Geographies, Volume 2, Issue 1 (March 2022) – 10 articles

This paper considers whether existing approaches for quantifying variables in cellular automata (CA) modelling adequately incorporate all the relevant factors in typical actor decisions underpinning urban development. A survey of developers and planners is used to identify factors they incorporate to allow for or proceed with development, using South East Queensland as a reference region. Three types of decision factors are identified and ranked in order of importance: those that are already modelled in CA applications; those that are not modelled but are quantifiable; and those that are not (easily) quantifiable because they are subjective in nature. Factors identified in the second category include development height/scale, open space supply, and existing infrastructure capacity. Factors identified in the third category include political intent, community opposition, and lifestyle quality. Drawing on our analysis of these factors we suggest how and to what extent survey data might be used to address the challenges of incorporating actor variables into the CA modelling of urban change. The paper represents the first attempt to review what decision factors should be included in CA modelling, and how this might be enabled. Full article

The construction industry relies on construction cost indexes to prepare cost estimate benchmarks and develop cost estimates. Subsequently, government agencies, non-profit organizations, and private companies routinely publish construction cost indexes for cities. Currently, all construction cost indexes are released in a tabular format for 649 cities across the conterminous United States, which is not effective in illustrating construction cost variations at the national level. This study explored the utility of various established interpolation methods and mapping techniques to visualize construction cost indexes at the national level. Geovisualization techniques such as thematic mapping provide a visual representation of construction cost data in addition to traditional tabular formats. This study explored the utility of Thiessen polygon and inverse distance weighted (IDW) methods to create thematic maps which can be used to interactively visualize construction costs at the national level. A qualitative comparison revealed that the IDW method can produce the most intuitive, interactive, and continuous surface maps to identify dynamic and previously unrecognized patterns. These continuous surface maps allow construction practitioners and academics, real estate developers, and the public to locate the geographic proximity of high or low construction costs while cost change maps allow investors and businesses to identify patterns in changing construction costs over a certain period. This work contributes to the body of knowledge by introducing interpolated maps for visualizing any construction cost-related indexes at a large scale such as the national level. Full article

In this article, geovisualization is used for the presentation and interpretation of spatial analysis results concerning several house attributes. For that purpose, point data for houses in the region of Attica, Greece are analyzed. The data concern houses for sale and comprise structural characteristics, such as size, age and floor, as well as locational attributes. Geovisualization of house characteristics is performed employing spatial interpolation techniques, kriging techniques, in particular. Spatial autocorrelation in the data is examined through the calculation of the Moran’s I coefficient, while spatial clusters of houses with similar characteristics are identified using the Getis-Ord Gi* local spatial autocorrelation coefficient. Finally, a model is developed in order to predict house prices according to several structural and locational characteristics. In that respect, a classic hedonic pricing model is constructed, which is consequently developed as a geographically weighted regression (GWR) model in a GIS environment. The results of this model indicate that two characteristics, i.e., size and age, account for most of the variability in house prices in the study region. Since GWR is a local model producing different regression parameters for each observation, it is possible to obtain the spatial distribution of the regression parameters, which indicate the significance of the house characteristics for price determination in different locations in the study area. Full article

Color occupies a prominent place in the bibliography of cartography, as it is an important element in the formation of cartographic symbolization. Apart from the technical issues of its application to maps, color theory is one of the elements that connect maps with art. In this paper various cartographic trends and their origins are examined and correlated with the artistic periods in which they were developed in order to investigate and document the extent to which maps follow the artistic movements and, particularly in the art of painting, concerning the form and the content of the maps and whether color can be used as an identification element of the art trend and the corresponding period. The research spans from the end of the Middle Ages to the 21st century and is referred spatially in Western Europe, including Italy. The comparison of colors is made in both descriptive and quantitative terms through the commentary of hue, brightness, and saturation, as well as through plotting them in the color wheel, a process that allows an overview of the range and location of color sequences. Concluding, the paintings and maps that were selected and examined in detail support the effect of painting on maps, without implying that it is intentional. Full article

Protected areas (PAs) transform over time due to natural and anthropogenic processes, resulting in the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. As current and projected climatic trends are poised to pressurize the sustainability of PAs, analyses of the existing perturbations are crucial for providing valuable insights that will facilitate conservation management. In this study, land cover change, landscape characteristics, and spatiotemporal patterns of the vegetation intensity in the Kasungu National Park (area = 2445.10 km²) in Malawi were assessed using Landsat data (1997, 2008 and 2018) in a Fuzzy K-Means unsupervised classification. The findings reveal that a 21.12% forest cover loss occurred from 1997 to 2018: an average annual loss of 1.09%. Transition analyses of the land cover changes revealed that forest to shrubs conversion was the main form of land cover transition, while conversions from shrubs (3.51%) and bare land (3.48%) to forest over the two decades were comparatively lower, signifying a very low rate of forest regeneration. The remaining forest cover in the park was aggregated in a small land area with dissimilar landscape characteristics. Vegetation intensity and vigor were lower mainly in the eastern part of the park in 2018. The findings have implications for conservation management in the context of climate change and the growing demand for ecosystem services in forest-dependent localities. Full article

Mapping ancient roads is crucial to tell credible geospatial stories about where, how, or why different people might have travelled or transported materials within and between places in the distant past. Achieving this process is challenging and commonly accomplished by means of archaeological and GIS methods and materials. It is not uncommon for different experts employing these methods to generate inconsistent delineations of the same ancient roads, creating confusion about how to produce knowledge and decisions based on multiple geospatial perspectives. This yet to be adequately addressed problem motivates our desire to enrich existing literature on the nature and extents of these differences. We juxtapose GIS and archaeologically generated road maps for northern Etruria, a region of ancient Italy with a well-developed road network built by the Etruscans and Romans. We reveal map differences through a map comparison approach that integrates a broad set of qualitative and quantitative measures plus geospatial concepts and strategies. The differences are evident in route locations, sinuosities, lengths, and complexities of the terrains on which the routes were set as defined by subtle variations in elevation, slope, and ruggedness. They ranged from 11.2–34.4 km in road length, 0–65.7 m in road relief, 1.0–13.5% in mean road grade, 0.07–0.79 in detour indices and 0.19–3.08 for mean terrain roughness indices, all of which can be considerable depending on application. Taken together, the measures proved effective in furthering our understanding of the range of possible disagreements between ancient linear features mapped by different experts and methods and are extensible for other application areas. They point to the importance of explicitly acknowledging and maintaining all usable perspectives in geospatial databases as well as visualization and analysis processes, regardless of levels of disagreement, and especially where ground-truth informed assessments cannot be reliably performed. Full article

Fire susceptibility modeling is crucial for sustaining and managing forests among many other valuable land resources. With 56% of its area covered by forests, Arkansas is known as the “natural state”. About 1000 wildfires occurred and burned more than 10,000 acres each year during 1981–2018. In this paper, we use remote-sensing-based machine learning methods to address the natural and anthropogenic factors influencing wildfires and model fire susceptibility in Arkansas. Among the 15 explored variables, potential evapotranspiration, soil moisture, Palmer drought severity index, and dry season precipitation were recognized as the most significant factors contributing to the fire density. The obtained R-squared values are significant, with 0.99 for training the model and 0.92 for the validation. The results show that the Ouachita National Forest and the Ozark Forest, in west-central and west Arkansas, respectively, have the highest susceptibility to wildfires. The southern part of Arkansas has low-to-moderate fire susceptibility, while the eastern part of the state has the lowest fire susceptibility. These new results for Arkansas demonstrate the potency of remote-sensing-based random forest in predicting fire susceptibility at the state level that can be adapted to study fires in other states and help with fire preparedness to reduce loss and save the precious environment. Full article

Climate change is expected to alter prevailing temperature, precipitation, cloud cover, and humidity this century, thereby modifying insect demographic processes and possibly increasing the frequency and intensity of rangeland and crop impacts by pest insects. We leveraged ten years of migratory grasshopper (Melanoplus sanguinipes) field surveys to assess the response of nymph recruitment to projected climate conditions through the year 2040. Melanoplus sanguinipes is the foremost pest of grain, oilseed, pulse, and rangeland forage crops in the western United States. To assess nymph recruitment, we developed a multi-level, joint modeling framework that individually assessed nymph and adult life stages while concurrently incorporating density-dependence and accounting for observation bias connected to preferential sampling. Our results indicated that nymph recruitment rates will exhibit strong geographic variation under projected climate change, with population sizes at many locations being comparable to those historically observed, but other locations experiencing increased insect abundances. Our findings suggest that alterations to prevailing temperature and precipitation regimes as instigated by climate change will amplify recruitment, thereby enlarging population sizes and potentially intensifying agricultural pest impacts by 2040. Full article

Urbanization is an unavoidable process of social and economic growth in modern times. However, the speed with which urbanization is taking place produces complex environmental changes. It has affected the surface albedo and roughness of the soil, thereby modulating hydrological and ecological systems, which in turn has affected regional and local climate systems. In developing countries of South Asia, rampant and unplanned urbanization has created a complex system of adverse environmental scenarios. Similar is the case in India. The state of the urban environment across India is degrading so quickly that the long-term sustainability of its cities is endangered. Many metropolitan cities in India are witnessing the harmful impacts of urbanization on their land ecology. In this context, remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS) based assessments provide a comprehensive and effective analysis of the rate and the impact of urbanization. The present study focuses on understanding the spatiotemporal characteristics of urban growth and its implications on the geomorphology of the Panchkula District, Haryana, one of the fastest-growing urban centers in India. The study links the changes in land use/land cover (LULC) with the changing geomorphology of the study area using satellite remote sensing and GIS. The results showed that between 1980 and 2020, agricultural (+73.71%), built-up (+84.66%), and forest (+4.07%) classes of land increased in contrast to that of the fallow land (−76.80%) and riverbed (−50.86%) classes that have decreased in spatial extents. It has been observed that the hill geomorphological class had decreased in the area owing to conversion to industrial and built-up activities. Assessment of the environmental quality of cities involves multiple disciplines that call for a significant amount of scientific evaluation and strong decision making, and the present study shall lay down the baseline analysis of the impact of changing LULC on the geomorphological setup of the selected urban center. Full article