satellite coverage, websites and educational venues including curriculum content and stamps. Visual geopolitics is already recognized as being an important source influencing public opinion, as evidenced in the attractive visible layouts, graphics, colors, often “seductive” designing of official websites. Postage stamps is an additional important and “informing” visible way that states inform both insiders and outsiders about how they “see” their place in the world. They also provide a view into how a state sees its “own” place in the world of environmental change and how it sees “the world beyond its own borders”. I introduce the concept of “visual geopolitics” and use recent postage stamp issues about global environmental change from a number of countries to illustrate how they are informing views of their own and the world about pressing environmental issues.

Assessing a Temporal Change Strategy for Sub-Pixel Land Cover Change Mapping from Multi-Scale Remote Sensing Imagery

Remotely sensed imagery is an attractive source of information for mapping and monitoring land cover. Fine spatial resolution imagery is typically acquired infrequently, but fine temporal resolution systems commonly provide coarse spatial resolution imagery. Sub-pixel land cover change mapping is a method that aims to use the advantages of these multiple spatial and temporal resolution sensing systems. This method produces fine spatial and temporal resolution land cover maps, by updating fine spatial resolution land cover maps using coarse spatial resolution remote sensing imagery. A critical issue for sub-pixel land cover change mapping is downscaling coarse spatial resolution fraction maps estimated by soft classification to a fine spatial resolution land cover map. The relationship between a historic fine spatial resolution map and a contemporary fine spatial resolution map to be estimated at a more recent date plays an important role in the downscaling procedure. A change strategy based on the assumption that the change for each land cover class in a coarse spatial resolution pixel is unidirectional was shown to be a promising means to describe this relationship. This paper aims to assess this change strategy by analyzing the factors that affect the accuracy of the change strategy, using six subsets of the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) of USA. The results show that the spatial resolution of coarse pixels, the time interval of the previous fine resolution land cover map and the current coarse spatial resolution images, and the thematic resolution of the used land cover class scheme have considerable influence on the accuracy of the change strategy. The accuracy of the change strategy decreases with the coarsening of spatial resolution, an increase of time interval, and an increase of thematic resolution. The results also indicate that, when the historic land cover map has a 30 m resolution, like the NLCD, the average accuracy of the change strategy is still as high as 92% when the coarse spatial resolution data used had a resolution of ~1000 m, confirming the effectiveness of the change strategy used in sub-pixel land cover change mapping for use with popular remote sensing systems.

Quantifying Surface Water Dynamics at 30 Meter Spatial Resolution in the North American High Northern Latitudes 1991–2011

The availability of a dense time series of satellite observations at moderate (30 m) spatial resolution is enabling unprecedented opportunities for understanding ecosystems around the world. A time series of data from Landsat was used to generate a series of three maps at decadal time step to show how surface water has changed from 1991 to 2011 in the high northern latitudes of North America. Previous attempts to characterize the change in surface water in this region have been limited in either spatial or temporal resolution, or both. This series of maps was generated for the NASA Arctic and Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE), which began in fall 2015. These maps show a “nominal” extent of surface water by using multiple observations to make a single map for each time step. This increases the confidence that any detected changes are related to climate or ecosystem changes not simply caused by short duration weather events such as flood or drought. The methods and comparison to other contemporary maps of the region are presented here. Initial verification results indicate 96% producer accuracy and 54% user accuracy when compared to 2-m resolution WorldView-2 data. All water bodies that were omitted were one Landsat pixel or smaller, hence below detection limits of the instrument.

Identification of extent, topographic characteristics and land abandonment process of vineyard terraces in the Tokaj-Hegyalja wine region between 1784 and 2010

ABSTRACTThe terracing of vineyards has been a centuries-old traditional land use type in the Tokaj-Hegyalja region (887 km2). However, most of them have since been abandoned and are occupied by dense vegetation. In this study, we mapped the spatial extent of vineyard terraces, based on aerial photos. We classified the terraced fields, considering their topographic characteristics as assessed by topographic factors (slope, exposure and elevation) and the process of abandonment between 1784 and 2010 using historical and contemporary land use maps. Based on the overall map of vineyard abandonment (scale: 1:120,000), the process of the abandonment of terraces can be divided into six consecutive time intervals (1784–1858, 1858–1884, 1884–1940, 1940–1969, 1969–1989 and 1989–2010). Vineyard terraces were found on 590 ha, which were concentrated on hillsides steeper than 17%, on southwestern, southern and southeastern exposures, and lying between 150 and 500 m a.s.l. In the period between 1884 and 1989, 77.8% of the terraces were abandoned, with a particularly intense period of abandonment between 1940 and 1969, which saw a 31.1% decrease in the extent of cultivated terraces.

Early aerial photography and contributions to Digital Earth - The case of the 1921 Halifax air survey mission in Canada

This paper presents research into the military and civilian history, technological development, and practical outcomes of aerial photography in Canada immediately after the First World War. The collections of early aerial photography in Canada and elsewhere, as well as the institutional and practical circumstances and arrangements of their creation, represent an important part of remote sensing heritage. It is argued that the digital rendition of the air photos and their representation in mosaic form can make valuable contributions to Digital Earth historic inquiries and mapping exercises today. An episode of one of the first urban surveys, carried out over Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1921, is highlighted and an air photo mosaic and interpretation key is presented. Using the almost one hundred year old air photos and a digitally re-assembled mosaic of a substantial portion of that collection as a guide, a variety of features unique to the post-war urban landscape of the Halifax peninsula are analysed, illustrated, and compared with records of past and current land use. The pan-chromatic air photo ensemble at a nominal scale of 1:5,000 is placed into the historical context with contemporary thematic maps, recent air photos, and modern satellite imagery. Further research opportunities and applications concerning early Canadian aerial photography are outlined.

The new release of the Italian contemporary stress map

The new release of the Italian contemporary stress map

Writing on Stone; Writing on Paper: Myth, History and Memory in NW Amazonia

This paper deals with the relation between different kinds of indigenous speech and music and various iconographic forms such as petroglyphs, house painting, basketry designs and also features of landscape that are understood in graphic terms. It examines how Northwest Amazonian myth-history is structured and memorized, how it can appear in both verbal and non-verbal forms, and how contemporary books, maps and diagrams produced by indigenous organizations as part of programmes of research and education show continuity with these traditional forms. Rather than making firm distinctions between peoples with and without writing, I argue that it is more profitable to focus on how various mnemonic systems—“writing”—work in tandem with different narrative forms—“myth”. When “writing” and “myth” are understood in indigenous terms, contemporary written documents appear in a new light.

Diagnostic and model dependent uncertainty of simulated Tibetan permafrost area

Abstract. We perform a land-surface model intercomparison to investigate how the simulation of permafrost area on the Tibetan Plateau (TP) varies among six modern stand-alone land-surface models (CLM4.5, CoLM, ISBA, JULES, LPJ-GUESS, UVic). We also examine the variability in simulated permafrost area and distribution introduced by five different methods of diagnosing permafrost (from modeled monthly ground temperature, mean annual ground and air temperatures, air and surface frost indexes). There is good agreement (99 to 135 × 104 km2) between the two diagnostic methods based on air temperature which are also consistent with the observation-based estimate of actual permafrost area (101 × 104 km2). However the uncertainty (1 to 128 × 104 km2) using the three methods that require simulation of ground temperature is much greater. Moreover simulated permafrost distribution on the TP is generally only fair to poor for these three methods (diagnosis of permafrost from monthly, and mean annual ground temperature, and surface frost index), while permafrost distribution using air-temperature-based methods is generally good. Model evaluation at field sites highlights specific problems in process simulations likely related to soil texture specification, vegetation types and snow cover. Models are particularly poor at simulating permafrost distribution using the definition that soil temperature remains at or below 0 °C for 24 consecutive months, which requires reliable simulation of both mean annual ground temperatures and seasonal cycle, and hence is relatively demanding. Although models can produce better permafrost maps using mean annual ground temperature and surface frost index, analysis of simulated soil temperature profiles reveals substantial biases. The current generation of land-surface models need to reduce biases in simulated soil temperature profiles before reliable contemporary permafrost maps and predictions of changes in future permafrost distribution can be made for the Tibetan Plateau.

Madagascar’s Mangroves: Quantifying Nation-Wide and Ecosystem Specific Dynamics, and Detailed Contemporary Mapping of Distinct Ecosystems

Mangrove ecosystems help mitigate climate change, are highly biodiverse, and provide critical goods and services to coastal communities. Despite their importance, anthropogenic activities are rapidly degrading and deforesting mangroves world-wide. Madagascar contains 2% of the world’s mangroves, many of which have undergone or are starting to exhibit signs of widespread degradation and deforestation. Remotely sensed data can be used to quantify mangrove loss and characterize remaining distributions, providing detailed, accurate, timely and updateable information. We use USGS maps produced from Landsat data to calculate nation-wide dynamics for Madagascar’s mangroves from 1990 to 2010, and examine change more closely by partitioning the national distribution in to primary (i.e., >1000 ha) ecosystems; with focus on four Areas of Interest (AOIs): Ambaro-Ambanja Bays (AAB), Mahajamba Bay (MHJ), Tsiribihina Manombolo Delta (TMD) and Bay des Assassins (BdA). Results indicate a nation–wide net-loss of 21% (i.e., 57,359 ha) from 1990 to 2010, with dynamics varying considerably among primary mangrove ecosystems. Given the limitations of national-level maps for certain localized applications (e.g., carbon stock inventories), building on two previous studies for AAB and MHJ, we employ Landsat data to produce detailed, contemporary mangrove maps for TMD and BdA. These contemporary, AOI-specific maps provide improved detail and accuracy over the USGS national-level maps, and are being applied to conservation and restoration initiatives through the Blue Ventures’ Blue Forests programme and WWF Madagascar West Indian Ocean Programme Office’s work in the region.

Hydronimy Pasma Brzanki na Pogórzu Ciężkowickim

The Brzanka Mountain Range in the Ciezkowickie Foothills has a dense river network. Unfortunately the contemporary maps contain only the names of some main rivers of the Brzanka Mountain Range. Local communities use the same set of names of rivers as cartographers, while studies in the historical geography of the Brzanka Mountain Range reveal a wealth of local hydronyms that have seemingly been forgotten. The article attempts both to reconstruct a set of hydronyms of the Brzanka Mountain Range and to explain their etymology. It shows that hydronyms change over time and that studies on local hydronyms can help restore the collection of the names of rivers in the Brzanka Mountain Range and provide interesting information related to the past of this region. Moreover, they reveal contemporary unknown facts related to the natural environment and settlement processes in the Middle Ages. A visual summary of the article is a map showing the Brzanka Mountain Range with its river network and associated hydronyms.

New Ages, New Opinions: Shaftesbury in His World and Today ed. by Patrick Müller

Reviewed by: New Ages, New Opinions: Shaftesbury in His World and Today ed. by Patrick Müller Clive Probyn New Ages, New Opinions: Shaftesbury in His World and Today, ed. Patrick Müller. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2014. Pp. 327. $78.95. There are eighteen essays in this handsome, scrupulously edited, and well-produced collection, not counting a brief prefatory address from Nicholas Ashley-Cooper, the twelfth Earl of Shaftesbury. All originate from a three-day conference on the third Earl held in Nuremberg in August/September 2012, the purpose of which was to report on the latest research into the Earl’s life, work, and intellectual context. The underlying aim of both the conference and the collection of published papers was to present a broad spectrum of interpretation reflecting the European cosmopolitanism of their subject. Established [End Page 175] scholarship includes that of the editor, whose premise is that “Reading Shaftesbury is difficult” (no argument there, one might suggest), Michael B. Gill (on top form with an essay on Politeness, Honesty, and Virtue, with a glance at Diogenes and the ethics of public copulation), Lawrence E. Klein (with a stately reading of Shaftesbury’s readers in the eighteenth century), and Isabella Woldt, whose notable recruitment of neuroscience in a discussion of Shaftesbury’s concept of Freedom and “Compatibilism” is one of several novel approaches in the collection. A smaller group of essays takes up Shaftesbury’s views and capacity as a theoretical and practical gardener, and the standout contribution here is Suzannah Fleming’s study of the estates at St. Giles and Little Chelsea, basing her aesthetic arguments firmly on contemporary estate maps and household accounts. Sir William Temple’s interest in sharawadgi and Shaftesbury’s interest in the aesthetics of irregularity bring the East to the West in Yu Liu’s graceful, Confucian essay on the latter’s “Passion for Wild Nature”; in China “gardeners never lined things up into any geometrical shape or symmetrical order, but not because they were lazy or unskilled (as some Jesuit missionaries to China once thought).” Shaftesbury admired the skilled artisan without feeling that he should become one. His horticultural theorizing (and perhaps also his asthma) excluded him from picking up a spade himself. Similarly, his deep fascination for ideas of freedom—for those rich, educated, and socially responsible enough to understand it and be trusted with its exploration—sits perfectly alongside the patrician’s iron control over the vulgar business of printing and publishing his own work. James Pratt’s study of Shaftesbury’s collaboration with Simon Gribelin, the engraver and codesigner of the plates in Characteristicks (1714/15), not only raises the artistic profile of a man to whom Shaftesbury condescended as a mere “engine” or “instrument” of his own higher purposes but also tells us that Pope’s November 2, 1716, instructions to Gribelin relate not, as George Sherburn suggested, to the second edition of Dryden’s translation of du Fresnoy’s Art of Painting but to Pope’s own Works, published on June 3, 1717. It is good to see a skilled artisan emerging from the shadows. The central enigma for the modern reader of Shaftesbury is his challenging, sometimes irritating, often baffling combination of the formal procedures of philosophy and the “freedoms” of oblique literary suggestion, putting stress on traditional relationships between content and style, statement and tone, logic and allusiveness. For readers chiefly interested in Shaftesbury’s philosophical regimen, Andrea Gatti tells us to think of Shaftesbury as a pedagogue at odds with the temper of the age. She argues that Shaftesbury’s Neoplatonism is “often a mere mask meant to cover his Stoic convictions,” a device to sweeten the pill of his message about Stoic rigor and discipline at a time when post-Restoration England was in no mood for self-denial. Laurent Jaffro similarly indicates how and why Shaftesbury uses stories, fables, and tales in The Characteristicks and Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author: read them not as literary asides but as essential, enabling procedures that liberate thinking from traditional formal method (on the will, self-control, necessity, and freedom). But there is again a caveat. In a private letter to one of...

IMPROVING THE FOREIGN POLICY OF RUSSIA ON THE BASIS OF THE GRAVITY MODELING (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE BRICS)

The article investigates the features of construction of gravity models, the results of the use of which will allow to identify eff ective ways of Russian foreign policy improvements. Purpose of the article: multigravitatsion development model of Russia's foreign trade, which will identify forward the development of export-import relations in the framework of inter-regional trade area of the Russian Federation, including integration associations such as the EU, BRICS, CIS. Methodology: methodological basis of the study make up scientific methods of cognition, namely, methods of theoretical generalization and comparison; method of integrated and structural analysis. Results: During the studied analyzed Russia's foreign trade turnover, the results of which revealed that for the country's economic development is important as a variety of trade fl ows and capital fl ows, which in turn updates the problem of formation and development of the national foreign trade potential, finding the optimal proportion of commodity structure diversification and the introduction of eff ective mechanisms of regulation of export-import operations. The solution of the problem determined the conduct of the study articles Russian contemporary maps of foreign cooperation in the conditions of existing sanctions and embargoes, as well as the identification of targeted country markets for Russia's non-oil exports with a separate allocation problem area that emerged as a result of external challenges of political and economic nature faced by Russia because of the military confl ict in Ukraine. Special attention is paid to the distribution of Russian imports by partner countries. Significance: the example of EU integration associations of the CIS and the BRICS, which make up multiregional commercial space of Russia, multigravitatsionnaya model is constructed in order to assess the impact of Russia's cooperation with the EU member countries, CIS countries and the BRICS, as well as to forecast and analyze trade fl ows as the country as a whole, and in the context of export and import.

Crossing Boundaries: Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in a Transnational World ed. by Brian D. Behnken, Simon Wendt, and: At the Border of Empires: The Tohono O’odham, Gender, and Assimilation, 1880–1934 by Andrae M. Marak, Laura Tuennerman

Reviewed by: Crossing Boundaries: Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in a Transnational World ed. by Brian D. Behnken, Simon Wendt, and: At the Border of Empires: The Tohono O’odham, Gender, and Assimilation, 1880–1934 by Andrae M. Marak, Laura Tuennerman Benjamin H. Johnson Crossing Boundaries: Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in a Transnational World. Edited by Brian D. Behnken and Simon Wendt. New York: Lexington Books, 2013. 330pp. $85 (cloth). At the Border of Empires: The Tohono O’odham, Gender, and Assimilation, 1880–1934. By Andrae M. Marak and Laura Tuennerman. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013. 232pp. $55 (cloth). Contemporary maps divide the world into territories controlled by discrete nation-states, the very entities that have structured the modern discipline of history. Yet social and political reality is also characterized by transnational flows of people, goods, and ideas. Paradoxically, these exchanges—the raison d’être of the burgeoning field of transnational history—include nationalist ideas and mobilizations. “Transnationalized concepts of national belonging” are the focus of the wide-ranging and provocative anthology Crossing Boundaries. Its editors endeavor to show how such concepts have been “forced and adopted, borrowed and compelled, adapted and coopted, and, ultimately how they can be accepted and rejected by local people” (p. 2). The volume consists of fourteen brief essays, of about twenty pages each, which range over the twentieth century. Half of the essays examine transnational dynamics in the Americas; four are set primarily in Asia; and the rest describe transnational relationships rooted primarily in Africa and Europe. The center of gravity lies in the study of political movements, but transnational cultural history is a strong secondary theme, particularly in Brian Behnken’s discussion of music and hair-style in his essay on connections between the U.S. Chicano movement and Mexican student unrest and in Pablo Dominguez Andersen’s examination of Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong and her fame in Weimar Germany. The last essay, Kevin Amidon’s superb and wonderfully theorized “Beyond the Straight State: On the Borderlands of Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Nation in the United States and Europe,” is more comparative than explicitly transnational. The individual essays have their particular ambitions and historiographic interventions, but the editors conclude that the volume’s most fundamental revelation is that “transnational and transcultural processes impeded political elites’ efforts to create ethnically and racially homogenous national communities, while they also produced a hybrid sense of national belonging that frequently transcended traditional forms of ethnic nationalism as well as national boundaries” (p. 6). This revelation is pursued in a particularly compelling fashion in several of the essays. [End Page 414] Charles Reed makes a convincing case for the importance of “imperial citizenship,” which allowed early twentieth-century South African activists to struggle for dignity and autonomy within the British Empire and to thereby escape the distinctions that later scholars often drew between civic and ethnic nationalisms. His subjects, Reed observes, “imagined themselves as British citizen-subjects (civic) and ‘natives’ (ethnic) without contradiction and without such distinctions in mind” (p. 104). Similarly, Charlton Yingling’s recreation of Dominican exile networks from the 1930s to 1950s traces the joining of notions of pan– Latin Americanism with Dominican nationalism, concluding with a forceful articulation of the importance of exile “as a decisive site of nation-building” (p. 54). Karen Morris points to debates over Ivoirité in the Cote d’Ivoire in recent decades as illustrative of the wider tensions “inherent in equations of post–World War II national citizenship with ancestry-based pre-colonial territoriality” in postcolonial Africa and beyond (p. 173). The similarities in themes link together essays that are diverse in empirical terms. Examining different national projects on five continents over the course of a century necessarily draws on an enormous range of historical developments and historiographies. The fact that the essays speak so well to one another reflects a strong editorial hand and the sweeping importance of the questions about ethnicity, race, and nationalism that lie at the heart of the volume. The anthology’s success in terms of thematic unity, however, raises questions that it does not answer or even substantially address. Taken as a whole, Crossing Boundaries offers very little sense...

Spatial Analyses in the Research of Land Cover Changes (A Case Study)

Abstract Increasing human activity significantly influences the geographic environment. The effects of excessive anthropogenic pressure are manifested by changes in land cover and in landscape structure, and land cover changes can particularly well observed in river valleys. In this study we aimed to determine the transformations of land use in 13.9 sq km of the Silesian Voivodeship in southern Poland, including parts of the city of Ruda Slaska and Mikolow County by analyzing changes in land cover that occurred from 1827-2012 and archival and contemporary topographic maps, and aerial photos were used as primary source materials. All materials were prepared with the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), using spatial analyses, such as kernel density and point density in order to define land cover structure changes. Results show the development of residential areas and the fragmentation of large structures that have occurred over the time period.

Integrating vector control across diseases.

BackgroundVector-borne diseases cause a significant proportion of the overall burden of disease across the globe, accounting for over 10 % of the burden of infectious diseases. Despite the availability of effective interventions for many of these diseases, a lack of resources prevents their effective control. Many existing vector control interventions are known to be effective against multiple diseases, so combining vector control programmes to simultaneously tackle several diseases could offer more cost-effective and therefore sustainable disease reductions.DiscussionThe highly successful cross-disease integration of vaccine and mass drug administration programmes in low-resource settings acts a precedent for cross-disease vector control. Whilst deliberate implementation of vector control programmes across multiple diseases has yet to be trialled on a large scale, a number of examples of ‘accidental’ cross-disease vector control suggest the potential of such an approach. Combining contemporary high-resolution global maps of the major vector-borne pathogens enables us to quantify overlap in their distributions and to estimate the populations jointly at risk of multiple diseases. Such an analysis shows that over 80 % of the global population live in regions of the world at risk from one vector-borne disease, and more than half the world’s population live in areas where at least two different vector-borne diseases pose a threat to health. Combining information on co-endemicity with an assessment of the overlap of vector control methods effective against these diseases allows us to highlight opportunities for such integration.SummaryMalaria, leishmaniasis, lymphatic filariasis, and dengue are prime candidates for combined vector control. All four of these diseases overlap considerably in their distributions and there is a growing body of evidence for the effectiveness of insecticide-treated nets, screens, and curtains for controlling all of their vectors. The real-world effectiveness of cross-disease vector control programmes can only be evaluated by large-scale trials, but there is clear evidence of the potential of such an approach to enable greater overall health benefit using the limited funds available.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12916-015-0491-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Fighting the Taboo Cycle: Google Map Protests and Buraku Human Rights Activism in Historical Perspective

This article explores the historical significance of an incident reported in the international media in 2009 when Burakumin groups raised concerns about privacy and possible human rights abuses in relation to a new map service offered by Google. Reportage at the time indicated that historical maps containing references to outcaste settlements could be laid over contemporary maps to disclose the exact location of contemporary Buraku districts. A thorough examination of the incident, however, reveals a more complicated story. On the one hand the incident is clearly an example of ‘human rights activism’, an ongoing political strategy within the Buraku liberation movement to achieve permanent legal recognition of their status in the face of a state that has long resisted such demands. At the same time, however, the main features of this incident – silence, revelation, protest, and erasure – are also reoccurring themes within modern Buraku history that comprise what is described in the article as a taboo cycle. In their struggles for liberation, Burakumin have developed numerous strategies to combat the cycle as well as use it to their advantage.

Landscape persistence and stakeholder perspectives: The case of Romania's Carpathians

The traditional use of land for food, fuel and wood created cultural landscapes, which are threatened across Europe. The factors which contributed to their endangerment need to be identified to achieve effective preservation of such landscapes. The aim of our study was to identify landscapes with historical persistence in a GIS-based comparative analysis of historical and contemporary maps and the most prominent causes of the past landscape changes, based on stakeholders' perspective. We considered a case study in Romania's Carpathians. Three major land cover types were extracted from maps dating from 1912, 1980 and 2009: built-up, pastures and forests. The historical persistence of all land cover types was poor (<20%) and profound changes were quantitatively confirmed. Large, compact patches of unchanged forests were located in the neighbourhood of a national park. The persistent pastures were situated close to human settlements, and their preservation can be related to local traditional agro-silvo-pastoral management. Although the built-up area has increased over time, the corresponding surfaces are small and consist of scattered patches located around historical monuments. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to investigate stakeholders' perspective. Using cluster analysis five prominent causes of past landscape changes are identified: 'increasing tourism', 'land tenure and social changes', 'land-use intensification', 'post-communist transition', and 'foreign investments'. We join the results of the GIS analysis with those from stakeholders' perspective to gain more insights into the landscape changes. This research offers important information that could be used for the further planning of these valuable cultural landscapes in order to avoid potential conflicts and degradation.