SOIL AND VEGETATION PATTERNS IN BARRIER-ISLAND DUNE ENVIRONMENTS

Plant species distributions often have been attributed to landform characteristics or their associated geomorphic processes. This complicates interpretation of vegetation patterns in that geomorphic processes shape, and are shaped by, landforms. To characterize the biogeographic impacts of this interaction, I used principal components analysis (PCA) to examine hypotheses regarding the structure of variation among soil properties in active barrier-island dune systems. Dune soils and vegetation were sampled on two well-recognized barrier-island morphologies. On low-profile, wave-dominated microtidal barrier islands (South Core Banks, North Carolina) frequent overwash exerts a greater control on the distribution of soil properties. On mixed-energy mesotidal barrier islands (Sapelo Island, Georgia), overwash is less frequent, and the distribution of soil properties is shaped by a complex dune topography. Nontrivial principal components on both islands captured an equivalent amount of variance in the soil data. However, there were inter-island differences in the dimensionality of these nontrivial principal components, and differences in the distribution of variance and factor loadings. Suites of topography-modifying species, unique to each island, were uniform in the strength of their individual correlation with local edaphic variability. I posit that soil variance structure is a useful criterion to distinguish the relative influence on vegetation patterns of soil properties expressed through landforms (Sapelo Island) versus sediment transport processes (South Core Banks). [Key words: dune vegetation, barrier islands, principal components analysis (PCA), overwash.]     

Vulnerability of pastoral farming in Hawke's Bay to future climate change: Development of a pre‐screening (bottom‐up) methodology

Although future climate change will significantly affect New Zealand's climate, how regional climates will be changed remains highly uncertain. As a consequence, pre‐screening sensitivity analysis is recommended for climate‐sensitive activities. A ‘bottom‐up’ approach intended to serve this purpose in the context of non‐irrigated pasture is developed and demonstrated in the Hawke's Bay context. This is achieved using a simple daily water balance model to simulate near‐surface hydrological processes and empirical relationships between transpiration and pasture dry matter production. The Hawke's Bay case study indicates that the methodology has merit and is worthwhile pursuing nationally (with refinements).     

Rethinking the Growth Machine: How to Erase a Chinatown from the Urban Core

Abstract

This article explores Houston's two Chinatowns within the context of the city's recent urban reinvestment and revitalization initiatives. It provides a history of the Chinatowns and examines their changing condition during the years that Houston was promoting ethnic diversity and urban revival. The analysis is framed within the growth machine perspective, as initially explored in Houston by Joe Feagin, and later by Jan Lin and Igor Vojnovic. Houston's late-20th-century urban redevelopment initiatives occurred during a period in history when Houston's Chinese entrepreneurs lost their influence over the local growth machine. The eventual outcome was the erasure of Houston's downtown Chinatown and the displacement of its residents from their lucrative urban core location. The disappearance of Old Chinatown and other urban ethnic neighborhoods—including Little Saigon and Freedmen's Town—from the urban core all took place as the Houston media and public were celebrating diversity, pluralism, and ethnicity in the city.     

Crowdsourcing urban form and function

Urban form and function have been studied extensively in urban planning and geographical information science. However, gaining a greater understanding of how they merge to define the urban morphology remains a substantial scientific challenge. Toward this goal, this paper addresses the opportunities presented by the emergence of crowdsourced data to gain novel insights into form and function in urban spaces. We are focusing in particular on information harvested from social media and other open-source and volunteered datasets (e.g. trajectory and OpenStreetMap data). These data provide a first-hand account of form and function from the people who define urban space through their activities. This novel bottom-up approach to study these concepts complements traditional urban studies to provide a new lens for studying urban activity. By synthesizing recent advancements in the analysis of open-source data, we provide a new typology for characterizing the role of crowdsourcing in the study of urban morphology. We illustrate this new perspective by showing how social media, trajectory, and traffic data can be analyzed to capture the evolving nature of a city’s form and function. While these crowd contributions may be explicit or implicit in nature, they are giving rise to an emerging research agenda for monitoring, analyzing, and modeling form and function for urban design and analysis.     

A method for discovery and analysis of temporal patterns in complex event data

Pattern analysis techniques currently common within geography tend to focus either on characterizing patterns of spatial and/or temporal recurrence of a single event type (e.g., incidence of flu cases) or on comparing sequences of a limited number of event types where relationships between events are already represented in the data (e.g., movement patterns). The availability of large amounts of multivariate spatiotemporal data, however, requires new methods for pattern analysis. Here, we present a technique for finding associations among many different event types where the associations among these varying event types are not explicitly represented in the data or known in advance. This pattern discovery method, known as T-pattern analysis, was first developed within the field of psychology for the purpose of finding patterns in personal interactions. We have adapted and extended the T-pattern method to take the unique characteristics of geographic data into account and implemented it within a geovisualization toolkit for an integrated computational-geovisual environment we call STempo. To demonstrate how T-pattern analysis can be employed in geographic research for discovering patterns in complex spatiotemporal data, we describe a case study featuring events from news reports about Yemen during the Arab Spring of 2011–2012. Using supplementary data from the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone, we briefly summarize and reference a separate validation study, then evaluate the scalability of the T-pattern approach. We conclude with ideas for further extensions of the T-pattern technique to increase its utility for spatiotemporal analysis.     

Episodic dust formation by HD 192641 (WR 137) – II

We present new infrared photometry of the WC7-type Wolf–Rayet star HD 192641 (WR 137) from 1985 to 1999. These data track the cooling of the dust cloud formed in the 1982–84 dust-formation episode from 1985 to 1991, the increase of the infrared flux from 1994.5 to a new dust-formation maximum in 1997 and its subsequent fading. From these and earlier data we derive a period of 4765±50 d (13.05±0.15 yr) for the dust-formation episodes. Between dust-emission episodes, the infrared spectral energy distribution has the form of a power law, λF _λ ∝ λ ^−1.86. The rising branch of the infrared light curve (1994–97) differs in form from that of the episodic dust-maker WR 125. Time-dependent modelling shows that this difference can be attributed to a different time dependence of dust formation in WR 137, which occurred approximately ∝ t ² until maximum, whereas that of WR 125 could be described by a step function, akin to a threshold effect. For an adopted distance of 1.6 kpc, the rate of dust formation was found to be 5.0×10⁻⁸ M_⊙ yr⁻¹ at maximum, accounting for a fraction f _C≈1.5×10⁻³ of the carbon flowing in the stellar wind. The fading branches of the light curves show evidence for secondary 'mini-eruptions' in 1987, 1988 and 1990, behaviour very different from that of the prototypical episodic dust-maker HD 193793 (WR 140), and suggesting the presence in the WR 137 stellar wind of large-scale structures that are crossed by the wind–wind collision region.     

Ground-Based Observations Of Lunar Meteoritic Phenomena

The occurrence and visibility of meteoroid impacts on the moon as seen from the earth were little more than speculation prior to November 1999. The best evidence of present-day impact activity came from the seismic experiments left on the Moon during the Apollo era. Past systematic attempts at earth-based observations to document lunar impacts revealed nothing conclusive. However, during the Leonid storms of 1999 and 2001, lunar impact events were for the first time confirmed by multiple independent observers. A total of 15 meteoritic impact flash events have been verified during these storms, with an additional 12 unconfirmed but likely events awaiting confirmation. Estimates of the mass of these meteoroids range from less than one gram for the faintest flashes to more than 10 kg for the brightest observed flash. The fraction of visible light to total energy produced by these events, a quantity known as luminous efficiency, averages about 0.001 for the established events. The confirmation of lunar meteoritic events on the Moon opens a new avenue in lunar and planetary research, one which could help bridge the gap between atmospheric sampling of the smallest components of meteoroid streams and interplanetary debris to the larger scale objects accessible to ground-based telescopes.     

Dating Quaternary volcanism and incision by the River Tigris at Diyarbakır,southeast Turkey

New high‐precision Ar‐Ar dating of basalt underlying the city of Diyarbak?r, southeast Turkey, constrains the Quaternary incision history of the River Tigris, strengthening the pre‐existing chronology based on magnetostratigraphy and K‐Ar dates. The basalt, which overlies Tigris terrace gravel 70 m above the river, is part of the Karacada? shield volcano complex centred ca. 60 km to the southwest. The reverse‐magnetised Diyarbak?r basalt, one of relatively few flow units to reach the Tigris valley axis, has been dated to 1196 ± 19 ka (±2σ). Two lower terraces have been recognised in the Diyarbak?r area, 46 and 32 m above the present river, with at least one other further downstream. From this evidence the rate of Middle‐Late Pleistocene incision by the Tigris can be estimated; it probably reached ca. 0.07 mm a^?1, reflecting the characteristic global increase in uplift rates observed at that time. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.