Synthesized Model of Geospatial Thinking

Since the National Research Council (2006) report Learning to Think Spatially formalized geospatial thinking, researchers and educators have recognized the importance of investigating and understanding geospatial thinking. Conceptual frameworks have been developed and applied to individual research projects. Although useful in these contexts and potentially extendable to other related inquiries, they also overlap and conflict with one another. Moreover, the separate frameworks are built on different constructs, resulting in a disparate rather than a cohesive theoretical foundation for geospatial thinking. This article synthesizes existing frameworks and generates a model that represents conceptual advances and provides a foundation for research question generation.     

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Ten Years o f Physicogeographic Research in Hungary

Antarctic Snow and Ice Studies     

认知科学与儿童地图设计

地图是地图设计编制者将地理空间信息、社会信息及相关资讯科学地获取、加工,进而设计表现为一种符合人们阅读思维的信息传播媒介。在这个将客观世界转化为地图并为读者所使用的信息传播过程中,认知心理起到至关重要的作用,既影响地图作者的设计理念;又影响地图读者的阅读理解。因此,研究、理解和掌握认知心理学原理是对地图作者的必然要求。本文在此基础上提出了儿童电子地图的设计原则与方法,旨在使地图作者利用认知科学的知识设计出更加易于儿童阅读的地图作品,进一步做好儿童的早期教育,从而提高人口素质。     

Adopting cloud computing to optimize spatial web portals for better performance to support Digital Earth and other global geospatial initiatives

A spatial web portal (SWP) provides a web-based gateway to discover, access, manage, and integrate worldwide geospatial resources through the Internet and has the access characteristics of regional to global interest and spiking. Although various technologies have been adopted to improve SWP performance, enabling high-speed resource access for global users to better support Digital Earth remains challenging because of the computing and communication intensities in the SWP operation and the dynamic distribution of end users. This paper proposes a cloud-enabled framework for high-speed SWP access by leveraging elastic resource pooling, dynamic workload balancing, and global deployment. Experimental results demonstrate that the new SWP framework outperforms the traditional computing infrastructure and better supports users of a global system such as Digital Earth. Reported methodologies and framework can be adopted to support operational geospatial systems, such as monitoring national geographic state and spanning across regional and global geographic extent.     

Using adaptively coupled models and high-performance computing for enabling the computability of dust storm forecasting

Forecasting dust storms for large geographical areas with high resolution poses great challenges for scientific and computational research. Limitations of computing power and the scalability of parallel systems preclude an immediate solution to such challenges. This article reports our research on using adaptively coupled models to resolve the computational challenges and enable the computability of dust storm forecasting by dividing the large geographical domain into multiple subdomains based on spatiotemporal distributions of the dust storm. A dust storm model (Eta-8bin) performs a quick forecasting with low resolution (22 km) to identify potential hotspots with high dust concentration. A finer model, non-hydrostatic mesoscale model (NMM-dust) performs high-resolution (3 km) forecasting over the much smaller hotspots in parallel to reduce computational requirements and computing time. We also adopted spatiotemporal principles among computing resources and subdomains to optimize parallel systems and improve the performance of high-resolution NMM-dust model. This research enabled the computability of high-resolution, large-area dust storm forecasting using the adaptively coupled execution of the two models Eta-8bin and NMM-dust.     

Imagining the Dirty Green City

ABSTRACT

The green city is being elevated to the status of a self-evident good in the theory and practice of urban sustainability. A large literature documents the linked environmental, economic and well-being benefits associated with vegetating urban systems to maximise the ecosystem function. Contemporary urban greening seeks to challenge attempts to expel nature from the city in a quest for order and control. However, by imagining nature as a new mode of urban purification, much effort in the name of the green city inverts and reproduces dualistic understandings of natural and built space. In response, we disrupt the normative dialectics of purity and dirt that sustain this dualism to expose the untidy but fertile ground of the green city. We draw together Ash Amin’s four registers of the Good City – relatedness, rights, repair and re-enchantment – with the artworks of the Australian visual ecologist Aviva Reed. Our work seeks to enrich the practice of more-than-human urbanism through ‘dirt thinking’ by imagining the transformative possibilities in, of and for the dirty green city.     

关于中国环境管理和资源利用的几点思考(英文)

这一评述总结2008年耶鲁大学中国的环境和资源利用问题研讨会的讨论重点,包括:1)保护地方利益和防止污染扩散的区域协调;2)建立环境特殊区,实行前瞻性的环境政策试验;3)加强环境和资源利用教育和能力建设;4)协调国内和国际环境合作关系;5)中国的环境决策中权力的制约与平衡。本文不打算对这些专题进行深入分析,而是强调西方环境管理经验和教训与中国的现实相结合的重要性。     

对哥本哈根气候变化大会之后我国应对气候变化新形势和新任务的思考

综合分析了哥本哈根联合国气候变化大会的主要成果,对近期国际气候变化谈判的焦点问题进行了展望,还分析了我国应对气候变化面临的新形势和新任务。提出我国应进一步加强应对气候变化工作,把应对气候变化工作纳入法制化轨道,大力研发和推广气候友好技术,加强薄弱领域基础建设,提高适应气候变化的综合能力,积极探索符合我国国情的应对气候变化市场体制和机制,加强气候变化的科学研究,提高我国应对气候变化的科技软实力,增强全社会应对气候变化的意识。     

社会文化地理学在中国近10年的进展

21世纪以来,伴随中国社会的不断“分化”与“变迁”,典型社会文化现象不断涌现,社会文化地理学研究已成为学界所持续关注的研究领域。在初步总结国外社会文化地理学的理论演进脉络的基础上,本研究分析了过去10年以来中国社会文化地理学研究的热点与关注,结合中国发展现状提出,本土社会文化特质的地理学研究、权利与资本对社会文化空间形态与地方建构的影响、城乡与区域人口迁移所形成的流动现象与规模效应等,是未来社会文化地理学应重点关注的研究领域。同时强调了,社会文化地理学在中国的发展,需要注重知识贡献的普适性与中国自身社会文化特质的辩证统一。     

位涡理论及其应用

位涡是近代天气动力学的重要概念之一。本文主要对位涡理论的某些要点,包括位涡的概念、位涡的守恒性、位涡的分析、位涡思想、位涡反演、湿位涡及位涡理论的发展和应用等作一简要介绍。