Landscape Imagery Research Articles

The #AustralianBeachspace Project: Examining Opportunities for Research Dissemination Using Instagram

The #AustralianBeachspace Project: Examining Opportunities for Research Dissemination Using Instagram

‘Aphrodite’s Realm’: Representations of Tourist Landscapes in Postcolonial Cyprus as Symbols of Modernization

The touristic landscape construction and identity politics of Cyprus in the 1960s are manifest in travel guides of the time, after the island’s independence from the British, when tourism became a major priority of modernization and nation-building. Through the juxtaposition and interpretation of images depicting tourist landscapes in colonial and postcolonial Cyprus, this paper examines the shift in their construction and representation and explores the gradual transformation of landscape imagery brought about through both the adoption of contemporary international tourist trends and the implementation of contemporary political agendas. These transformed representations of tourist landscapes inevitably suggested new behaviors to be performed in them. Travel guides therefore also played a catalytic role in bringing a modern Mediterranean leisure culture to Cyprus in the 1960s, a culture that was imported and subsequently assimilated by native Cypriot societies in different ways. The aim of this paper is to examine the construction and representation of landscapes and uncover how they can become an instrument for asserting ideologies and shaping identity, especially through the development of tourism.

Narrating the Landscape: Print Culture and American Expansion in the Nineteenth Century by Matthew N. Johnston

Reviewed by: Narrating the Landscape: Print Culture and American Expansion in the Nineteenth Century by Matthew N. Johnston Andrew B. Ross Matthew N. Johnston, Narrating the Landscape: Print Culture and American Expansion in the Nineteenth Century. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2016. 242 pp. Cloth, $34.95. Matthew N. Johnston's Narrating the Landscape (the latest volume in the now decade-old Charles M. Russell Center Series on Art and Photography of the American West) examines the wider "print culture" that informed discourses of transportation and tourism, science, and ethnography in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. An insightful and precise media history of railroad and scenic guides, gift books, ethnographic studies, and geological surveys, Johnston's analysis pushes forward western studies' growing interest in visual culture and its significance for understanding pre-twentieth-century views of landscapes and peoples. "Views" should be read here in its most literal sense, as Johnston is very much concerned with the ways that illustrated texts mediated consumers' observations of landscapes both out the window of a train and on the page of a guidebook. While the study is usefully situated in art historical scholarship, what makes Narrating the Landscape particularly pertinent to scholars of western literature is its focus on the ways that image and text combine to form innovative narrative practices. In this way Johnston productively reads texts not just as objects, but also as curated experiences unfolding in time, interpreting how a wide range of published works "align the very act of reading them with a visceral experience of the kinds of time that structure the disciplines and industries these books both belong to and assist in creating" (15). Thus, the first half of the book surveys the feeling for progress evoked by illustrated travel guidebooks and business directories (a surprising turn for a chapter focused on "railroad narratives"[24]), and the appealing feelings of historicity legible in both Luminist and more local, commercial landscape imagery—particularly the way such temporal framing maps onto social class. In shifting from tourism to science, and engaging more conventionally western landscapes and texts, chapter 3 offers a study of the ethnological work of George Catlin and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, framing a shift from "ahistoric nature to past monument" (107) in their representations of American Indians. The book's final chapter [End Page 110] focuses upon geologic surveys produced between 1867 and 1879, considering the ways that emerging scientific theories informed the pictorial and narrative projects of familiar figures such as John Wesley Powell, Clarence King, Thomas Moran, and Timothy O'Sullivan. With the exception of some passing references to Paul Ricoeur and Gérard Genette in the book's introduction, Johnston opts not to engage in a meaningful way with established narratology, instead grounding the studies in engaging close readings of text and image positioned in respect to other scholarly work on nineteenth-century landscape art. This minor quibble aside, this book provides adept interpretations of illustrated texts with an eye to their significance for concepts such as mobility and settler colonialism. In reading the ways that image and text interact to produce temporal narratives informing frontier and expansionist culture, Johnston amasses an insightful collection of noncanonical print artifacts that offer insight into emerging cultures of aesthetics, travel, and science in the nineteenth-century West. Andrew B. Ross University of Nevada, Reno Copyright © 2017 Western Literature Association

Landscape Imagery in Popular Representations of African American Soldiers during the Civil War

Landscape Imagery in Popular Representations of African American Soldiers during the Civil War

Season Spotter: Using Citizen Science to Validate and Scale Plant Phenology from Near-Surface Remote Sensing

The impact of a rapidly changing climate on the biosphere is an urgent area of research for mitigation policy and management. Plant phenology is a sensitive indicator of climate change and regulates the seasonality of carbon, water, and energy fluxes between the land surface and the climate system, making it an important tool for studying biosphere–atmosphere interactions. To monitor plant phenology at regional and continental scales, automated near-surface cameras are being increasingly used to supplement phenology data derived from satellite imagery and data from ground-based human observers. We used imagery from a network of phenology cameras in a citizen science project called Season Spotter to investigate whether information could be derived from these images beyond standard, color-based vegetation indices. We found that engaging citizen science volunteers resulted in useful science knowledge in three ways: first, volunteers were able to detect some, but not all, reproductive phenology events, connecting landscape-level measures with field-based measures. Second, volunteers successfully demarcated individual trees in landscape imagery, facilitating scaling of vegetation indices from organism to ecosystem. And third, volunteers’ data were used to validate phenology transition dates calculated from vegetation indices and to identify potential improvements to existing algorithms to enable better biological interpretation. As a result, the use of citizen science in combination with near-surface remote sensing of phenology can be used to link ground-based phenology observations to satellite sensor data for scaling and validation. Well-designed citizen science projects targeting improved data processing and validation of remote sensing imagery hold promise for providing the data needed to address grand challenges in environmental science and Earth observation.

A simple approach for a spatial terrestrial exposure assessment of the insecticide fenoxycarb, based on a high-resolution landscape analysis.

BACKGROUNDThe objective was to refine the standard regulatory exposure scenario used in plant protection product authorisations by developing a more realistic landscape‐related GIS‐based exposure assessment for terrestrial non‐target arthropods. We quantified the proportion of adjacent off‐target area in agricultural landscapes potentially exposed to insecticide drift from applications of the active substance fenoxycarb. High‐resolution imagery, landscape classification and subsequent stepwise analysis of a whole landscape using drift and interception functions were applied to selected areas in representative fruit‐producing regions in Germany.RESULTSEven under worst‐case assumptions regarding treated area, use rate and drift, less than 12% of the non‐agricultural habitat area would potentially be exposed to fenoxycarb drift above regulatory acceptable concentrations. Additionally, if the filtering effect of tall vegetation were taken into account, this number would decrease to 6.6%. Further refinements to landscape elements and application conditions indicate that less than 5% of the habitat area might be exposed above regulatory acceptable concentrations, meaning that 95% of the non‐agricultural habitat area will be unimpacted (i.e. no unacceptable effects) and can serve as refuge for recolonisation.CONCLUSIONApproaches and tools are proposed for standardisable and transparent refinements in regulatory risk assessments on the landscape level. © 2016 The Authors. Pest Management Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.

Palangyo’s Dying in the Sun as a Solution to the Neomodernist Mind Style

This paper studies the dialectics of modernist, postmodernist and neomodernist mind style as exemplified in Peter Palangyo’s novel, Dying in the Sun ( DITS). Set in East Africa, the novel, especially its first half with its tragic vision replete with harrowing images of sickness, suffering, despair, and death, has often been described as an example of African neomodernist writing. However, this study appropriately locates it within the context of the “antimodernist” temper of postmodernism. The research investigates the author’s and main character’s narrative mind style referred to in modernism as stream of consciousness, its historicity, and landscape imagery as symbols of the defeat of despair and cynicism, as well as the resurgence of hope that dominates the second half of the novel. It considers the development of the character’s perception as well as the narrator’s point of view from cynicism and death to hope and understanding, and concludes that Palangyo’s visionary mind style in the novel is an African solution to modernist cynicism and nihilism.

Agent-Based Model for River-Side Land-Living: Portrait of Bandung Indonesian Cikapundung Park Case Study

A city park has been built from the organic urban settlement in the Cikapundung River, Bandung, Indonesia. While the aim for the development is the revitalization of the river for being unhealthy from the waste coming from the settlement. A study on how Indonesian people, in general, treating water source, like river, lake, and ocean is revisited. Throwing waste into the river has actually become paradox with the collective mental understanding about water among Indonesians. Two scenarios of agent-based simulation is presented, to see the dynamics of organic settlement and life of the city park after being opened for public. The simulation is delivered upon the imagery of landscape taken from the satellite and drone. While experience for presented problems gives insights, the computational social laboratory also awaits for further theoretical explorations and endeavors to sharpen good policymaking.

ロケット跳躍型探査ロボットJumping Scouterコンセプトと跳躍精度評価

Jumping Scouter is a rocket-powered robot for planetary exploration. The light-weighted robot traverses long distance, independent of terrain conditions. For example, it theoretically jumps 43[km] with only 290[g] of vehicle mass and 98[g] of black powder. It also acquires landscape imagery of wide areas during and after traversal jumps. This paper describes the robot's concept, system configuration and primary evaluation tests for jumping functionary.

The Effect of Action Observation Training on Sit to Walk with Chronic Stroke Patients

Purpose: This study was performed to examine the effect of action observation training on sit to-walk times in chronic stroke patients. Methods: Twelve stroke patients were randomly allocated to two groups, as follows: an action observation training (AOT) group and a scenery picture observation (SPO) group. The AOT group was engaged in video observation for 2 minutes 30 seconds with 12 ADL functional activities related to the sit-to–walk task: physical training was carried out in two repetitions lasting 2 minutes 30 seconds. The landscape imagery control group observed landscape picture for 2 minutes 30 seconds and then carried out the same physical training. The intervention involved a total of 12 sessions over 4 weeks, and each session lasted 30 minutes. The pre and post-tests measured the timed up and go test (TUG), Sit to stand test (STS), and Dynamic gait index (DGI). The Wilcoxon signed ranks test was used to compare pre-test and post-test result, and the Mann-Whitney U test was employed for comparison between groups. Results: The TUG time was significantly different between the AOT group and the SPO group. According to the findings, the experimental group’s TUG was significantly decreased (p<0.05). In comparison of the two groups, there was no significant in STS or DGI between the AOT group and SPO group. Conclusion: This study showed that the intervention can be used to decrease TUG time. Our research suggests that action observation training has a positive effect on sit-to-walk times in patients with chronic stroke.

Tourism, Aesthetics, and Touristic Judgment

This article explores the role of aesthetics in the tourist experience. Because tourism involves the interpretation of signs within a landscape and landscape imagery is an important way in which places are delineated, aesthetic modes—the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque—are important foundations for the making of meaning when touring. However, aesthetics does more than bring order and meaning to what we see while touring by providing paradigms of visuality. These same paradigms also serve to naturalize ideology through the subjective judgments involved in tourism, a process we term “touristic judgment.”

Negative Film Plot and Tourists´ Image and Intentions: The Case of City of God

ABSTRACTThis study aims to contribute to the understanding of the effects of films with a negative plot on tourists’ cognitive and affective image about Brazil and behavioral intentions of visiting the country. The film selected is City of God, one of the most internationally acclaimed motion pictures produced in Brazil. The results suggest that films with a negative plot tend to negatively reinforce the viewers’ evaluations of the image attributes, although the influence on the general image tends to be subtle. Moreover, it was concluded that in the case of films with a negative plot, the imagery of landscapes is the element that is most likely to increase visiting intention.

Landscapes of Lesbian Desire

A review essay of Lisa L. Moore’s Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes (2011).

From Climate Crisis to Climate Movement: A Conversation with Robert van Waarden

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] On September 3, 2014, in the lead-up to the People's Climate March of September 21, the Concordia University Student Union, the Students' Society of McGill University, Divest Concordia, and Divest McGill hosted the People's Climate Tour in Montreal, which was organized by 350.org and featured a lecture by Bill McKibben, author and co-founder of the international environmental organization, as well as by Ellen Gabriel, a human rights activist from Kanehsata:ke. Also present on the tour was Robert van Waarden, a young Montreal-based photographer, whose recent project, Along the Pipeline (2014), documents the stories of people who live along the 4,600 km path of the proposed Energy East pipeline, which, if realized, would transport more than one million barrels of diluted bitumen from Alberta's tar sands to Saint John, New Brunswick, where it would be refined and exported. (1) Van Waarden is a professional photographer whose work focuses on climate change as well as the social movements involved in climate change projects. He has photographed four United Nations summits on climate change, wind energy across the globe, coal plants in Tennessee, villages in the Arctic, and protests in Southeast Asia. For Along the Pipeline, he photographed and interviewed more than eighty individuals whose lives could be directly impacted by this pipeline project. With funding assistance from an Indiegogo initiative as well as Greenpeace, the Council of Canadians, and Environmental Defence, he interviewed city mayors, native elders and chiefs, fishermen, ranchers, and people from various walks of life to uncover the ways that people are making sense of yet another environmentally damaging proposal. I interviewed van Waarden at his home in Montreal on September 8, 2014, to discuss this project and the growing climate change movement. MARC JAMES LEGER: Tell me about your new project, Along the Pipeline. ROBERT VAN WAARDEN: The proposals for the Energy East pipeline hit the airwaves sometime around April of 2013. I found out about it while I was living in Europe--yet another pipeline. When I came back, I realized that this was something I could work on from a photographic and journalistic perspective. I knew some people who were interested in working on the pipeline issue already, so I approached them first. A few of those organizations put in some funding for the project. I then got a 4 x 5 film camera--a camera made in the 1970s for black-and-white film, with bellows. The travel time was about two months on the road. I started in New Brunswick, since I was already in eastern Canada. I spent ten days in New Brunswick and then came back to Montreal for a few weeks to figure things out. I then drove all the way to Alberta and worked my way back along the line. We put about seventeen thousand kilometers on the car, so there was a lot of driving. We interviewed about eighty people- mostly individuals--but there was one group, in Quebec. The idea was to find people from different walks of life to get a better idea of what's going on, whether that meant politicians, farmers, ranchers, fishermen, First Nations groups, or activists and supporters. MJL: Do you think that all of these stories put together create a coherent picture? Do you think that collectively we have a solution to the tar sands aspect of the crisis of global warming? How do you see individual will connecting with scientific knowledge and with political will? RVW: My decision to photograph individuals comes from my previous work as a photographer and understanding how imagery is often used in the environmental or climate-related context. What you often see is landscape imagery or natural world imagery with polar bears or tigers. These are emblems that are used to raise awareness. What's often missing, at least from a communication perspective, is the fact that people relate to other people and their stories. In that sense, I thought that a focus on the stories of people along the pipeline would help the audience pay closer attention. …

1P2-V07 ロケット跳躍型探査ロボットJumping Scouter初期評価

Jumping Scouter is a rocket-powered robot for planetary exploration. The 1kg-ordered robot traverses long distance, independent of terrain conditions. For example, it theoretically jumps 2.1km on the Moon and 0.9km on the Mars with only 1.3kg of vehicle mass and 98g of black powder. It also acquires landscape imagery of wide areas during and after traversal jumps. This paper describes the robot's concept, system configuration and primary evaluation tests for jumping functionary.

Landscape Imagery, Politics, and Identity in a Divided Germany, 1968-1989

Catherine Wilkins’s monograph draws on a chronologically wide-ranging base of sources to weave a complex narrative of the late Cold War. She grounds her analysis in the premise that both West and East Germans, and Germans across time, shared a common interest in and identification with the image of the untamed Northern landscape. Such tropes marked the landscape painting of artists of the German Romantic school of the early nineteenth century. By comparing these landscape tropes present in the work of six Cold War German artists—three from East Germany and three from West—with German Romantics of the early nineteenth century, Wilkins argues that Germans living in the two German states after the Second World War shared many of the same issues and concerns. Wilkins sketches in her first chapter the political and cultural environments in both postwar Germanies that led to emergence of the 68er movement, showing that the movement’s interest in issues such as the unresolved legacies of the Second World War, changing gender dynamics and structures, evolving individual and collective relationships with spirituality, environmental destruction and the division of Germany ‘empowered’ (p. 27) the six artists who provide the material for the core of her analysis. The focus of her second chapter is on the century before to help illustrate that German Romantics of the early nineteenth century existed in a similar larger milieu, one also marked by the aftermath of devastating war, changing views of gender and of religion, potential environment devastation and German division. This context informed the Romantic landscape paintings of artists such as Caspar David Friedrich and Karl Blechen.

An allometric model for estimating DBH of isolated and clustered Eucalyptus trees from measurements of crown projection area

Owing to its relevance to remotely-sensed imagery of landscapes, this paper investigates the ability to infer diameter at breast height (DBH) for five species of Australian native Eucalyptus from measurements of tree height and crown projection area. In this study regression models were developed for both single trees and clusters from 2 to 27 stems (maximum density 536 stems per ha) of Eucalyptus bridgesiana, Eucalyptus caliginosa, Eucalyptus blakelyi, Eucalyptus viminalis, and Eucalyptus melliodora. Crown projection area and tree height were strongly correlated for single trees, and the log-transformed crown projection area explained the most variance in DBH (R2=0.68, mean prediction error±16cm). Including tree height as a descriptor did not significantly alter the model performance and is a viable alternative to using crown projection area. The total crown projection area of tree clusters explained only 34% of the variance in the total (sum of) the DBH within the clusters. However average crown projection area per stem of entire tree clusters explained 67% of the variance in the average (per stem) DBH of the constituent trees with a mean prediction error±8cm. Both the single tree and tree cluster models were statistically similar and a combined model to predict average stem DBH yielded R2=0.71 with a mean prediction error (average DBH per stem) of±13cm within the range of 0.28–0.84m. A single model to infer DBH for both single trees and clusters comprising up to 27 stems offers a pathway for using remote sensing to infer DBH provided a means of determining the number of stems within cluster boundaries is included.

“Suddenly there was Nothing”: Foot and mouth, communal trauma and landscape photography

This paper examines the landscape photography that emerged during the Foot and Mouth epidemic in the UK in 2001. It builds upon Convery et al.’s proposal that the epidemic constituted a communally traumatic event in the worst affected areas, specifically Cumbria in North West England. This proposal can be seen as Alexander’s “cultural construction of trauma”: an act that specifically reframes a “disastrous” event as “traumatic”. However this process was aided by the landscape imagery that appeared in the intense press coverage of the epidemic, and by photographers working in the artistic or documentary sphere, such as John Darwell, Ian Geering and Nick May. This paper examines how landscape imagery can communicate the traumatic human experience of a changed lifescape, and how the broadcast of these images has contributed to the wider acknowledgement of Foot and Mouth as communal trauma. It argues that this imagery is actually essential to understanding the traumatic experience of a crisis which happened within, and to, the landscape.

A Study on Urban Furniture Design Based on Landscape Imagery

As same as indoor space, the urban space meets the user’s needs and reflects a city’s characteristics and culture, only through the reasonable furniture settings. This paper firstly started from the system of urban furniture, made a study of the connotation and type, and then discussed the relationship between urban furniture and landscape imagery. Based on research dates and design examples, it proposed design strategies based on landscape imagery from the following aspects: the deeply shaping of functions, styles with the overall and continuous creating, nature factors running through design and the culture’s reconstruction.

Predicaments of Heritage of Rural Cultural Landscape during Urbanization and its Solutions

The traditional rural cultural landscape is facing the danger of disappearance, which has carried the culture of agricultural civilization for thousands years because of rapid urbanization. In this paper, the authors mainly performed deep analysis from the villagers' sense of identity, rural cultural landscape imagery, landscape valuation norms and rural cultural landscape heritage,social integration of demand etc. The authors also proposed the solutions for rural cultural landscape heritage, in order to provide ideas for the protection of rural cultural landscape and development in new countryside construction.