CAPES / Os resíduos oriundos da construção e demolição quando não têm uma destinação final adequada acarretam em problemas de ordem social, econômica e ambiental. O descarte que muitas vezes acontece em locais inapropriados, demonstra a necessidade de áreas para a correta disposição final em acordo com as normas vigentes. Visando a diminuição dos impactos causados por esse tipo de resíduos, buscando atender a legislação pertinente, a indicação de áreas aptas à implantação de aterros de resíduos de construção e demolição ou aterro classe A faz-se necessária. Para isso, foi utilizada a ferramenta de Sistema de Informação Geográfica (SIG), apoiada pela análise e decisão por multicritérios. O SIG utilizado como ferramenta base na identificação de possíveis áreas adequadas tem como vantagem: o baixo custo; maior rapidez no processo de tomada de decisão e a diversidade de cenários que podem ser analisados ao mesmo tempo, sendo de grande valia nas etapas de gerenciamento dos resíduos de construção e demolição. Integrando o SIG com a ferramenta de análise e tomada de decisão por multicritérios, tem-se como resultado a indicação de possíveis áreas aptas à implantação de aterros de construção civil e inertes para o Núcleo Central Urbano da Região Metropolitana de Curitiba. / The construction and demolition (C&D) waste when do not have a proper final disposal; result in social, economic and environmental problems. The disposal often happens in inappropriate locations and demonstrates the necessity of adequate areas for the waste final disposal but also the selected site must be in accordance with local standards and regulations. Considering all these facts, the aim of this work is to indicate possible suitable areas for C&D waste landfill, using the Geographic Information System (GIS) tool, supported by Multi-criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). The GIS used as a basic tool to identify possible suitable areas has several advantages: low cost; faster decision-making process and various scenarios can be analyzed simultaneously, being a valuable tool in all the construction and demolition waste management steps. Integrating GIS with MCDA has resulted in the indication of possible suitable areas for C&D waste disposal, having as a study area the Urban Central Core of Metropolitan Region of Curitiba. Keywords: Geographic Information System. Co

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The primary objective of this research involves mapping out and validating the existence of sub surface drainage tiles in a given cropland using Remote Sensing and GIS methodologies. The process is dependent on soil edge differentiation found in lighter versus darker IR reflectance values from tiled vs. untiled soils patches. Data is collected from various sources and a primary classifier is created using secondary field variables such as soil type, topography and land Use and land cover (LULC). The classifier mask reduces computational time and allows application of various filtering algorithms for detection of edges. The filtered image allows an efficient feature recognition platform allowing the tile drains to be better identified. User defined methods and natural vision based methodologies are also developed or adopted as novel techniques for edge detection. The generated results are validated with field data sets which were established using Ground Penetration Radar (GPR) studies. Overlay efficiency is calculated for each methodology along with omission and commission errors. This comparison yields adaptable and efficient edge detection techniques which can be used for similar areas allowing further development of the tile detection process.

Since the earliest reported cases of HIV/AIDS probably in 1959 in Africa, there has been a consistent progression in the new HIV/AIDS infection cases. In South Africa, Gauteng, records one of the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence rates in the country. The Department of Health (DOH) South Africa conducts ongoing studies on HIV/AIDS at provincial levels; these studies monitor the prevalence of HIV/AIDS amongst pregnant women attending antenatal clinics, as a tool for determining and monitoring the prevalence, trends, patterns and spread of the disease in the general population. This study analyses sentinel and spatial data collected from the (DOH) and Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) respectively, and depicts them in the form of spatial maps, and then critically analyses the spatial patterns that occur. The research findings would hopefully contribute to the overall knowledge of HIV/AIDS and provide framework and relevant literature for further investigation. / Geography / M.Sc. (Geography)

Since the earliest reported cases of HIV/AIDS probably in 1959 in Africa, there has been a consistent progression in the new HIV/AIDS infection cases. In South Africa, Gauteng, records one of the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence rates in the country. The Department of Health (DOH) South Africa conducts ongoing studies on HIV/AIDS at provincial levels; these studies monitor the prevalence of HIV/AIDS amongst pregnant women attending antenatal clinics, as a tool for determining and monitoring the prevalence, trends, patterns and spread of the disease in the general population. This study analyses sentinel and spatial data collected from the (DOH) and Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) respectively, and depicts them in the form of spatial maps, and then critically analyses the spatial patterns that occur. The research findings would hopefully contribute to the overall knowledge of HIV/AIDS and provide framework and relevant literature for further investigation. / Geography / M.Sc. (Geography)

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Identifying spatial and temporal patterns of disease occurrence by mapping the residential locations of affected people can provide information that informs response by public health practitioners and improves understanding in epidemiological research. A common method of locating patients at the individual level is geocoding residential addresses stored in electronic medical records (EMRs) using address matching procedures in a geographic information system (GIS). While the process of geocoding is becoming more common in public health studies, few researchers take the time to examine the effects of using different address databases on match rate and positional accuracy of the geocoded results. This research examined and compared accuracy and match rate resulting from four commonly-used geocoding databases applied to sample of 59,341 subjects residing in and around Marion County/ Indianapolis, IN. The results are intended to inform researchers on the benefits and downsides to their selection of a database to geocode patient addresses in EMRs.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Over the past two decades, northern parts of the United States have experienced extreme heat conditions. Some of the notable heat wave impacts have occurred in Chicago in 1995 with over 600 reported deaths and in Philadelphia in 1993 with over 180 reported deaths. The distribution of extreme heat events in Indianapolis has varied since the year 2000. The Urban Heat Island effect has caused the temperatures to rise unusually high during the summer months. Although the number of reported deaths in Indianapolis is smaller when compared to Chicago and Philadelphia, the heat wave in the year 2010 affected primarily the vulnerable population comprised of the elderly and the lower socio-economic groups. Studying the spatial distribution of high temperatures in the vulnerable areas helps determine not only the extent of the heat affected areas, but also to devise strategies and methods to plan, mitigate, and tackle extreme heat. In addition, examining spatial patterns of vulnerability can aid in development of a heat warning system to alert the populations at risk during extreme heat events. This study focuses on the qualitative and quantitative methods used to measure extreme heat events. Land surface temperatures obtained from the Landsat TM images provide useful means by which the spatial distribution of temperatures can be studied in relation to the temporal changes and socioeconomic vulnerability. The percentile method used, helps to determine the vulnerable areas and their extents. The maximum temperatures measured using LST conversion of the original digital number values of the Landsat TM images is reliable in terms of identifying the heat-affected regions.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Environmental planning is very cumbersome work for environmentalists, government agencies like USDA and NRCS, and farmers. There are a number of conflicts and issues involved in such a decision making process. This research is based on the work to provide a common platform for environmental planning called WRESTORE (Watershed Restoration using Spatio-Temporal Optimization of Resources). We have designed a system that can be used to provide the best management practices for environmental planning. A distributed system was designed to combine high performance computing power of clusters/supercomputers in running various environmental model simulations. The system is designed to be a multi-user system just like a multi-user operating system. A number of stakeholders can log-on and run environmental model simulations simultaneously, seamlessly collaborate, and make collective judgments by visualizing their landscapes. In the research, we identified challenges in running such a system and proposed various solutions. One challenge was the lack of fast optimization algorithm. In our research, several algorithms are utilized such as Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Learning Automaton (LA). However, the criticism is that LA has a slow rate of convergence and that both LA and GA have the problem of getting stuck in local optima. We tried to solve the multi-objective problems using LA in batch mode to make the learning faster and accurate. The problems where the evaluation of the fitness functions for optimization is a bottleneck, like running environmental model simulation, evaluation of a number of such models in parallel can give considerable speed-up. In the multi-objective LA, different weight pair solutions were evaluated independently. We created their parallel versions to make them practically faster in computation. Additionally, we extended the parallelism concept with the batch mode learning. Another challenge we faced was in User Modeling. There are a number of User Modeling techniques available. Selection of the best user modeling technique is a hard problem. In this research, we modeled user's preferences and search criteria using an ANN (Artificial Neural Network). Training an ANN with limited data is not always feasible. There are many situations where a simple modeling technique works better if the learning data set is small. We formulated ways to fine tune the ANN in case of limited data and also introduced the concept of Deep Learning in User Modeling for environmental planning system.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The objective of this research is to examine the development of the California alcohol outlets over time and the relationship between neighborhood characteristics and densities of the alcohol outlets. Two types of advanced analyses were done after the usual preliminary description of data. Firstly, fixed and random effects linear regression were used for the county panel data across time (1945-2010) with a dummy variable added to capture the change in law regarding limitations on alcohol outlets density. Secondly, a Bayesian spatio-temporal Poisson regression of the census tract panel data was conducted to capture recent availability of population characteristics affecting outlet density. The spatial Conditional Autoregressive model was embedded in the Poisson regression to detect spatial dependency of unexplained variance of alcohol outlet density. The results show that the alcohol outlets density reduced under the limitation law over time. However, it was no more effective in reducing the growth of alcohol outlets after the limitation was modified to be more restrictive. Poorer, higher vacancy rate and lower percentage of Black neighborhoods tend to have higher alcohol outlet density (numbers of alcohol outlets to population ratio) for both on-sale general and off-sale general. Other characteristics like percentage of Hispanics, percentage of Asians, percentage of younger population and median income of adjacency neighbors were associated with densities of on-sale general and off sale general alcohol outlets. Some regions like the San Francisco Bay area and the Greater Los Angeles area have more alcohol outlets than the predictions of neighborhood characteristics included in the model.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Land use alterations have been major drivers for modifying hydrologic cycles in many watersheds nationwide. Imbalances in this cycle have led to unexpected or extreme changes in flood and drought patterns and intensities, severe impairment of rivers and streams due to pollutants, and extensive economic losses to affected communities. Eagle Creek Watershed (ECW) is a typical Midwestern agricultural watershed with a growing urban land-use that has been affected by these problems. Structural solutions, such as ditches and tiles, have helped in the past to reduce the flooding problem in the upland agricultural area. But these structures have led to extensive flooding and water quality problems downstream and loss of moisture storage in the soil upstream. It has been suggested that re-naturalization of watershed hydrology via a spatially-distributed implementation of non-structural and structural conservation practices, such as cover crops, wetlands, riparian buffers, grassed waterways, etc. will help to reduce these problems by improving the upland runoff (storing water temporally as moisture in the soil or in depression storages). However, spatial implementation of these upland storage practices poses hurdles not only due to the large number of possible alternatives offered by physical models, but also by the effect of tenure, social attitudes, and behaviors of landowners that could further add complexities on whether and how these practices are adopted and effectively implemented for benefits. This study investigates (a) how landowner tenure and attitudes can be used to identify promising conservation practices in an agricultural watershed, (b) how the different attitudes and preferences of stakeholders can modify the effectiveness of solutions obtained via classic optimization approaches that do not include the influence of social attitudes in a watershed, and (c) how spatial distribution of landowner tenure affects the spatial optimization of conservation practices on a watershed scale. Results showed two main preferred practices, one for an economic evaluation (filter strips) and one for an environmental perspective (wetlands). A land tenure comparison showed differences in spatial distribution of systems considering all the conservation practices. It also was observed that cash renters selected practices will provide a better cost-revenue relation than the selected optimal solution.