Geographical Challenges Research Articles

Comparing Household Listing Techniques in a Rural Midwestern Vanguard Center of the National Children's Study

The National Children's Study (NCS) is a longitudinal study that will examine the influence of environmental and social factors on the health and development of 100,000 children, following them from before birth until age 21. Proposed participant recruitment methods call for locating and listing all dwelling units (DUs) located within randomly selected segments within the 105 NCS sites. One of seven Vanguard Centers of the NCS includes four rural counties that span approximately 2,500 square miles. The size of this sampling area presents unique geographic challenges. In order to determine the most efficient method for listing DUs within this large area, a study was undertaken to investigate the differences in the percent of DUs identified and the cost of four different approaches. It compared the on-site listing method of physically identifying each DU with three other methods: plat maps, postal listings, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)/satellite imagery techniques. The on-site method had the strongest kappa (.85) in terms of identifying true DUs. There was a moderate agreement (.59) with the plat map method, fair agreement (.34) with the postal method, and only a slight agreement (.14) with the GIS/satellite imagery method. The plat map, postal listing, and GIS/satellite methods were less time-consuming than the on-site method.

National Red Lists: the largest global market for IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria

ESR Endangered Species Research Contact the journal Facebook Twitter RSS Mailing List Subscribe to our mailing list via Mailchimp HomeLatest VolumeAbout the JournalEditorsSpecials ESR 6:193-198 (2008) - DOI: https://doi.org/10.3354/esr00129 National Red Lists: the largest global market for IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria Jon Paul Rodríguez1,2,* 1Centro de Ecología, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas, Apdo. 20632, Caracas 1020-A,Venezuela 2Provita, Apdo. 47552, Caracas 1041-A, Venezuela *Email: jonpaul@ivic.ve ABSTRACT: The 2 major challenges currently confronting the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) with regard to the ‘red listing’ process are the taxonomic, and the geographic growth of the data base. Taxonomic growth refers to the objective of gradually assessing the risk of extinction of all the world’s species and periodically repeating such assessments. Geographic growth refers to the increasing number of people around the world interested in performing extinction risk assessments for various groups of organisms in their region or country. The taxonomic challenge, although a large and demanding task, can be addressed by expanding and strengthening the networks of experts organized within the IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC), which represents a significant scaling-up of a well-developed, known model. However, no current structure within the IUCN has the mandate to address the geographic challenge; this requires the creation of new structures or mechanisms. At least 5 key activities must be implemented to effectively integrate the diffuse network of national assessors into the global red listing process: (1) large-scale publicizing of the Guidelines for Application of IUCN Red List Criteria at Regional Levels, and encouraging the work of national assessors; (2) establishing the IUCN Species Programme as the primary trainer and certifier of multipliers; (3) delegating the majority of training to national institutions; (4) creating a virtual data clearing house for national red lists, seamlessly linked to the global list; and (5) consolidating the IUCN Species Programme as the primary endorser of national red list assessments. Hundreds of regional and national red lists will probably be produced in the next decade using the IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria, particularly because they are now recognized by international agreements such as the 2010 biodiversity target of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nation’s General Assembly Millennium Development Goals. By catalyzing this process, the IUCN would expand the information on the world’s threatened species, while strengthening local scientific capacity for generating and using these data to support conservation action. KEY WORDS: Assessment of extinction risk · Conservation priorities · IUCN Red List · National red lists · Threatened species Full text in pdf format PreviousCite this article as: Rodríguez JP (2008) National Red Lists: the largest global market for IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria. Endang Species Res 6:193-198. https://doi.org/10.3354/esr00129 Export citation RSS - Facebook - Tweet - linkedIn Cited by Published in ESR Vol. 6, No. 2. Online publication date: December 30, 2008 Print ISSN: 1863-5407; Online ISSN: 1613-4796 Copyright © 2008 Inter-Research.

Relations of Care: A Framework for Placing Women and Health in Rural Communities

Living rurally creates geographic and socio-economic challenges for women, which negatively affect their health and well-being. Gender ideologies, expectations and practices that assign domestic and familial unpaid care work as “women’s work” serve also to disadvantage women. How these ideological and material forces together affect health are difficult to assess with a health determinants model. Drawing from relational theories of place and gender, articulated in geographic and feminist literature, we offer a nuanced relational framework that builds on insights of health determinants explanations but situates women as recipients and providers of care within a “relations of care” context. We discuss how this framework can contribute to a better understanding of rural women’s health and well-being. We focus on the context of neo-liberalism and the subsequent restructuring of rural Canadian society but note how our framework is applicable to other high-income nations, such as Finland, Iceland and Norway. We argue that it is critical to consider how contemporary political and ideological changes interact with place and gender relations to affect conditions of dignity for women as recipients and providers of care in rural places. We conclude with suggestions for policy directions.

On the Normality of Stock Return Distributions: Latin American Markets, 2000-2007

An increasing amount of empirical research conducted at different times and in different geographical settings challenges the traditional assumption of the normal distribution of stock returns evident in the main body of financial theory. This article involved testing the normality assumption for the behavior of market returns in the main Latin American stock markets. Normality tests were applied to daily market returns for the period 2000 to 2007 for the main security markets of Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela. The normality hypothesis is rejected for all these markets. The article also involved testing the normality assumption for market returns over longer periods, considering specifically blocks of 5, 20, 60, and 120 consecutive market days between 2000 and 2007. In general, the behavior of the returns approaches a normal distribution as the length of time increases.

Recent feminist research in US geography

Feminist research in the US is vibrant, diverse, and innovative. I explore practical ways US-based feminists sustain themselves, and introduce research in political geography and migration studies. Recent work in these areas expands dialogue between political and feminist geographers, and sharpens the political edge of a larger collective feminist project aligned with activists and scholars worldwide. These works explicitly consider power while pursuing feminist action. In migration studies, the impact of feminist ideas is evident in the connections among migration, gender, and globalization. I argue that the greatest challenge for US-based feminist geographers is to maintain a political edge. To do so, we must attend to the global scope of the discipline ; encourage multi-sited, multi-scalar collaborative research ; nurture alliances with a broad spectrum of activists including anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, labor, sexuality, and environmental activists ; and creatively imagine political projects from various theoretical angles. In short, while our feminist theorizing and feminist actions may be heterogeneous, we must also seek – and constantly refine – a collective feminist project.

Landscape typology in Czechia and abroad: State of the art, methods and theoretical basis

The main goal of this paper is to introduce the importance of landscape typology in present times when many landscapes are exposed to dynamic human impacts such as land use changes, urbanization, intensive agriculture, forestry or industrialization. Different approaches to landscape typology in Czechia and other European countries as well as relations of landscape typology to landscape character assessment and the European Landscape Convention are discussed. A requirement of a new exact and applicable landscape typology is a great challenge for Czech geographers.

The Getty Villa

The Getty is a lively history of the Getty Museum, its renowned antiquities collections, and its growth from a small museum in a ranch house in Malibu to its first home in a building designed to replicate what we know of the Villa dei Papiri, an ancient Roman villa partially uncovered in Herculaneum. Most engagingly, this book records the ten-year adventure in reconfiguring a beautiful, but topographically challenging, site into one that could continue to accommodate the splendid Museum building and also provide for an outdoor theatre, laboratories for conservation work and research, offices for staff and visiting scholars, and an education program for adults and children. This is a story of architectural imagination, geographical challenges, and legal hurdles, all of which ultimately have resulted in a truly unique and beautiful site. And while this story may be of only one project in one place, to anyone interested in architecture and in the difficulties posed by building on a grand scale in the twenty-first century, the story told by True and Silvetti is an enlightening and rewarding one - and it is illustrated with 250 reproductions of works of art, the old and the new Getty Museum, site plans, and architectural elevations.

British Imperial Transport Management

This article traces the development of The Gold Coast Sekondi–Kumase Railway during its first eight years, from 1903-1911. The author, in order to present a more balanced assessment, focuses on statistical details concerning the railway. Specifically examined are the railway's design and construction, personnel and administration, finance and accounting procedures, capital investments and costs associated with servicing its debt. Because of the geographical and logistical challenges of building a railway in a tropics-based agricultural environment, the author gives particular emphasis to the managerial and accounting techniques available at the time. From an analysis of financial records, the author found that the Sekondi–Tarkwa–Obuasi–Kumase line showed improvements in its day-to-day operations during its first decade, despite the railway's numerous flaws and problems. The railway's receipts and finances exhibited a certain level of efficiency in its operations that resulted in substantial cost savings over time. The author shows that, in many respects, the railway's financial results were not so unlike those of its railway contemporaries in more industrialized parts of the world.

Exploring ‘Other’ childhoods through quantitative secondary analyses of large scale surveys: Opportunities and challenges for children's geographers

This paper considers the potential contribution of secondary quantitative analyses of large scale surveys to the investigation of ‘other’ childhoods. Exploring other childhoods involves investigating the experience of young people who are unequally positioned in relation to multiple, embodied, identity locations, such as (dis)ability, ‘class’, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race. Despite some possible advantages of utilising extensive databases, the paper outlines a number of methodological problems with existing surveys which tend to reinforce adultist and broader hierarchical social relations. It is contended that scholars of children's geographies could overcome some of these problematic aspects of secondary data sources by endeavouring to transform the research relations of large scale surveys. Such endeavours would present new theoretical, ethical and methodological complexities, which are briefly considered.

Regional Analysis Using Census Bureau Microdata at the Center for Economic Studies

Regional science research requires data sets with detailed geography. Dissemination of data sets with sufficient geographic specificity challenges statistical agencies in terms of protecting respondent privacy. The U.S. Census Bureau first released decennial census microdata in the 1960s. Today, public versions of largely demographic surveys enjoy widespread use but limit the geographic detail of individual observations. With business data, firm and establishment distributions are highly skewed, preventing release of public use microdata versions. To support its own statistical programs by giving external researchers access to internal versions of public use data files, the Census Bureau created the Center for Economic Studies (CES) and a national network of Research Data Centers (RDCs). This model permits researchers access to confidential economic and demographic data under secure, controlled conditions. This article describes the CES-RDC enterprise, provides descriptions of available data sets and their spatial identifiers, and outlines issues and challenges facing the RDC network.

Multidimensional visualisation of degrees of relevance of geographic data

The ever‐increasing number of spatial data sets accessible through spatial data clearinghouses continues to make geographic information retrieval and spatial data discovery major challenges. Such challenges have been addressed in the discipline of Information Retrieval through ranking of data according to inferred degrees of relevance. Spatial data, however, present an additional challenge as they are characteristically made up of geometry, attribute and, optionally, temporal components. As these components are mutually independent of one another, this paper suggests that they be ranked independently of one another. The representation of the results of the independent ranking of these three components of spatial data suggests that representation of the results of the ranking process requires an alternative approach to currently used textual ranked lists: visualisation of relevance in a three‐dimensional visualisation environment. To illustrate the possible application of such an approach, a prototype browser is presented.

Greece’s New Geopolitical Environment

The geopolitical landscape of Greece has changed considerably in the past few years given not only the various geographical challenges but the emergence of a number of ‘functional’ ones as well. According to the author, Greece’s geopolitical landscape is now much wider as a result of Greece’s continued Europeanisation and the effect of globalisation. These include questions of equity and reform, concerns over terrorism and ‘homeland defence’ as well as the need for multilateral responses to global challenges. Although the verdict is still out as to whether Greece can adapt to its changing environment, the author speculates on some ‘wild cards’ that could affect the country’s geopolitical scene profoundly.

A wave of destruction and the waves of relief: issues, challenges and strategies

PurposeTo highlight the failure of the tsunami early warning system and the challenges of successfully responding to, and managing a transnational catastrophe of this nature. The paper also highlights unique challenges in the management of this catastrophe and suggests potential strategies for good disaster response and management in this response and beyond.Design/methodology/approachPrimary data collection was by telephone interviews with experts in the South and South‐East Asian region, supplemented by a comprehensive literature review of scholarly journals, reports from relief agencies and United Nations situation reports and bulletins amongst others. The scope of the paper is limited to the issue of a warning not been passed onto appropriate authorities in the region, the unique challenges of the relief response and the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the affected communities.FindingsFrom the study, there is a need for further investigation into the catastrophic warning failure; as reasons proffered by the early warning officials for their inability to pass on a warning to authorities in the affected area appear weak at this stage. The study also found unique geographical, political, economic and social challenges facing the international relief and reconstruction effort. Specifically some of the challenges include the management of the media and information, logistics and coordination, needs and damage assessment, donations and safety and security issues amongst others. In summary, the author found that there is also a need for foreign assistance agencies to be seen to be fair, to build trust and ownership of relief and reconstruction efforts amongst the local populace, as well as use local people as much as possible.Research limitations/implicationsThe study was conducted only 21 days (three weeks) after the tsunami catastrophe of 26 December 2004, hence it is a snapshot of events in the days immediately after the catastrophe. The relief action is an on‐going event and there may be changes as new information emerges from the field.Practical implicationsA world wide network of integrated submarine earthquake and tsunami monitoring and early warning system should be set up. Critical warning information in any potential disaster should be shared as inclusively as possible. Relief workers must be seen to be politically and religiously neutral, especially in the civil conflicts of Banda Aceh Indonesia. Finally relief and aid should be given on the basis of sound humanitarian principles such as need, not just on wider economic criteria.Originality/valueThe study highlights specific potential challenges which relief organisations must deal with in responding effectively to the disaster, and in assisting to reconstruct the region. The paper proffers specific strategies for effective management of the international assistance effort. Finally, the study adds to the literature on developing countries and is valuable for governments, emergency and relief workers, policy makers in both developed and developing countries.

Mammal Community Dynamics: Management and Conservation in the Coniferous Forests of Western North America

C. J. Zabel, R. G. Anthony. 2003. Mammal Community Dynamics: Management and Conservation in the Coniferous Forests of Western North America. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, xxi + 709 pp. ISBN 0-521-00865-4, price (paper), $60.00. This interesting and valuable book evolved from a day-long symposium at the Annual Meeting of The Wildlife Society in 2000. The 42 authors are among the “who's who” in ecological work—both pure and applied—on mammals of western North American forests and woodlands; the 58 peer reviewers are an equally distinguished group. A brief foreword by wildlife biologist Jack Ward Thomas, former Chief of the United States Forest Service, argues that “… it is essential that [new knowledge on ecosystems] be packaged in technically appropriate and user-friendly ways so that it may be brought to bear on management and target new research efforts” (p. xvii). That sets a high standard. The stated geographical range of the book is from the Eastem Slope of the Rockies to the Pacific, and from the southwestem United States to northem Canada and Alaska. Miles Hemstrom's excellent review of Forests and Woodlands of Western North America is one of the chapters that meets this geographical challenge, but others do not. (A marginal heading seems to be missing on p. 24, so the account of ponderosa pine woodlands and forests is disguised within the account of pinon-juniper woodlands.) The book is divided into 3 parts. Management and Conservation Issues for Various Taxa (9 chapters). Community and Ecosystem Relations (6 chapters), and Conservation Issues and Strategies (5 chapters). The first chapter ( Introduction and Historical Perspective , by the editors plus J. Estes) raises some interesting questions that generally are ignored elsewhere in the book. For example, the Late Pleistocene-Holocene demise of two-thirds of the native mammalian megafauna means that the contemporary biota is very young and has developed in the presence of humans and …

Networking issues in wireless sensor networks

The emergence of sensor networks as one of the dominant technology trends in the coming decades (Technol. Rev. (February 2003)) has posed numerous unique challenges to researchers. These networks are likely to be composed of hundreds, and potentially thousands of tiny sensor nodes, functioning autonomously, and in many cases, without access to renewable energy resources. Cost constraints and the need for ubiquitous, invisible deployments will result in small sized, resource-constrained sensor nodes. While the set of challenges in sensor networks are diverse, we focus on fundamental networking challenges in this paper. The key networking challenges in sensor networks that we discuss are: (a) supporting multi-hop communication while limiting radio operation to conserve power, (b) data management, including frameworks that support attribute-based data naming, routing and in-network aggregation, (c) geographic routing challenges in networks where nodes know their locations, and (d) monitoring and maintenance of such dynamic, resource-limited systems. For each of these research areas, we provide an overview of proposed solutions to the problem and discuss in detail one or few representative solutions. Finally, we illustrate how these networking components can be integrated into a complex data storage solution for sensor networks.

Report of the Sixty-Sixth Annual Meeting, Portland, Oregon, September 17-20, 2003

Report of the Sixty-Sixth Annual Meeting Portland, Oregon September 17–20, 2003 Martha Works and Keith Hadley The 66th annual meeting of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers was held on the campus of Portland State University September 17-20, 2003. Over 280 participants enjoyed lively paper sessions; field trips to regional parks, glaciers, wineries, and the urban fringe; several opportunities to socialize with colleagues; some of Portland's lovely late summer weather; and the parklike setting of PSU's campus. After a day of remote sensing and professional development workshops, the formal meeting began with a reception on Wednesday evening and an opening session titled "Over, Under, and Spaced Out: Scale and Environmental Research at Oregon's Universities." The session featured introductory remarks by Teresa Bulman (President of APCG), Richard Jarvis (geographer and Chancellor of the Oregon University System), and Doug Richardson (Executive Director of the Association of American Geographers), followed by presentations by geographers from Oregon's three largest universities. Andrew Marcus of University of Oregon presented "Remote Sensing of Riparian Systems: Research Opportunities, Ethical Quandaries, and Potential Roles for Geographers," Dawn Wright of Oregon State University discussed her research in a paper titled "Getting to the Bottom of It: Issues of Scale and Environmental Change Under the Sea,"and Keith Hadley of Portland State University spoke on "Scale and Complexity in Forest Landscapes: Three Challenges for Geographers." Thursday's field trips took nearly 110 people on journeys around the northern Willamette Valley, Mt. Hood, and the Columbia Gorge. All field trip leaders were PSU Geography faculty except as noted. Keith Hadley and Karl Lillquist (Central Washington University-Geography) led a trip focusing on geomorphology and biogeography to Elliot Glacier on the slopes of Mt. Hood. Heejun Chang escorted a group on an excursion to University of Washington's forest canopy research center that included an opportunity to take a canopy crane to the top of an old-growth forest. Dan Johnson and Bill Lang (PSU-History) took participants on the trail of Lewis and Clark as they [End Page 151] made their way west, then east, on their trip through the Columbia River Gorge. Joe Poracsky, Ralph Rogers (EPA), and Jim Sjulin (Portland Parks and Recreation) showed off Portland's nationally renowned system of urban parks. Tom Harvey took 40 people on a tour of several New Urbanist developments in the Portland metropolitan area, and Greg Jones (Southern Oregon University -Geography) led a trip to some of Oregon's wineries, including one of the state's most highly capitalized ventures and an organic winery. A Thursday evening meal was held at Portland's Natural Capital Center, a 19th century warehouse renovated using environ- mentally innovative techniques such as extensive use of recycled materials and certified wood, an ecoroof, and onsite stormwater recycling. Tenants (such as a bank focused on socially and environ- mentally sensitive investing; restaurants supporting local sustainable agriculture; the conservation agency Ecotrust; and other local non-profits) support a conservation economy. Participants enjoyed a rooftop terrace and sunset over the Pearl District, a gentrifying warehouse area in Northwest Portland. 100 papers were presented in 24 sessions on Friday and Saturday. Topics ranged from climate variation and atmospheric modeling to symbolic and imaginary cultural landscapes with lots of fascinating presentations across the range of geographic inquiry. A poster session on Friday afternoon included 12 additional presentations for people to peruse during a reception in PSU's Multicultural Center. The President's Plenary session held Friday afternoon featured presentations by local scholars: Chet Orloff (Adjunct Professor, Urban Studies and Planning, PSU),"Landscaping Paradise: Olmsted in Portland";Carl Abbott (Professor of Urban Studies and Planning, PSU), "Urbanity and Environment in Portland's Sense of Place";and Judy Walton (Adjunct Professor, Geography Department, PSU), "Sustaining the Livable City: Portland at a Crossroads." Saturday night's awards banquet showcased a presentation by APCG President Teresa Bulman titled "The Joy of Geography." Teresa shared with us how personal interests can mesh nicely with professional goals as an appreciation of fine wines led to her Ph.D. [End Page 152] dissertation on water issues in California's Napa Valley and subsequent research. PSU students did a terrific job preparing...

Winter, ou la cartographie intime de Rick Bass

Displaying the geographical and textual challenges that spending winter in the Yaak Valley represents, Winter is a founding work of Rick Bass’s nature-writing. This article intends to show that, far from distracting the author from his original referential purpose, the metatextual questioning of discourse paradoxically leads him to renew the notion of realism and unveil the most intimate, invisible aspects of nature. An analogy between diary-writing and map-writing first leads me to unveil Bass’s respectful recording of the mysteries of nature. The whiteness of winter then appears as a necessary screen initiating the eye to loss and renunciation. I finally try to show that by subverting romantic cliches, Bass’s poetic transcription of unexpected, fleeting events of everyday life can favor an emotional encounter with Otherness.

The application of information technology to regional, national, and global surveillance of antimicrobial resistance.

Establishing local, national, and global surveillance networks for monitoring the dissemination of antimicrobial resistance and detecting the emergence of new resistance mechanisms has been recommended by the American Society for Microbiology Task Force on Antibiotic Resistance and other national organizations. While the need to develop and deploy surveillance strategies cannot be argued, the design and implementation of effective regional, national, and global surveillance networks is a daunting task with geographic, participatory, logistic, and funding challenges. Using information technology to capture, combine, collate, and analyze daily clinical microbiology laboratory data would seem to be a far more robust and logical approach to surveillance than traditional centralized studies that generally focus on only a few bacterial species or on isolates from a single body site. Information technology allows long-term, continuous tracking of antimicrobial resistance trends among large numbers of isolates over a broad range of species, and across entire regions or countries. The rationale for wanting to use networks of clinical laboratories for surveillance is obvious: susceptibility data are generated every day by thousands of laboratories located around the world, and most of these laboratories perform antimicrobial susceptibility testing on the bacterial species that pose the greatest public health problems. By virtue of information technology, large volumes of data can readily be managed and stored to allow timely and thorough analysis on institutional, regional, national, and global levels.

Radar Observations of Bird Migration Over The Great Lakes

Abstract The Great Lakes and nearby agricultural midwestern United States together represent a geographical challenge to migratory land birds during flight and stopover. We explored large-scale migratory responses of land birds encountering the Great Lakes as revealed by weather surveillance radars (WSR-88D) and two smaller specialized radars. Those responses reveal comprehensive landscape- or regional-scale migratory patterns that would otherwise have been difficult to infer. Analysis of radar echoes showed birds crossed the Great Lakes in large numbers, although we also found evidence of birds avoiding lake crossing in some locations. Around dawn, birds over water in numerous locations frequently exhibited an increase in migratory height (dawn ascent) and often an accompanying reorientation toward nearest land if they were within ∼28 km of shore. Those behavioral responses to the Great Lakes influence the resulting distribution of birds stopping over in the intervening terrestrial landscapes.

An Australian Aboriginal birth cohort: a unique resource for a life course study of an Indigenous population. A study protocol.

BackgroundThe global rise of Type 2 diabetes and its complications has drawn attention to the burden of non-communicable diseases on populations undergoing epidemiological transition. The life course approach of a birth cohort has the potential to increase our understanding of the development of these chronic diseases. In 1987 we sought to establish an Australian Indigenous birth cohort to be used as a resource for descriptive and analytical studies with particular attention on non-communicable diseases. The focus of this report is the methodology of recruiting and following-up an Aboriginal birth cohort of mobile subjects belonging to diverse cultural and language groups living in a large sparsely populated area in the Top End of the Northern Territory of Australia.MethodsA prospective longitudinal study of Aboriginal singletons born at the Royal Darwin Hospital 1987–1990, with second wave cross-sectional follow-up examination of subjects 1998–2001 in over 70 different locations. A multiphase protocol was used to locate and collect data on 686 subjects with different approaches for urban and rural children. Manual chart audits, faxes to remote communities, death registries and a full time subject locator with past experience of Aboriginal communities were all used.DiscussionThe successful recruitment of 686 Indigenous subjects followed up 14 years later with vital status determined for 95% of subjects and examination of 86% shows an Indigenous birth cohort can be established in an environment with geographic, cultural and climatic challenges. The high rates of recruitment and follow up indicate there were effective strategies of follow-up in a supportive population.