Active cave management, which represents any continuous action to conserve, restore, or protect a cave environment, is virtually non-existent in west-central Florida. This study focuses on developing an inventory to rank terrestrial caves in west-central Florida by management priority. A GIS-based cave inventory system, including a cave sensitivity index and cave disturbance index, were used as a tool to gain an understanding of the management priority of west-central Florida caves. The inventory was applied to 36 terrestrial caves in west-central Florida, which demonstrated a wide range of sensitivity and disturbance. The results show that by relying solely on sensitivity and disturbance scores, management priority may not be accurately determined. Further examination revealed that ownership and management status also affect management priority. Consequently, cave sensitivity, disturbance, ownership, or management status does not solely indicate management priority. Rather, the management priority of caves in west-central Florida depends on a number of complicated, interwoven factors, and the goal of management must be examined holistically. Each cave must be individually examined for its sensitivity, disturbance, resources, management, and social and physical context in order to gain an understanding of management priority. Nonetheless, the cave inventory system developed for this project was used to gain a general understanding of which caves hold management priority, based on the cave manager's objectives. In order to ensure the conservation and protection of west-central Florida terrestrial caves, support from county or state government, combined with cave inventory data, is crucial in developing sound management policy.

African Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities in the U.S. continue to face conditions of residential and educational segregation, lower socioeconomic status, and higher rates of mortality than whites. Better theory-based research that uses community and individual level factors to explain how health disparities are created and perpetuated is needed. The Community Context and Health Disparities Model, which extends the work of Schulz and Northridge (2004) with elements described by Williams and Collins (2001), is described. This framework identifies the pathways by which characteristics of the physical, built, social, economic, and healthcare environments impact health and are mediated by individual traits. Two measures of the healthcare environment, physician density and emergency room hospital accessibility, are created using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), compared to traditional measures of these concepts, and contrasted across racial and ethnic populations. The Community Context and Health Disparities Model is implemented to understand physical and mental health disparities among a sample of older adults in Miami-Dade County who were participants in the Survey of Older Floridians using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). Exogenous measures of each community domain, including the healthcare measures created, are used as community-level predictors of self-rated health and number of depressive symptoms. The results show that community poverty rate predicts self-rated health, but is no longer significant after individual attributes are controlled. There is a significant interaction between Hispanic ethnicity and community poverty associated with self-rated health. Hispanics are negatively impacted by community poverty but other ethnic groups are not. Depressive symptoms are found to be primarily explained by individual characteristics. Future research, practice recommendations and policy implications of these findings are described.

The projected growth in human population, rapid urbanization, and expansion of structures like highways and canals pose a major threat to the future survival of wildlife, particularly large terrestrial mammals. In many cases, wild animal populations have been restricted to fragmented habitat islands due to anthropogenic developments, endangering them to local extinction. Current and future wildlife conservation and management strategies are leading to the implementation of mitigation measures such as creation of wildlife habitat corridors. In this light, novel and interdisciplinary research methods such as approaches in the field of landscape genetics are proving to be increasingly useful and necessary for assessing the status of wildlife populations and furthering efficacy of conservation programs and management efforts. In this 5-year research study, I review literature in the field of landscape genetics, highlighting studies and their applications toward wildlife conservation over the past decade (2005-2014). I then use a landscape genetic approach to understand the potential impact of natural and human-made barriers in and around the northern Sonoran Desert on one of the widest-ranging mammals in the world, the mountain lion (Puma concolor). I employ recently developed genetic tools to assess the current population genetic status of mountain lions in this region and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools to relate observations to landscape features through interpretive maps. I further investigate the utility of GIS and expert-based models in connectivity conservation and suggest validating them with information on genetic relatedness and functional connectivity among mountain lions. Lastly, in many parts of this document, I emphasize the use of these methods and data sharing in conservation planning as well as wildlife management.

Branches of complexity theory have been widely employed in geographic information systems (GIS) to explore phenomena that appear in urban environments. Among these, space syntax, as an urban morphological application of complexity theory, has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Accordingly, many computer-based tools have been developed to realize related analysis spatially, especially those that can be integrated as functions with GIS. In this thesis, a space syntax tool – Axwoman – is redeveloped and tested as an extension of ESRI ArcGIS Desktop in order to fulfill certain specific needs in urban morphological analysis. It is primarily used to calculate all space syntax measures for several urban systems and to explore the relationships between these measures. To meet the needs for this new version of Axwoman, several functions have been updated and changed, for drawing, coloring, and classifying axial lines as maps for visual thinking; ticking overpasses and excluding them from computing space syntax parameters; and integrating AxialGen and Axwoman. In accordance with this, several case studies have been performed on the urban street networks in large cities. In this paper, Stockholm was chosen as the study object at both the urban level and the building level. After the scaling analysis and time efficiency analysis, the results are also interpreted from a structural point of view and in terms of how the function of space is subject to its morphological structure. Finally, the connectivity of axial lines (a spatial measurement in space syntax theory) was found to follow a power-law distribution. Through this work, the new edition of Axwoman generating satisfactory outputs, the research have proved that the connectivity of axial lines follows a lognormal distribution or a power-law-like distribution, which is one of the heavy-tailed distributions. In addition, it was have found that axial lines better for capture the underlying urban morphologies showed in their study on redefining the generated axial lines from street center lines. Moreover, fewer longest axial lines will show up on the maps, just as coincidental as the shape of mental maps, which proved that the axial line representations can be a powerful tool for urban studies.

The work presented in this dissertation informs on river network modeling at large scales using geographic information systems, parallel computing and the latest advancements of atmospheric and land surface modeling. This work is motivated by the availability of a vector-based Geographic Information System dataset that describes the networks of streams and rivers in the United States, and how they are connected. A land surface model called Noah-distributed is used to provide lateral inflow to an NHDPlus river network in the Guadalupe River Basin in Texas. Challenges related to the projection of gridded hydrographic data from a coordinate system to another are investigated. The different representations of the shape of the Earth used in atmospheric science (spherical) and hydrology (spheroidal) can lead to a significant North-South shift on the order of 20 km at mid latitudes. A river network model called RAPID is developed and applied in a four-year study of the Guadalupe and San Antonio River Basins in Texas using the river network of NHDPlus. Gage measurements are used to estimate flow wave celerities in a river network and to assess the quality of RAPID flow computations. The performance of RAPID in a massively-parallel computing environment is tested and further investigation of its scalability is needed before using RAPID at the state or federal level. The replacement by RAPID of the river routing scheme used in SIM-France -- a hydro-meteorological model -- is investigated in a ten-year study of river flow in France. While the formulation of RAPID improves the functionality of SIM-France, the flow simulations are comparable in accuracy to those previously obtained by SIM-France. Sub-basin parameterization was found to improve model results. A single criterion for quantifying the quality of river flow simulations using several river gages globally in a river network is developed that normalizes the square error of modeled flow to allow equal treatment of all gaging stations regardless of the magnitude of flow. The use of this criterion as the cost function for parameter estimation in RAPID allows better results than by increasing the degree of spatial variability in model parameters. / text

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are useful in analyzing and visualizing database information. Specifically, the field of geotechnical engineering stands to benefit from a database encompassing GIS; as, geotechnical data varies spatially. The City of Austin Water Utility realized the advantages of a geotechnical database utilizing GIS which led to the motivation of designing a database for Austin, Texas. The main objective is to provide a detailed explanation of the design of a GIS-relational geotechnical database for Austin, Texas. In addition, several examples of useful methods of analyzing geotechnical data spatially are included. The examples show the identification of faults, the uses of structural contour maps, summarization of data through plots and tables, and analyzing temporal piezometric conditions. The idea of a database is to organize and store data in a basic efficient format so that information is not duplicated. Database queries are then used to combine and rearrange the data within the database through relationships. The queries are then connected to GIS for intelligent visualization. This process is designed specifically for the geologic conditions that exist in Austin, Texas. Understanding the geotechnical engineering state of practice is important when designing a database that will encompass geotechnical data for a given region. The City of Austin relies on experience and the geotechnical report filing systems to initially plan future projects around geologic conditions. With the help of a geotechnical database, the information from geotechnical reports is a “computer click” away. Also, the geotechnical data from multiple reports is viewable at one time in both a 2 and 3 dimensional environments through GIS. Database features coupled with GIS tools proves to be an effective way for engineers and geologists to use geotechnical data. / text

Urban agriculture and the local food movement have taken main stage both in academic discourse and public and political media. Socio-environmental downfalls of our current industrial food systems have been highlighted, compelling the public and political spheres to engage in activities that support the integration of local, urban food-growing systems. This thesis aims to contribute to that integration by examining possibilities for urban agriculture within the city limits of Atlanta. Through geospatial analysis methods and consultation of city and county property records, possible future sites were ascertained using socioeconomic and ecological factors, with 21 key neighborhoods found to have the greatest potential and need to transform existing land use for agricultural purposes. This research contributes to the larger goal of systemic integration of urban and local food systems into our current economic, political and social landscape, and the study is framed using social theoretical insights from urban geography. While further examination of these urban agricultural food systems is vital, this thesis contributes to broader discussions about urban environmental sustainability and supports the roots of the local food movement by identifying possible sites for food cultivation and food markets.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Geography and Geology / Master / Master of Geographic Information System

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Geography / Master / Master of Geographic Information System

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Geography / Master / Master of Geographic Information System