Drivers of Change and Sustainability in Linked Social–Ecological Systems: An Analysis in the Volta River Basin of Ghana,West Africa

Understanding the nature and relative importance of various drivers of change is crucial for sustainable management of natural resources and in prioritizing management efforts, allocating limited resources, and understanding cumulative effects. For this article, we employed structured an expert judgments approach to identify, characterize, and assess the relative importance of the key biophysical and socioeconomic drivers of change within the Volta River Basin, West Africa. Precipitation variability, water availability, land use change, drought events, and population growth were perceived as most important, while biodiversity loss, social conflicts, pest and disease occurrence, urbanization, and pollution were viewed as less critical. A majority of these drivers were characterized as “slow” acting processes as compared to rapidly changing drivers. Intra- and interexpert groups agreement were found to be significant and convergent, indicating the reliability of the results. The implications of these results for sustainable water resources management and agricultural production are discussed.     

Anglo‐American Electoral Geography: Same Roots and Same Goals,but Different Means and Ends?*

Electoral geographers in the United States and the United Kingdom have similar goals but pursue these through different means. In part, these reflect differences between the two countries' electoral and political systems, but they also reflect different methodological strategies and desired ends. Drawing on the U.K. experience, this article identifies areas for possible expansion in studies of the electoral geography of the United States, which are expressed as five challenges.     

Regional Differences in Affluent Black and Affluent White Residential Outcomes

This study compares the residential outcomes of affluent black and affluent white households using data from the 1990 and 2000 censuses and pooled data from the 2005–2009 American Community Survey. Results indicate that affluent black households are highly segregated from their white economic peers. Furthermore, affluent black households live in neighborhoods of lower average quality compared to affluent white households. Affluent black households are least segregated from affluent white households in the South, but the greatest equality in neighborhood‐quality outcomes occurs in the West. The South, however, shows the greatest improvement in both average neighborhood quality for affluent black households and a substantial reduction in affluent black–affluent white segregation over the entire study period. The authors find that place stratification theory better describes the residential geography of affluent black households than does spatial assimilation theory.     

Are Australia’s suburbs swamped by Asians and Muslims? Countering political claims with data

Recent decades have seen substantial growth across many developed-world countries of right-wing populist political parties whose policies oppose immigration and multiculturalism as threats to the majority way of life there. These are exemplified in Australia by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, which was successful at elections there at the turn of the twenty-first century and again in 2016. Part of this party’s rhetoric focuses on the geography of immigrant groups in Australia’s cities, with claims that their members live in ghettos. Is that factually correct? Using data from the 2011 Australian census this paper analyses the distribution of Asians and Muslims (the two groups picked out by One Nation and its leader) at four spatial scales within the country’s 11 largest urban areas. It finds no evidence at all of intensive residential segregation of Muslims, and although there are concentrations of Asians—notably in Sydney and Melbourne—most residents claiming Asian ancestry live in neighbourhoods and suburbs where they form a minority (in many cases a small minority) only of the local population.     

LAGEOS II perigee rate and eccentricity vector excitations residuals and the Yarkovsky-Schach effect

We have analysed LAGEOS II perigee rate and eccentricity vector excitation residuals over a period of about 7.8 years, adjusting and computing the satellite orbit with the full set of dynamical models included in the GEODYN II software code. The long-term behaviour of these orbital residuals appears to be characterised by several distinct frequencies which are a clear signature of the Yarkovsky-Schach perturbing effect. This non-gravitational perturbation is not included in the GEODYN II models for the orbit determination and analysis. Through an independent numerical analysis, and using the new LOSSAM model to represent the spin-axis behaviour of the satellite, we propagated the Yarkovsky-Schach effect on LAGEOS II perigee rate and compared the results obtained with the orbital residuals. We have thus been able to satisfactorily fit the amplitude of the Yarkovsky-Schach effect to the observed residuals. Our approach here has proven very successful with very positive results. We have been able to obtain a fractional reduction of about 40% of the post-fit rms with respect to the pre-fit value. When analysing the eccentricity vector residuals, we have been able to obtain a better result in the case of the real component, with a fractional reduction of the post-fit rms of about 49% of the initial value. The analysis of the effect's imaginary component in the eccentricity vector rate is more complicated and deserves additional scrutiny. In this case we need a deeper study which includes the analysis of other unmodelled and mismodelled effects acting on the imaginary component. The study performed in this paper will be of significant relevance not only for the geophysical applications involving LAGEOS II orbit analysis, but also for a refined re-analysis of the general relativistic precession produced by the Earth angular momentum, i.e., the Lense-Thirring effect.     

Decade time-scale modulation of low-mass X-ray binaries

Regular observations by the All-Sky Monitor aboard the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite have yielded well-sampled light curves with a time baseline of over 10 years. We find that up to eight of the 16 brightest persistent low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) show significant, possible sinusoidal, variations with periods of the order of 10 years. We speculate on its possible origin and prevalence in the population of LMXBs, and we find the presence of a third object in the system, or long-period variability intrinsic to the donor star, as being attractive origins for the X-ray flux modulation we detect. For some of the objects in which we do not detect a signal, there is substantial short-term variation which may hide modest modulation on long time-scales. Decade time-scale modulations may thus be even more common.     

Finite element formulation for poroelastic problem with zero effective stress boundary condition

Zero effective stress boundary condition along with constant fluid flux is commonly encountered in geotechnical applications such as uncased borehole stability, fluid injection and production at an uncased borehole, hydraulic fracturing and sand production. This complex boundary condition introduces high nonlinearity in the numerical simulation. Conventional iterative methods such as Newton–Raphson method are required to solve this nonlinear problem iteratively, which involve huge computing time and also pose numerical difficulties on the convergence. To overcome this numerical difficulty and hence reduce the computing time, a novel numerical technique is proposed in this paper. Its performance is evaluated using a numerical example simulating fluid injection around an uncased borehole. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.