Residents’ urbanized landscape preferences in rural areas reveal the importance of naturalness-livability contrast

Journal of Geographical Sciences - Urbanization has caused significant landscape changes in rural areas, leading to the emergence of urbanized landscapes (ULs), which have been generally criticized...     

Narratives of the Mother Road: Geographic Themes Along Route 66

One of the most culturally significant roads in the world, U.S. Highway 66 (commonly referred to as Route 66) has connected Chicago and Los Angeles since 1926. In order to explore what heritage themes Route 66 sites convey to tourists, we assessed the information presented to visitors at nearly four‐dozen museums and interpretive sites astride the road using the qualitative software Nvivo 10. Five themes dominate interpretation. Route 66 thematically flows east to west with Chicago as the beginning and Los Angeles as the end of the road. Mobility and personal freedom of movement via the automobile are encapsulated in the history of the road. In addition, Route 66 highlights nostalgia for the 1950s with classic American automobiles, music of the era, and neon lights representing this golden age of the highway. Economic decline, and often the economic continuity of communities, is frequently found in interpretive materials. Finally, Route 66 museums are repositories of community memory as oral histories preserve the narratives of individuals and families who owned businesses on and lived near the road for multiple decades. We conclude with several observations about interpretative themes that are overlooked as well as regional differences in the geography of memory along Route 66.     

Assessing the potential of integrated Landsat 8 thermal bands,with the traditional reflective bands and derived vegetation indices in classifying urban landscapes

Reliable and up-to-date urban land cover information is valuable in urban planning and policy development. Due to the increasing demand for reliable land cover information there has been a growing need for robust methods and datasets to improve the classification accuracy from remotely sensed imagery. This study sought to assess the potential of the newly launched Landsat 8 sensor’s thermal bands and derived vegetation indices in improving land cover classification in a complex urban landscape using the support vector machine classifier. This study compared the individual and combined performance of Landsat 8’s reflective, thermal bands and vegetation indices in classifying urban land use-land cover. The integration of Landsat 8 reflective bands, derived vegetation indices and thermal bands overall produced significantly higher accuracy classification results than using traditional bands as standalone (i.e. overall, user and producer accuracies). An overall accuracy above 89.33% and a kappa index of 0.86, significantly higher than the one obtained with the use of the traditional reflective bands as a standalone data-set and other analysis stages. On average, the results also indicate high producer and user accuracies (i.e. above 80%) for most of the classes with a McNemar’s Z score of 9.00 at 95% confidence interval showing significant improvement compared with classification using reflective bands as standalone. Overall, the results of this study indicate that the integration of the Landsat 8’s OLI and TIR data presents an invaluable potential for accurate and robust land cover classification in a complex urban landscape, especially in areas where the availability of high resolution datasets remains a challenge.     

朗吉努斯《论崇高》的辨证思想探析

朗吉努斯的《论崇高》主要是对五种崇高风格的讨论,在修辞学和美学史上都有重要的意义。从朗吉努斯崇高理论出发,论证了其崇高风格蕴含的辨证思想,即整个文章把握了客观与主观的统一,内容与形式的统一,实践的决定性和正确意识的积极作用,最后由文学理论上升到人类灵魂的崇高境界,完成了一次历史的蜕变。     

Parameterization of Heat Fluxes at Heterogeneous Surfaces by Integrating Satellite Measurements with Surface Layer and Atmospheric Boundary Layer Observations

The regional heat flux exchange between heterogeneous landscapes and the nearby surface layer (SL) is a key issue in the study of land-atmosphere interactions over arid areas such as the Heihe River basin in northwestern China and in high elevation areas such as the Tibetan Plateau. Based on analysis of the land surface heterogeneity and its effects on the overlying air flow, the use of SL observations, atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) observations, and satellite remote sensing (RS) measurements along with ...     

Hypsometry of glaciated landscapes

Hypsometry (frequency distribution of elevations) is often used to characterize landscape morphology, traditionally in the context of the degree of ?uvial dissection. Recently, the hypsometry of glaciated regions has been used to infer how rates of glacial erosion compare with tectonic uplift rates. However, many factors other than tectonics can also exert a major in?uence on the hypsometry of a glaciated landscape, resulting in a wide variety of hypsometries. Using examples from the eastern Sierra Nevada, California, the western Sangre de Cristo Range, Colorado, and the Ben Ohau Range, New Zealand, we demonstrate that, all else being equal, the hypsometries of neighbouring basins can indicate the relative degree of glacial modi?cation in each. A selection of drainage basins from the Rocky Mountains shows that the position of the equilibrium line altitude (ELA) within the drainage basin relief is a dominant variable in determining the hypsometry of a glaciated basin. This is a non‐linear effect: once the ELA falls to some critical level, the glaciers scour deeply below the ELA, causing a noticeably different hypsometry. The hypsometry of an arbitrary region encompassing many drainage basins can disguise the variation present in the hypsometries, and thus landforms, of the individual basins. Unique local circumstances, such as the presence of a mountain ice?eld (Waiho Basin, Southern Alps), substantial hanging valleys (Avalanche Creek, Glacier National Park), a narrow outlet canyon (Sawmill Creek, Sierra Nevada), and isolated geologic structures (Baker Creek, Sierra Nevada), can have a major impact on the hypsometry of an individual basin. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

全球化背景下滇南山地多民族农业文化景观的演变及其民族共生关系响应——以西双版纳傣族自治州为例

山地多民族地区农业文化景观的演变与当地地理空间的复杂性和民族文化的多样性特征密切相关。运用遥感、GIS技术,并结合田野调查,点面结合,分析了西双版纳傣族自治州橡胶文化景观的空间格局及其对民族关系的影响。研究表明:受全球化的影响,西双版纳地区传统稻作文化正逐渐式微,因经济利益驱使导致橡胶种植面积急剧扩大,土地利用方式改变,这是橡胶文化景观兴起的主要空间演化机制。橡胶文化在给当地少数民族带来丰厚经济收入和促进现代化发展的同时,也造成了生态多样性的破坏,民族特色经济、文化的损害,民族发展互补性的减少以及民族经济共生关系的打破。民族感情和民族认同让位于经济利益,民族乡土社会结构受到冲击,民族共生关系受到影响,这些都集中体现在橡胶文化景观上。通过研究文化景观演变与民族关系的关联,可以丰富人地关系理论的内涵,引入民族因素和文化因素来思考民族地区人地关系,扩展当今全球化变革影响下民族地理学研究的内容,同时也在实践上为做好民族工作和构建新型和谐民族关系提供新的思路。     

The Promise for Geomorphic Discovery in the South

Abstract

Until recently a neglected region, renown for limited exposures, the southern United States is becoming an area of geomorphic discovery. This article presents an overview of current geomorphic research in this region, suggesting that despite past problems, academic geographers have made significant contributions to the geomorphology of the South in recent years. Research topics published on the region are highly varied, with some spatial bias as well as topical bias toward fluvial systems. Yet because of the limited historical work, much is unknown about these unique landscapes and their susceptibility to natural and human disturbances, and much benefit is to be gained from both applied and theoretical study of them.     

THE MONUMENT AND THE BUNGALOW

ABSTRACT. Students of human landscapes often view those landscapes as documents and seek to “read” them for cultural and historical meaning. But how does one learn to read landscape? And how can students be taught to do it? After many years of teaching courses about commonplace American landscapes, I have discovered that students must learn two things before they can expect to read human landscapes. First, they must learn to pay attention to commonplace things which most Americans normally ignore. Second, they must master vocabularies that permit them to classify elements in the landscape and to connect small things with larger ideas. Two examples in the landscape of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania—the town's war memorial and a scattering of California bungalows-demonstrate how these ideas work.     

Human interactions with the sandstone landscape of central Sudetes

The paper examines the history of human interactions with the specific plateau and cuesta morphology developed upon Cretaceous sedimentary sequences in the Middle Sudetes, Central Europe (Poland, Czech Republic). Lithological contrasts influence relief at regional and local scale, providing diverse opportunities and limits to human activities since medieval times until the present. As a result a complex cultural landscape underpinned by geomorphology evolved through time, illustrating the concept of ‘sandstone phenomenon’. The following interactions with the physical landscape are identified: avoidance, adaptation, modification, and withdrawal. Although early modifications occurred in the late medieval period, adaptation rather than direct human impact typified the area until the mid-18th century. The expansion of settlement network in later times, along with forest clearance, development of quarrying and growth of tourism have led to substantial modifications of the geomorphological landscape and the origin of a suite of anthropic landforms. Depopulation of the region, particularly on the now Polish side, amplified after World War II, resulted in land use changes and renaturalization of many areas. Many previously occupied areas have been abandoned and various forms of nature and landscape protection now provide limitations to further development. Modification is tightly controlled, while re-adaptation is preferred and promoted, driven not by physical constraints anymore but by changing attitudes and increasing environmental awareness.