The California Electric Power Crisis: Lessons for Other States

Distinguishing forested wetland from dry forest using aerial photographs is handicapped because photographs often do not reveal the presence of water below tree canopies. Radar images obtained by the Seasat satellite reveal forested wetland as highly reflective patterns on the coastal plain between Maryland and Florida. Seasat radar images may complement aerial photographs for compiling maps of wetland. A test with experienced photointerpreters revealed that interpretation accuracy was significantly higher when using Seasat radar images than when using only conventional sources.     

Ants in Labyrinths: Lessons for Critical Landscapes

Percolation theory provides a starting point for models for the movement of organisms in fragmented landscapes. We simulated six general rules for movement on three general landscape patterns with different degrees of habitat fragmentation. Fragmentation pattern affects migration success. Organisms moving within habitat patches are restricted by fragmentation, but the response is less abrupt as one moves from random to hierarchical to fractal landscapes, respectively. Success for organisms moving along edges is more strongly differentiated by landscape pattern. Success and speed are usually directly related, but indirect relations may indicate rare but efficient pathways or cul-de-sacs. We propose that general rules can be applied to the identification of landscapes near critical levels of fragmentation that will respond sensitively to increases in fragmentation or efforts at restoration.     

Ants in Labyrinths: Lessons for Critical Landscapes

Percolation theory provides a starting point for models for the movement of organisms in fragmented landscapes. We simulated six general rules for movement on three general landscape patterns with different degrees of habitat fragmentation. Fragmentation pattern affects migration success. Organisms moving within habitat patches are restricted by fragmentation, but the response is less abrupt as one moves from random to hierarchical to fractal landscapes, respectively. Success for organisms moving along edges is more strongly differentiated by landscape pattern. Success and speed are usually directly related, but indirect relations may indicate rare but efficient pathways or cul-de-sacs. We propose that general rules can be applied to the identification of landscapes near critical levels of fragmentation that will respond sensitively to increases in fragmentation or efforts at restoration.     

The Cap and Water Trading in Australian Murray-Darling Basin for Wetlands Protection:The Possible Lessons for China

As the consequence of climate change, water that is received in Australian Murray-Darling Basin wetlands is declining and agricultural water demands are increasing. In order to keep the water use balance between environment protection including wetland protection and irrigation water use, the Australian government adopted a series of reforms in Murray-Darling Basin to address the environmental water shortage problem and encourage irrigators to use water more efficiently and plant high economic value crop. The water trading and cap are two major reforms in this process.In order to match up the environmental water demand such as wetland water use, based on the seasonal rainfall, dam level and environmental water demand, the cap system seasonally allocate how much water the irrigators can access as per water licenses. As the cap dramatically reduced the water access for irrigators, the water trading is aiming to use limited agricultural water more efficiently. The water trading scheme separate the water use right from the land property right and allow Australian farmers to trade their water licenses in the market. Water trading encouraged farmers who plant low value crops such as wheat and canola transfer their water entitles to farmers who plant high value crops such as grape. In the drought seasons, The Australian government can purchase the water licenses from irrigators to increase the environmental flows.This Australian water management system represents the most complicated and effective environmental and agricultural water use management in this world. There are possible many lessons that will help China to better manage the water use for wetland protection and farming practices.     

Closing the Gap Between Researchers and Policymakers: Lessons from the History of Fisheries Management in the United States

Increases in sea surface temperature have led to distributional changes in many commercially exploited fish species. These changes have already led to conflict over mackerel fisheries, arising from demand for fair resource apportionment and desire to manage the fishery sustainably. In order to develop adaptable management strategies for complex ocean fishery systems, policymakers and researchers must move beyond a reactive producer–consumer relationship to develop proactive, supportive collaborations. The history of U.S. national fisheries management is presented as an example of this transition. Building cooperative capacity over the last two centuries has lead to a more systematic understanding of the oceans, and has led to success in reducing the number of overfished stocks. Similar development of cooperation between policymakers and researchers on an international scale may be the surest way to develop management strategies adaptable enough to withstand challenges posed by future climate change.     

The Use of Storytelling for Understanding Women's Desires to Tan: Lessons from the Field

This paper presents reflections on a research project in women's health, providing both substantive findings surrounding tanning and social status and methodological recommendations for future research. The project under review utilized a picture-elicited storytelling method to: a) understand how women link tanned, bronzed skin to health, status, and attractiveness; and b) test the effectiveness of picture-elicited storytelling as a research method. The project found that, when tanning, women use their bodies to inscribe the social norm of the bronzed aesthetic. While women indicate considerable knowledge of the health dangers of tanning, they continue to link tanned skin to beauty, status, and attractiveness. Further, the research project found that the use of picture-elicited storytelling as a method is potentially powerful but requires considerable attention to concerns of power and representation on the part of the research team.     

The right to infrastructure: a struggle for sanitation in Fresno,California homeless encampments

In 2013, Fresno, California was home to more than 5,000 homeless people, many of whom took refuge in sprawling downtown encampments. Citing unsanitary conditions, Fresno officials implemented a policy of bulldozing the encampments while providing housing vouchers to a small number of residents. Yet homeless Fresnans by and large demanded the provision of sanitation in the encampments as an alternative to eviction. In doing so, they invoked their right to urban infrastructure. Drawing from literature on informal housing in the Global South, this paper argues that individual housing rights present a limited framework through which to understand homeless people’s right to the city, and that a truly radical right to the city should reflect the demand for sanitation infrastructure emerging from the streets.     

The Australian Wool Crisis: Farm Adjustment Pressures and Strategies

Farm adjustment has resulted from the present crisis of production within the Australian agricultural sector. Farm adjustment pressures of the wool growers of the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales are outlined. The primary management strategies adopted by the wool producers are identified. Three farm adjustment strategies were noted; extensification, diversification and expansion. Choice of farm strategy was dependent on the characteristics of both the individual farm and farmer.     

The Distribution of Air Pollution in California: A Study in Spatial Interaction

Abstract

The landscape diversity of California provides abundant opportunity for the geographical investigation of physical and cultural problems. Air pollution has been one major environmental problem long identified in California. With relatively rapid population growth and urban development over the 1940 to 1970 period, the problem seems to have intensified. The map of air quality prepared by Middleton provided an initial geographical portrayal of the problem of air quality in California and gave particular attention to the existence of several centers of relatively high air pollution concentration (Figure 1).¹

The purpose of the following will be to discuss the distribution of air pollution in California through (1) the introduction of a method of measurement of the distribution of air quality, and (2) the explanation of the distribution interms of a spatial interaction model of air quality.     

Current Material for the Geography Teacher: Substitution of Other Materials for Wood Increasing

Abstract

Geography And Man's Environment. By Arthur N. Strahler and Alan H. Strahler. New York: John Wiley &; Sons, 1977. Pp. xi + 525.

Order Upon the Land: The U.S. Rectangular Land Survey and the Upper Mississippi Country. By Hildegard Binder Johnson. The Andrew H. Clark Series in the Historical Geography of North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Pp. 268, $9.00 and $5.00.

The Earth in Profile: A Physical Geography. By David Greenland and Harm J. de Blij. New York: Canfield Press, Harper &; Row, 1977. Pp. xi + 468.

Global Perspectives on Ecology. Edited by Thomas C. Emmel. Palo Alto, Calif.: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1977. Pp. viii + 522, $6.95.

Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. By Yi-Fu Tuan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Pp. vi + 235, $12.95.

African Survey. By Alan C. G. Best and Harm J. de Blij. New York: John Wiley &; Sons, 1977. Pp. xi + 626, $17.95.     

An Urban Policy Framework for Culture-oriented Economic Development: Lessons from the Netherlands

Over the past few decades, culture and creativity have been at the center of the shift in urban economies toward the non-material and the relational. In the new "cultural-economic" paradigm, the hypermobile class of creative workers and symbolic mediators is considered the vanguard of the knowledge society, and is nurtured and competed for by an increasing number of ambitious city governments. However, the integration of creative talent into the urban economy is not without problems: many cities are rapidly coming to realize that "traditional" approaches to economic development offer little help in the case of cultural industries, and that their impacts could be short-lived or socially ambivalent. More insight is thus needed into the dynamic relationships between culture and urban development, and on their implications for policymaking. This study is an attempt to build such knowledge, using qualitative information on four Dutch cities that have chosen culture as one of the spearheads of urban policy: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Eindhoven.     

The modern distribution of chironomid sub-fossils (Insecta: Diptera) in the Sierra Nevada, California: Potential for paleoclimatic reconstructions

Surface lake sediment was recovered from 57 lakes along an elevation gradient in the central, eastern Sierra Nevada of California. The surface sediment was analysed for subfossil chironomid remains in order to assess the modern distribution of chironomids in the region. The lakes sampled for the calibration dataset were between 2.0 and 40.0 m in depth, spanned an altitudinal gradient of 1360 m and a surface water temperature gradient of approximately 14 °C. Redundancy analysis (RDA) identified that five of the measured environmental variables – surface water temperature, elevation, depth, strontium, particulate organic carbon – accounted for a statistically significant amount of the variance in chironomid community composition. Quantitative transfer functions, based on weighted-averaging (WA), partial least squares (PLS) and weighted-averaging partial least squares (WA-PLS), were developed to estimate surface water temperature from the chironomid assemblages. The best model was a WA model with classical deshrinking, which had a relatively high coefficient of determination (r² = 0.73), low root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP = 1.2 °C) and a low maximum bias (0.90 °C). The results from this study suggest that robust quantitative estimates of past surface water temperature can be derived from the application of these models to fossil chironomid assemblages preserved in late-Quaternary lake sediment in this region.     

Secondary succession following cultivation in an arid ecosystem: The Owens Valley,California

Few old-field succession studies have been conducted in arid ecosystems and there is some question if classical secondary succession occurs in arid environments. In order to determine if old-field succession does occur under arid conditions, we sampled 40 previously-cultivated sites abandoned over a period of 29–80 years in the Owens Valley, California. We compared vegetation development at these 40 old fields to vegetation composition on 17 adjacent uncultivated reference sites. We were interested in determining if 1) seral communities could be identified, 2) these communities expressed predictable and progressive patterns, and 3) if so, whether the seral patterns indicated divergent or convergent successional pathways.The 57 sites separated into 6 separate seral communities. Two seres were identified, one progressing toward a big sagebrush late-seral community and the other with fourwing saltbush as the characteristic species. Based on multivariate statistical analysis, the two seres were likely to continue on divergent pathways for 100–140 years, after which the saltbush sere may converge toward the late-seral sagebrush community. Both localized and broad-scale factors were important in defining successional patterns in this arid environment. Our results support the concept that classical old-field succession does occur in arid regions.     

The suitability of shallow hand dug wells for safe water provision in sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons from Ndola,Zambia

Many informal communities within urban areas in sub-Saharan Africa are heavily reliant on shallow hand-dug wells for water, but these are vulnerable to contamination from a range of sources. This paper assesses the heavy metal contamination and total coliform risk of unprotected shallow wells in Ndola, Zambia – a city struggling with contaminated surface waters from both bacteriological and potential mining waste products. One hundred and twenty three shallow wells were sampled across the Ndola, and these encompassed the three main lithologies of the city. All wells lacked an internal casing, however, some wells did have covers and/or pavements surrounding the wells, albeit of dubious efficacy. Despite the lack of protection, the quality of water used abstracted from these wells generally met the World Health (WHO) guidelines for heavy metals (with the exception of Al) and total coliforms (although, this was highly variable). The quality of shallow well water varied across Ndola relative to the underlying geology, where total recoverable concentrations were typically lowest in granite-gneiss. Dissolved load concentrations were lowest in dolomite-limestone, highlighting the role of aquifer geology in acting as a buffer against metal toxicity. Our study illustrates that shallow wells, within the appropriate geological units, may provide a safe and reliable source of drinking water. Well protection is, however, needed to ensure that the proliferation of shallow well use does not lead to regional degradation of the groundwater resource. There is an immediate need to invest in promoting internal well casing during the construction of shallow wells, concomitant with investment and education into protecting wells at the surface, despite the current relatively low level of contamination in wells without protection.