Crowdsourced approaches for stage measurements at ungauged locations using smartphones

ABSTRACT

The growing availability of smart devices with advanced sensors has increased the opportunities for citizen science applications for environmental monitoring. Accurate and widespread monitoring of river stage is vital for modeling water resources. Reliable data points are required for model calibration and validation in forecast studies. While current embedded monitoring systems provide accurate measurements, the cost to replicate these systems on a large domain is prohibitively expensive, limiting the quantity of data available. This project describes a new method to accurately measure river levels using smartphone sensors. Pictures of the same point on the river’s surface are taken to perform calculations based on the GPS location and spatial orientation of the smartphone. The proposed implementation is significantly more accessible than existing water measuring systems while offering similar accuracy. A case study is performed to evaluate the accuracy and sensitivity of the measurements to changes in distance.     

专业技术资格评价与职务聘任分离的思考

通过对“评聘合一”单轨制的弊端、地勘单位评聘分离行动较迟缓等原因的讨论，提出了实行聘任分离资格评审要注重学术技术能力和工作业绩的考核的建议，打破身份、学历、资力和名额、结构比例等诸多限制，以及聘任要科学设岗、竞争上岗，动态聘任等应着重做好的几项工作。     

Building Capacity for Environmental Management: local knowledge and rehabilitation on the Gippsland Red Gum Plains

Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) continues to attract interest as a way of achieving social and environmental outcomes at the local and regional scale. Central to the success of CBNRM is the importance of capacity building and participatory approaches to research and management. This paper discusses an initiative in East Gippsland which involved a facilitated process to assist local residents build their capacity to manage their landscape. Through conducting a community survey, the project facilitated landholders to voice, develop and refine their understanding of remnant vegetation management, dieback and revegetation on private land. In doing so, landholders have improved not only their understanding of the issues but also their ability to act upon them. The empirical findings of the study highlight two issues of relevance to dieback on the East Gippsland Red Gum Plains. First, there is a perception that dieback has remained stable for at least 10 years. Second, scattered trees and small patches of trees are more vulnerable to dieback than clumped trees in larger patch sizes, as well as roadside vegetation. The research demonstrates the value of a community-based approach to NRM in terms of harnessing local knowledge, fostering human and social capital and engaging with interested landholders.     

Resource-based view of sustainability engagement

This research examines local sustainability planning processes under the label of Local Agenda 21 in Italy from a resource-based view. Two types of resources, municipal (or internal resources) and relational resources, are considered. Relational resources stem from (1) dyadic relationships with higher levels of government and (2) network relationships (municipality-higher level of government-municipality). A model is proposed in which the integration of these resources explains the engagement of municipal authorities with Local Agenda 21-type processes. The model is tested by considering the perceptions of 108 local senior officials and politicians who are in charge of Local Agenda 21 processes in Italy. The respondents account for 31% of the members of a formal Italian Local Agenda 21 network. The results show moderate to low engagement with Local Agenda 21 processes, which is explained by moderate to poor levels of relational resources. Our findings indicate that local authority engagement with Local Agenda 21-type processes requires a systemic perspective, where higher levels of government and municipalities integrate and combine their resources and create new purposefully led resources through regular and intense interactions.     

Everyday Encounters with Activist Scholarship

In light of the grave challenges ahead under the Trump administration and the rise of right-wing populism in the West, it is critical that geographers across subdisciplines embrace activist and engaged scholarship. Opportunities for such engagement often emerge organically in our everyday lives at the intersection between personal interests, ethics and commitments, and nascent research agendas. In this article, I share two experiences with community-engaged and activist research: (1) establishing the Los Puentes Spanish–English dual-language immersion program in partnership with a low-income rural North Carolina public school system and (2) collaborating on the Building Austin, Building Injustice participatory action research project with a community-based workers center to document and lobby for improvements to construction workers’ conditions in Austin, Texas. Through a situated and positioned personal account, I seek to not only provide two examples of activist research but also illustrate the diversity of encounters and how they can emerge in unlikely places and outside conventional “activist” arenas. In conclusion, I draw on lessons learned through these experiences to reflect on the various challenges and opportunities for activist scholarship within geography in the future.     

Building geospatial infrastructure

ABSTRACT

Many visions for geospatial technology have been advanced over the past half century. Initially researchers saw the handling of geospatial data as the major problem to be overcome. The vision of geographic information systems arose as an early international consensus. Later visions included spatial data infrastructure, Digital Earth, and a nervous system for the planet. With accelerating advances in information technology, a new vision is needed that reflects today’s focus on open and multimodal access, sharing, engagement, the Web, Big Data, artificial intelligence, and data science. We elaborate on the concept of geospatial infrastructure, and argue that it is essential if geospatial technology is to contribute to the solution of problems facing humanity.     

Selling climate change? The limitations of social marketing as a strategy for climate change public engagement

Social marketing is the systematic application of marketing concepts and techniques to achieve specific behavioural goals relevant to the social good. Social marketing approaches are becoming increasingly popular among governmental and non-governmental actors seeking to engage the public on climate change. The effectiveness of social marketing in achieving specific behavioural goals is empirically well-supported. However, in the first systematic critique of social marketing as a strategy for engaging the public on climate change, we present evidence that social marketing alone is insufficient to build support for the more ambitious policy changes and interventions that constitute a proportional response to climate change. In some circumstances, social marketing approaches may even be counterproductive. We describe some alternative approaches for engaging the public, which may provide governmental and non-governmental actors with additional or preferable tools for promoting public engagement with climate change. Given the scale of the challenge, it seems critical that those seeking to engage the public are equipped with the most effective strategies available - a goal that this paper seeks to contribute to. We conclude that acknowledging the limitations of social marketing - and exploring alternative methods of engaging the public - is an urgent task for climate change communication researchers and practitioners.     

Trust as a proxy indicator for intrinsic quality of Volunteered Geographic Information in biodiversity monitoring programs

In this article, we present a fuzzy model for intrinsic quality assessment of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) on species occurrences obtained by Citizen Science (CS) biodiversity monitoring programs. The proposed VGI quality assurance approach evaluates the thematic and positional quality of the crowdsourced biodiversity observation in terms of the trustworthiness of the observation by combining three indicators of consistency with habitat, consistency with surroundings, and reputation of contributor, that characterize the geographical and social aspects of trust in VGI. To evaluate the performance and usability of the proposed approach for evaluating the trustworthiness of crowdsourced observations and detecting thematic and positional errors in crowdsourced observations, the developed approach was applied to the crowdsourced observations on Acer macrophyllum collected through the CS biodiversity monitoring projects of E-Flora BC and iNaturalist. The result of a conformity test at the optimal acceptance threshold (sensitivity = 0.99, specificity = 0.8, and Cohen’s kappa = 0.79), the achieved area under the curve (AUC) value (AUC = 0.98), and the results of the complementary investigation on the predictions of the proposed model indicated that the proposed fuzzy trust model exhibited promising predictive performance and was able to flag the majority of attribute and positional errors in the crowdsourced biodiversity observations.     

Urban Contestation in a Feminist Register

Abstract

Approaches to urban contestation that challenge the dichotomy between institutionalization and opposition, and understand contestation as including engagement, are explored. The emphasis is on how recent forms of feminist analysis and critical scholarship open up a conceptual terrain for such thinking, and the discussion is grounded using further details of City for All Women Initiative/Initiative: une ville pour toutes les femmes (CAWI-IVTF), which is seen to be a concrete, successful case. Its tactics and strategies are noteworthy because of the manner in which ideas drawn from feminist and progressive organizing in other (including non-urban and non-Western) contexts have been incorporated. CAWI-IVTF's successes are most striking in relation to women who previously felt alienated from local politics. The organization's rationale, strategies, and tactics provide insights into how women active in this network create new spatialities, and how their interactions in space are producing new political subjects.     

A citizen data-based approach to predictive mapping of spatial variation of natural phenomena

The vast accumulation of environmental data and the rapid development of geospatial visualization and analytical techniques make it possible for scientists to solicit information from local citizens to map spatial variation of geographic phenomena. However, data provided by citizens (referred to as citizen data in this article) suffer two limitations for mapping: bias in spatial coverage and imprecision in spatial location. This article presents an approach to minimizing the impacts of these two limitations of citizen data using geospatial analysis techniques. The approach reduces location imprecision by adopting a frequency-sampling strategy to identify representative presence locations from areas over which citizens observed the geographic phenomenon. The approach compensates for the spatial bias by weighting presence locations with cumulative visibility (the frequency at which a given location can be seen by local citizens). As a case study to demonstrate the principle, this approach was applied to map the habitat suitability of the black-and-white snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus bieti) in Yunnan, China. Sightings of R. bieti were elicited from local citizens using a geovisualization platform and then processed with the proposed approach to predict a habitat suitability map. Presence locations of R. bieti recorded by biologists through intensive field tracking were used to validate the predicted habitat suitability map. Validation showed that the continuous Boyce index (B_cont(0.1)) calculated on the suitability map was 0.873 (95% CI: [0.810, 0.917]), indicating that the map was highly consistent with the field-observed distribution of R. bieti. B_cont(0.1) was much lower (0.173) for the suitability map predicted based on citizen data when location imprecision was not reduced and even lower (?0.048) when there was no compensation for spatial bias. This indicates that the proposed approach effectively minimized the impacts of location imprecision and spatial bias in citizen data and therefore effectively improved the quality of mapped spatial variation using citizen data. It further implies that, with the application of geospatial analysis techniques to properly account for limitations in citizen data, valuable information embedded in such data can be extracted and used for scientific mapping.