Suffering for water, suffering from water: Emotional geographies of resource access, control and conflict

This article argues that resource access, use, control, ownership and conflict are not only mediated through social relations of power, but also through emotional geographies where gendered subjectivities and embodied emotions constitute how nature-society relations are lived and experienced on a daily basis. By engaging the insights from feminist political ecology literatures and emotional geographies literatures, the article demonstrates that resource struggles and conflicts are not just material challenges but emotional ones, which are mediated through bodies, spaces and emotions. Such a focus fleshes out the complexities, entanglements and messy relations that constitute political ecologies of resources management, where practices and processes are negotiated through constructions of gender, embodiments, and emotions. Abstractions of ‘resource struggles’ and ‘resource conflicts’ are thereby grounded in embodied emotional geographies of places, peoples, and resources, enabling us to better understand the ways resources and emotions come to matter in everyday survival struggles. This framing can enrich feminist political ecology theorizations and texture our understandings of commonly-used terms such as access, use, control, conflict and struggles vis-à-vis natural resources in any context. In other words, we are better able to conceptualize and explain how and why people access, use, and struggle over resources the ways they do. A case study of drinking water contamination from Bangladesh is used to develop the theoretical arguments in contributing to existing debates in (feminist) political ecologies.     

GIS-based landslide susceptibility modeling: A comparison between fuzzy multi-criteria and machine learning algorithms

Hazards and disasters have always negative impacts on the way of life.Landslide is an overwhelming natural as well as man-made disaster that causes loss of natural resources and human properties throughout theworld.The present study aimed to assess and compare the prediction efficiency of different models in landslide susceptibility in the Kysuca river basin,Slovakia.In this regard,the fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory combining with the analytic network process(FDEMATEL-ANP),Na?ve Bayes(NB)classifier,and random forest(RF)classifier were considered.Initially,a landslide inventory map was produced with 2000 landslide and nonlandslide points by randomly dividedwith a ratio of 70%:30%for training and testing,respectively.The geospatial database for assessing the landslide susceptibility was generated with the help of 16 landslide conditioning factors by allowing for topographical,hydrological,lithological,and land cover factors.The ReliefF methodwas considered for determining the significance of selected conditioning factors and inclusion in the model building.Consequently,the landslide susceptibility maps(LSMs)were generated using the FDEMATEL-ANP,Na?ve Bayes(NB)classifier,and random forest(RF)classifier models.Finally,the area under curve(AUC)and different arithmetic evaluation were used for validating and comparing the results and models.The results revealed that random forest(RF)classifier is a promising and optimum model for landslide susceptibility in the study area with a very high value of area under curve(AUC=0.954),lower value of mean absolute error(MAE=0.1238)and root mean square error(RMSE=0.2555),and higher value of Kappa index(K=0.8435)and overall accuracy(OAC=92.2%).     

Nuclear geophysical logging for Gondwana coal exploration: a case study at Phulbari Coal Basin, northern part of Bangladesh

Different methods of lithology predictions from geophysical data have been developed in the last 15 years, among which the conventional logs are as follows: sonic, neutron–neutron, natural gamma, and density (backscattered gamma–gamma). This article concentrates on the nuclear geophysical suite, in particular, gamma and gamma–gamma logging, which, to date, provide the most accurate geophysical means of identifying coal seams and estimating their thickness. From the gamma and gamma–gamma logs of boreholes AEN 002, 007, 044, 045, 063, 085, and 105, which were carried out at the Phulbari Coal Basin of Bangladesh, two coal seams—upper and main with two lower seams of limited occurrence and of varying thickness—were identified, together with their regional occurrence.     

Characterization of regional hydrological drought using improved precipitation records under multi-auxiliary information

Theoretical and Applied Climatology - Drought is a complex natural hazard that has been recurrently occurred in many regions across the globe. Therefore, precise drought characterization and its...     

Micro-CT and FIB–SEM imaging and pore structure characterization of dolomite rock at multiple scales

With improvements of imaging techniques and computational power, Digital Rock Physics (DRP) has been increasingly used to determine transport and elastic properties of reservoir core plugs. Since numerical computations highly rely on accurate 3D representations of the porous microstructure of the rocks, the imaging technique and the scale at which the imaging is performed is a critical parameter. In this paper, we introduce a multiscale imaging workflow that uses both micro-X-ray tomography (micro-XCT) and focused ion beam combined with scanning electron microscope (FIB–SEM) to characterize a dolomite rock from the microscale to the nanoscale. This allows for the accurate capture of the different heterogeneities that exist in the carbonate (texture, mineralogy, pore size). The reconstructed microporous structures were then used to successfully predict elastic and permeability properties of selected carbonate.     

Allocative efficiency analysis of wheat and cotton in district Khanewal,Punjab, Pakistan

GeoJournal - To compete in the international market, a farmer in Pakistan needs to decrease its production cost. Agricultural researchers and policymakers are focusing on increasing the...     

Gamma and resistivity logs for characterization of Gondwana coal seams at the Northwestern part of Bangladesh

Different parameters obtained through geophysical borehole logging using self potential, resistivity, gamma–gamma, neutron, natural gamma, and acoustic tools, help in the identification of strata and estimation of the physical, electrical, and acoustical properties of the subsurface lithology. In the coal mining industry, currently, the main application for the logs is to determine coal seam depth, thickness together with coal seam quality, qualitatively. Gamma and resistivity logging in seven boreholes at the Phulbari Coal Basin show high resistivity value and low gamma count rate data in coal seams than the interbeds. An attempt has been made to identify and characterize Gondwana coal seams to a limited extent of seam depth, thickness, and quality in seven boreholes together with draw relationship between resistivity, gamma count rate, and ash content of coal at the Phulbari Coal Basin of Bangladesh.     

Discretization of Complex Geometric Domain Through Computer-Based Stair-Step Representation Method for Estimating Water Levels Associated with A Storm

In this paper, an improvement has been made to the approximation technique of a complex domain through the stairstep approach to have a considerable accuracy, minimize computational cost, and avoid the hardship of manual work. A novel stair-step representation algorithm is used in this regard, where the entire procedure is carried out through our developed MATLAB routine. Arakawa C-grid is used in our approximation with (1/120)° grid resolution. As a test case, the method is applied to approximate the domain covering the area between 15°–23°N latitudes and 85°–95° E longitudes in the Bay of Bengal. Along with the approximation of the land-sea interface, coastal stations are also identified. Approximated land-sea interfaces and coastal stations are found to be in good agreement with the actual ones based on the similarity index, overlap fraction, and extra fraction criteria. The method can be used for approximating an irregular geometric domain to employ the finite difference method in solving problems related to long waves. As a test case, shallow water equations in Cartesian coordinates are solved on the domain of interest for simulating water levels due to the nonlinear tide-surge interaction associated with the storms April 1991 and AILA, 2009 along the coast of Bangladesh. The same input except for the discretized domain and bathymetry as that of Paul et al. (2016) is used in our simulation. The results are found to be in reasonable agreement with the observed data procured from Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority.

     

Heterogeneous data management and modeling for the gravimetric geoid model: a review study in Pakistan

Arabian Journal of Geosciences - The gravimetric geoid model can be used as vertical reference in surveying and other related technologies. It is being developed by NESCOM in collaboration with the...