Analyzing Accessibility Using Parcel Data: Is There Still an Access–Space Trade-Off in Long Beach,California?

This article analyzes the impact of changing housing and neighborhood characteristics on the accessibility of neighborhood businesses using Long Beach, California, as a case study. Although advocates of smart growth and New Urbanism encourage land use mixing, aggregate-level analysis can be too coarse to pick up on fine-grained aspects of urban streetscapes. This study uses assessor parcel records and a point-based business establishment data set to analyze city-wide patterns of accessibility from individual dwelling units to thirty-one types of neighborhood businesses, including grocery stores, service shops, drug stores, doctor's offices, and banks. Regression results compare parcel-level and neighborhood-level drivers of accessibility between 2006 and 2015 to gauge the aggregated effect of recent economic, demographic, and built environment changes on this aspect of urban spatial structure. Larger homes in older, multiunit buildings and higher income neighborhoods show substantial increases in accessibility to most establishment types, suggesting a trend toward both greater accessibility and larger dwelling units—despite the traditional trade-off between access and space. Although gradual increases in home and business density increased overall accessibility over this period, weaker neighborhood-level results indicate that this trend is less pronounced in high-poverty and non-white areas.     

Should Geography Educators Adopt Electronic Textbooks?

Significant changes in textbook publishing are at college instructors' door. Textbook representatives are directed to mesmerize potential clients with eye-catching displays and statements about digital literacy of the next generation of college students. Based on a one-year pilot study, in 2014–2015, of an electronic textbook, this commentary shares real experiences with the digital tools, contextualizes the shift in textbook publishing and research on student outcomes, and provides insight in navigating through the Brave New World of digital texts and adaptive learning tools.     

Men and women in Boston learn about terrorism differently: gendering the urban values–vulnerability nexus

This paper expands the values-vulnerability nexus for studying urban vulnerability to terrorism. Gender is among the most salient social structures affecting a person’s interpretation of risk, and urban geographers have demonstrated that gender also deeply affects the experience of urban life. However, the values that shape urban vulnerability to terrorism have been conceptualized more broadly, usually focusing on the underpinning economic organization of cities that terrorists exploit rather than on concepts such as gender. As a result, the role of gender in understanding societal responses to terrorism—specifically risk perception and preparedness—is underdeveloped, including in the 2008 US National Survey of Disaster and Preparedness, which sought to understand Americans’ responses to terrorism. This paper outlines a gender values–vulnerability nexus for studying terrorism. Using interview data from Boston, Massachusetts conducted before and after the 15 April 2013 Boston Marathon attacks, I demonstrate that gender deeply affected how Bostonians learned about and responded to terrorism. The gender values–vulnerability nexus explores the role of gendered political, social, economic, and geographical dimensions in urban vulnerability to terrorism. The role of gender has the potential to substantially increase vulnerability for urban populations, particularly given gender-similar social networks and urban contexts that continue to yield different experiences for men and women. The implications of these findings may signal challenges for urban emergency managers, public safety officials, and ordinary people in American cities.     

Fracturing and fluid‐flow during post‐rift subsidence in carbonates of the Jandaíra Formation,Potiguar Basin,NE Brazil

Pervasive fracture networks are common in many reservoir‐scale carbonate bodies even in the absence of large deformation and exert a major impact on their mechanical and flow behaviour. The Upper Cretaceous Jandaíra Formation is a few hundred meters thick succession of shallow water carbonates deposited during the early post‐rift stage of the Potiguar rift (NE Brazil). The Jandaíra Formation in the present onshore domain experienced <1.5 km thermal subsidence and, following Tertiary exhumation, forms outcrops over an area of >1000 km². The carbonates have a gentle, <5?, dip to the NE and are affected by few regional, low displacement faults or folds. Despite their simple tectonic history, carbonates display ubiquitous open fractures, sub‐vertical veins, and sub‐vertical as well as sub‐horizontal stylolites. Combining structural analysis, drone imaging, isotope studies and mathematical modelling, we reconstruct the fracturing history of the Jandaíra Formation during and following subsidence and analyse the impact fractures had on coeval fluid flow. We find that Jandaíra carbonates, fully cemented after early diagenesis, experienced negligible deformation during the first few hundreds of meters of subsidence but were pervasively fractured when they reached depths >400–500 m. Deformation was accommodated by a dense network of sub‐vertical mode I and hybrid fractures associated with sub‐vertical stylolites developed in a stress field characterised by a sub‐horizontal σ₁ and sub‐vertical σ₂. The development of a network of hybrid fractures, rarely reported in the literature, activated the circulation of waters charged in the mountainous region, flowing along the porous Açu sandstone underlying the Jandaíra carbonates and rising to the surface through the fractured carbonates. With persisting subsidence, carbonates reached depths of 800–900 m entering a depth interval characterised by a sub‐vertical σ₁. At this stage, sub‐horizontal stylolites developed liberating calcite which sealed the sub‐vertical open fractures transforming them in veins and preventing further flow. During Tertiary exhumation, several of the pre‐existing veins and stylolites opened and became longer, and new fractures were created typically with the same directions of the older features. The simplicity of our model suggests that most rocks in passive margin settings might have followed a similar evolution and thus display similar structures.     

Comparison of a Manual and an Automated Tracking Method for Tibetan Plateau Vortices

Tibetan Plateau vortices(TPVs) are mesoscale cyclones originating over the Tibetan Plateau(TP) during the extended summer season(April–September).Most TPVs stay on the TP,but a small number can move off the TP to the east.TPVs are known to be one of the main precipitation-bearing systems on the TP and moving-off TPVs have been associated with heavy precipitation and flooding downstream of the TP(e.g.,in Sichuan province or over the Yangtze River Valley).Identifying and tracking TPVs is difficult because of their comparatively small horizontal extent(400–800 km) and the limited availability of soundings over the TP,which in turn constitutes a challenge for short-term predictions of TPV-related impacts and for the climatological study of TPVs.In this study,(i) manual tracking(MT) results using radiosonde data from a network over and downstream of the TP are compared with(ii) results obtained by an automated tracking(AT) algorithm applied to ERA-Interim data.Ten MT-TPV cases are selected based on method(i) and matched to and compared with the corresponding AT-TPVs identified with method(ii).Conversely,ten AT-TPVs are selected and compared with the corresponding MT-TPVs.In general,the comparison shows good results in cases where the underlying data are in good agreement,but considerable differences are also seen in some cases and explained in terms of differences in the tracking methods,data availability/coverage and disagreement between sounding and ERA-Interim data.Recommendations are given for future efforts in TPV detection and tracking,including in an operational weather forecasting context.     

Changes in Climate Extremes Over the Australian Region and New Zealand During the Twentieth Century

Analyses of high quality data show that there have been some interesting recent changes in the incidence of some climate extremes in the Australian region and New Zealand.     

Electron spin resonance dating of the fossil deposits in the Naracoorte Caves,South Australia

The caves near Naracoorte, South Australia, contain one of the richest and most diverse fossil faunal assemblages on the Australian continent. Three sites were selected for electron spin resonance (ESR) dating because clastic, fossiliferous sediments were sandwiched between speleothem layers. This allows independent age control by highly precise thermal ionization mass‐spectrometry (TIMS) U‐series dating. We find that all ESR results agree within the constraints given by the U‐series dates, and allow further refinement of the age of the fauna analysed, indicating that most of the fauna in the large Victoria Cave Fossil Chamber is twice as old as reported previously. Our dating results, spanning from 280 to 500 ka for the Fossil Chamber, Victoria Cave, to about 125 ka for the Grant Hall, Victoria Cave, and 170 to 280 ka for the Fossil Chamber, Cathedral Cave, indicate little change, if any, in the megafaunal assemblage from the early Middle to the early Late Pleistocene. This changed dramatically after the last interglacial, when a large proportion of the megafauna suddenly disappeared. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A finite element model for seismic response analysis of deformable rocking frames

A new finite element model to analyze the seismic response of deformable rocking bodies and rocking structures is presented. The model comprises a set of beam elements to represent the rocking body and zero‐length fiber cross‐section elements at the ends of the rocking body to represent the rocking surfaces. The energy dissipation during rocking motion is modeled using a Hilber–Hughes–Taylor numerically dissipative time step integration scheme. The model is verified through correct prediction of the horizontal and vertical displacements of a rigid rocking block and validated against the analytical Housner model solution for the rocking response of rigid bodies subjected to ground motion excitation. The proposed model is augmented by a dissipative model of the ground under the rocking surface to facilitate modeling of the rocking response of deformable bodies and structures. The augmented model is used to compute the overturning and uplift rocking response spectra for a deformable rocking frame structure to symmetric and anti‐symmetric Ricker pulse ground motion excitation. It is found that the deformability of the columns of a rocking frame does not jeopardize its stability under Ricker pulse ground motion excitation. In fact, there are cases where a deformable rocking frame is more stable than its rigid counterpart. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A multicatchment analysis of headwater and downstream temperature effects from contemporary forest harvesting

Stream temperature is a key physical water‐quality parameter, controlling many biological, chemical, and physical processes in aquatic ecosystems. Maintenance of cool stream temperatures during summer is critical for high‐quality aquatic habitat. As such, transmission of warm water from small, nonfish‐bearing headwater streams after forest harvesting could cause warming in downstream fish‐bearing stream reaches with negative consequences. In this study, we evaluate (a) the effects of contemporary forest management practices on stream temperature in small, headwater streams, (b) the transmission of thermal signals from headwater reaches after harvesting to downstream fish‐bearing reaches, and (c) the relative role of lithology and forest management practices in influencing differential thermal responses in both the headwater and downstream reaches. We measured summer stream temperatures both preharvest and postharvest at 29 sites—12 upstream sites (4 reference, 8 harvested) and 17 downstream sites (5 reference, 12 harvested)—across 3 paired watershed studies in western Oregon. The 7‐day moving average of daily maximum stream temperature (T_7DAYMAX) was greater during the postharvest period relative to the preharvest period at 7 of the 8 harvested upstream sites. Although the T_7DAYMAX was generally warmer in the downstream direction at most of the stream reaches during both the preharvest and postharvest period, there was no evidence for additional downstream warming related to the harvesting activity. Rather, the T_7DAYMAX cooled rapidly as stream water flowed into forested reaches ~370–1,420 m downstream of harvested areas. Finally, the magnitude of effects of contemporary forest management practices on stream temperature increased with the proportion of catchment underlain by more resistant lithology at both the headwater and downstream sites, reducing the potential for the cooling influence of groundwater.