<p> This single-case study was to explore how Geographical Information Systems (GIS) could contribute to reducing dropout and non-attainment rates in Nepal&rsquo;s secondary school system. GIS specialists analyzed information collected from parents on why their school-age children either dropped out or otherwise did not attain a secondary school education. The sample size in this study was eight, which included five sets of parent(s) whose children ages 13 to 16; either dropped out or otherwise did not attend a secondary school system, and three GIS specialists. Economics, teachers, and government were three themes that emerged from the parents&rsquo; interview. Interviews with GIS specialists reveled that GIS could assist in addressing dropout and non-attainment issues. In the context of Nepal, GIS is a still a new technology. The Government of Nepal lacks adequate infrastructure in areas of human resources, training and technical resources, and the central data repository system required for the proper use of GIS. GIS specialists recommended augmenting Nepal's information technology infrastructure by implementing a sustainable Enterprise GIS, and an Educational Management Information System. This research work recommends that identification of strategic solutions for student retention issues will require a concerted effort by not only governmental leadership, but also policy-makers, and non-government community leaders. The Government of Nepal may need to play vital role in overcoming existing economic and political barriers to improve IT infrastructure. GIS technology is certain to emerge as an important tool for making a difference in the planning process for minimizing dropout rates and enhancing enrollment ratios across the country. The recognition of both a need for change and the changes required are two important themes that emerged from the research study.</p>

<p> There is a global need for energy technologies that reduce the adverse impacts of societal progress and that address today's challenges without creating tomorrow's problems. Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) can support technology developers in achieving these prerequisites of sustainability by providing a systems perspective. However, modeling the early-stage scale up and impacts of technology systems may lead to unreliable or incomplete results due to a lack of representative technical, spatial, and temporal data. The goal of this dissertation is to support the acceleration of clean energy technology development by providing information about the regional variation of impacts and benefits resulting from plausible deployment scenarios. Three emerging energy technologies are selected as case studies: (1) brine management for carbon dioxide sequestration; (2) carbon dioxide capture, utilization, and sequestration; (3) stationary fuel cells for combined heat and power in commercial buildings. In all three case studies, priority areas are identified where more reliable data and models are necessary for reducing uncertainty, and vital information is revealed on how impacts vary spatially and temporally. Importantly, moving away from default technology and waste management hierarchies as a source of data fosters goal-driven systems thinking which in turn leads to the discovery of technology improvement potentials.</p>

<p> The Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard (CMECS) provides a comprehensive framework of common terminology for organizing physical, chemical, biological, and geological information about marine ecosystems. Federally endorsed as a dynamic content standard, all federally funded data must be compliant by 2018; however, applying CMECS to deep sea datasets and underwater video have not been extensively examined. The presented research demonstrates the extent to which CMECS can be applied to deep sea benthic habitats, assesses the feasibility of applying CMECS to remotely operated vehicle (ROV) video data in near-real-time, and establishes best practices for mapping environmental aspects and observed deep sea habitats as viewed by the ROV&rsquo;s forward-facing camera. All data were collected during 2014 in the Northern Gulf of Mexico by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration&rsquo;s (NOAA) ROV <i> Deep Discoverer</i> and ship <i>Okeanos Explorer.</i></p>

<p> Healthcare access is a highly reported problem for immigrant populations in the United States, especially for Hispanic migrants at the US-Mexico border. This statement holds particularly true for populations living in unincorporated communities known as <i>colonias</i> in the borderland region. Residents of a <i>colonia</i> are estimated to suffer from preventable or treatable illnesses including tuberculosis, hepatitis A, cholera, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, depression, substance abuse, among other health problems, at two to four times the national average (Matthiesen 1997; Anders et al. 2010:366; Mier et al. 2013:208; Sharkey et al. 2011; Davidhizar 1999). This apparent disparity is a result of unequal healthcare access due to social, legal, economic, and physical/spatial barriers. Using a structural violence framework as a lens, this study attempted to determine the barriers impeding access to healthcare for <i>colonia</i> residents, as well as analyze the interrelationships between the types of barriers. This study utilized semi-structured interviews to gain an understanding of perceived social, legal, spatial/physical, and other suggested barriers preventing healthcare access in El Paso County, TX <i>colonias</i>. In order to fully demonstrate the role of spatial/physical barriers on access to care, this study utilized Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to map obstacles in the targeted communities.</p>

<p> This study compared two remote sensing water indices: the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) and the Modified NDWI (MNDWI). Both indices were calculated using publically-available data from the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI). The research goal was to determine whether the indices are effective in locating open water and measuring surface soil moisture. To demonstrate the application of water indices, analysis was conducted for freshwater wetlands in the Tualatin River Basin in northwestern Oregon to estimate hydrologic connectivity and hydrological permanence between these wetlands and nearby water bodies. Remote sensing techniques have been used to study wetlands in recent decades; however, scientific studies have rarely addressed hydrologic connectivity and hydrologic permanence, in spite of the documented importance of these properties. Research steps were designed to be straightforward for easy repeatability: 1) locate sample sites, 2) predict wetness with water indices, 3) estimate wetness with soil samples from the field, 4) validate the index predictions against the soil samples from the field, and 5) in the demonstration step, estimate hydrologic connectivity and hydrological permanence. Results indicate that both indices predicted the presence of large, open water features with clarity; that dry conditions were predicted by MNDWI with more subtle differentiation; and that NDWI results seem more sensitive to sites with vegetation. Use of this low-cost method to discover patterns of surface moisture in the landscape could directly improve the ability to manage wetland environments.</p>

<p> People often become disoriented when navigating in complex, multi-level buildings. To efficiently find destinations located on different floors, navigators must refer to a globally coherent mental representation of the multi-level environment, which is termed a multi-level cognitive map. However, there is a surprising dearth of research into underlying theories of why integrating multi-level spatial knowledge into a multi-level cognitive map is so challenging and error-prone for humans. This overarching problem is the core motivation of this dissertation.</p><p> We address this vexing problem in a two-pronged approach combining study of both basic and applied research questions. Of theoretical interest, we investigate questions about how multi-level built environments are learned and structured in memory. The concept of multi-level cognitive maps and a framework of multi-level cognitive map development are provided. We then conducted a set of empirical experiments to evaluate the effects of several environmental factors on users' development of multi-level cognitive maps. The findings of these studies provide important design guidelines that can be used by architects and help to better understand the research question of why people get lost in buildings. Related to application, we investigate questions about how to design user-friendly visualization interfaces that augment users' capability to form multi-level cognitive maps. An important finding of this dissertation is that increasing visual access with an X-ray-like visualization interface is effective for overcoming the disadvantage of limited visual access in built environments and assists the development of multi-level cognitive maps. These findings provide important human-computer interaction (HCI) guidelines for visualization techniques to be used in future indoor navigation systems. </p><p> In sum, this dissertation adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining theories from the fields of spatial cognition, information visualization, and HCI, addressing a long-standing and ubiquitous problem faced by anyone who navigates indoors: why do people get lost inside multi-level buildings. Results provide both theoretical and applied levels of knowledge generation and explanation, as well as contribute to the growing field of real-time indoor navigation systems.</p>

Presented at the 2016 American Libraries Association Annual Conference / The University of Arizona (UA) Libraries has been providing GIS services and access to geospatial data since the 1990's, first by providing access to US Federal Depository Program geospatial data on CD-ROMs and DVDs, later through the Arizona Electronic Atlas and more recently the UA Institutional Repository (UAiR) and the UA Campus Repository. Focus groups with faculty and staff confirmed our view that neither the UAiR nor the Campus Repository meet the needs of the UA's GIS community. To address their needs, the UA Libraries investigated various solutions for developing a geospatial data portal that would facilitate discovery, access, sharing, and retrieval of distributed geospatial data resources and consolidate several repositories at the University into one accessible and modern interface. An inventory was completed, interviews were conducted with relevant campus stakeholders and geospatial data portal managers at various academic libraries, and various options were investigated. Based on several factors, the UA decided to implement Open Geoportal (http://www.opengeoportal.org), a collaboratively developed, open source, federated web application for discovering, previewing, and retrieving geospatial data from multiple repositories. The UA Libraries released the resulting geospatial data portal, Spatial Data Explorer (SDE), in the fall 2015. In anticipation of the release, a survey was conducted in spring 2015 of faculty, staff, and students to gauge interest in contributing data to the SDE. The poster will include why we decided to implement Open Geoportal, screen shots showing the SDE interface and functionality, results of the survey and follow-up interviews with potential contributors, and use statistics.

<p>Wetland monitoring and preservation efforts have the potential to be enhanced with advanced remote sensing acquisition and digital image analysis approaches. Progress in the development and utilization of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) as remote sensing platforms has offered significant spatial and temporal advantages over traditional aerial and orbital remote sensing platforms. Photogrammetric approaches to generate high spatial resolution orthophotos of UAV acquired imagery along with the UAV?s low-cost and temporally flexible characteristics are explored. A comparative analysis of different spectral based land cover maps derived from imagery captured using UAV, satellite, and airplane platforms provide an assessment of the Huntington Beach Wetlands. This research presents a UAS remote sensing methodology encompassing data collection, image processing, and analysis in constructing spectral based land cover maps to augment the efforts of the Huntington Beach Wetlands Conservancy by assessing ecological and temporal changes at the Huntington Beach Wetlands.

<p> <i>Home</i>&hellip;that space so personal, so distinct, so intrinsic to the human/place relationship that &ldquo;lies right at the heart of human geography&rdquo; (Cresswell, 2004, p. 93). Studying the connection people feel toward certain places through concepts of emotion, experience, and attachment to meaning stems outward from the phenomenological and humanist branches of geography (Holt-Jensen, 2009). With every person&rsquo;s version of home a space unto itself, is it possible for a place so intimate to be studied and defined? My answer is yes. This phenomenological case study investigates the perceptions and emotions of a newly designated conservation neighborhood, the second of its kind in Reno, Nevada. In an area usually looked at as a site for economic development and perhaps initiatives in historic preservation, there is little research undertaken through a cultural geographic lens aiming to understand how different communities in the area view their own home ground in transition and the implications of place creation. This project navigates the allegory of home through the voices and drawn maps of the Wells Avenue Neighborhood Conservation District (WANCD) and is approached through the impressions and attitudes of community groups, merchants, and a patchwork of residents diverse in both their backgrounds and their stories about the place they live. Through the construction of sense of place inside and around the WANCD and with the usage of Geographic Information Systems as a tool for qualitative data collection and comunication, this study investigates how personal experiences and perceptions, community connections and common goals, and specifically-identified areas of personal meaning play into the way in which these different stakeholders experience, participate in, and envision their neighborhood.</p>

This is a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation of about 27 slides used in conjunction with a talk at UCI-CRITO on 18 May 2005, and the research reported is from a previously published study of mine. Information technology is varied and human use and impact can be examined at different levels. I report on a study that examines the ubiquitous hyperlinks as instruments of cognition in e-learning. This study has been published as Coleman, A. 2005. Instruments of cognition: Use of citations and Web links in online teaching materials. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 56 (4): 382-392. Preprint available online: http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/archive/00000806/. Last retrieved: 12 May, 2005