Browsing by Department "Geography"

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Collaborative Research: Sea Ice as a Driver of Antarctic Benthic Macroalgal Community Composition and Nearshore Trophic Connectivity
Geography; TAMU; https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14641/400; National Science Foundation
The western Antarctic Peninsula has become a model for understanding cold water communities and how they may be changing in Antarctica and elsewhere. Brown macroalgae (seaweeds) form extensive undersea forests in the northern portion of this region where they play a key role in providing both physical structure and a food (carbon) source for shallow water communities. Yet between Anvers Island (64 degrees S latitude) and Adelaide Island (67 S latitude) these macroalgae become markedly less abundant and diverse. This is probably because the habitat to the south is covered by more sea ice for a longer period, and the sea ice reduces the amount of light that reaches the algae. The reduced macroalgal cover undoubtedly impacts other organisms in the food web, but the ways in which it alters sea-floor community processes and organization is unknown. This project will quantitatively document the macroalgal communities at multiple sites between Anvers and Adelaide Islands using a combination of SCUBA diving, video surveys, and algal collections. Sea ice cover, light levels, and other environmental parameters on community structure will be modelled to determine which factors have the largest influence. Impacts on community structure, food webs, and carbon flow will be assessed through a mixture of SCUBA diving and video surveys. Broader impacts include the training of graduate students and a postdoctoral researcher, as well as numerous informal public education activities including lectures, presentations to K-12 groups, and a variety of social media-based outreach. Macroalgal communities are more abundance and diverse to the north along the Western Antarctic Peninsula, perhaps due to the greater light availability that is associated with shorter period of sea-ice cover. This project will determine the causes and community level consequence of this variation in algal community structure. First, satellite data on sea ice extent and water turbidity will be used to select study sites between 64 S and 69 S where the extent of annual sea ice cover is the primary factor influencing subsurface light levels. Then, variations in macroalgal cover across these study sites will be determined by video line-transect surveys conducted by SCUBA divers. The health, growth, and physiological status of species found at the different sites will be determined by quadrat sampling. The relative importance of macroalgal-derived carbon to the common invertebrate consumers in the foodweb will be assessed with stable isotope and fatty acid biomarker techniques. This will reveal how variation in macroalgal abundance and species composition across the sea ice cover gradient impacts sea floor community composition and carbon flow throughout the food web. In combination, this work will facilitate predictions of how the ongoing reductions in extent and duration of sea ice cover that is occurring in the region as a result of global climate change will impact the structure of nearshore benthic communities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
GRASP ATSDR/CDC Geocoding Tool
Geography; TAMU; https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14641/659; DHHS-Centers For Disease Control and Prevention
Scope of Work: Geocoding Services for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) Purpose Texas A&M University (TAMU) will provision online geocoding to enable CDC/ATSDR staff, fellows, and contractors to perform unlimited geocoding activities conforming to the acceptable use specifications outlined below. General Requirements As part of this contract, TAMU agrees to provide: 1. Web Interface providing secure access to the TAMU geocoding engine. The secure access must be integrated with the CDC SAMS security controls. 2. Web Interface which supports data uploads and downloads in a variety of formats including CSV, TSV, and Access Databases. TAMU will work with CDC to investigate implementation approaches to expand input data types to include MS Excel. 3. TAMU geocoding results must include a geocode quality indicator characterizing the quality of the geocode that has been provided, for each record. 4. 9:00AM – 5:00PM CST Monday-Friday phone and email support for CDC users (excluding university holidays and closures). 5. Travel to and participate in project and scientific meetings related to the project scope. Acceptable Use Clause 1. CDC/ATSDR staff, fellows, and contractors may use the TAMU geocoder in an unlimited manner as long as a. Each geocoding job is manually performed and capped at 10,000 records. b. Each job contains data for projects funded by CDC and for work carried out by CDC staff, fellows, and contractors. 2. CDC/ATSDR staff, fellows, and contractors may not a. Use the TAMU geocoder for non-CDC projects, partners, or data. b. Use the TAMU geocoder as a component within automated data collection or processing systems. Performance Period The performance period is two years, from the date at which the service may be reasonable initiated.
RAPID - Tree Blowdown Impacts of Hurricane Harvey on Hydrologic Surface Connectivity in a Coastal River and Its Floodplain
Geography; TAMU; https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14641/353; National Science Foundation
Flood inundation typically enables the largest and most abrupt material and energy exchanges between a river and its floodplain and the size of the area affected is highly dependent on river-channel and floodplain geomorphology. Given the vulnerability of coastal plains to the wind and rain impacts of tropical cyclones with increasing strength and frequency, it is critical to advance our understanding of these impacts on river-floodplain interactions in these environments. This knowledge is also crucial to successful preservation and management of the coastal plain river systems, their ecosystems, and ecosystem services. The Mission River on the Coastal Bend of Texas, which is also a part of the Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve (MANERR), was on the path of the destructive core of Hurricane Harvey, which made its first landfall on Aug. 25, 2017. Hurricane driven heavy rainfall resulted only in moderate flooding of the river; however, the extreme winds induced a substantial amount of tree blowdowns and large woody debris (LWD) on the river and its floodplain. LWD creates logjams and barriers that can alter the flow of the river and redirect flood and river flow into floodplain environments, resulting in erosion and reconfiguration of the river system. This rapid-response research project will be the first assessment of the tree blowdown impacts of Hurricane Harvey ? and one of the first of any hurricane? on a coastal river system. The outcomes are expected to contribute to the very limited literature in fluvial geomorphology on the subject by advancing the knowledge-base on extreme wind impacts of tropical cyclones on river systems. The findings will provide insights for developing successful landscape and ecosystem management of the riverine habitats at the MANERR, with applicability to similar systems which might include human habitation and infrastructure. This research will establish partnerships with staff/researchers at the MANERR and Coastal Resilience Collaborative (CRC) within Texas Sea Grant. The findings will be disseminated via the MANERR environmental stewardship program and CRC education and outreach communities with the aim of increasing awareness of coastal communities, resource managers, and land-use planners on the impacts of tropical cyclones on river and floodplain systems and associated ecosystem services. The proposed study will provide training and mentoring of graduate and undergraduate students from underrepresented groups. This study aims to answer the question: What are the tree blowdown and LWD impacts of Hurricane Harvey on hydrologic surface connectivity between the Mission River channel and floodplain? The study is driven by two objectives: 1) determine quantitatively the spatial extent and patterns of tree blowdowns on the floodplain and LWD inputs into the river channel; 2) evaluate the impact of tree blowdowns and LWD after an extreme event (i.e., hurricane-force wind) on flood inundation and hydrologic surface connectivity between the river channel and the floodplain in a spatial and temporal context. To address these objectives, the study will integrate field investigations, high spatial- and spectral-resolution geospatial data, and hydrodynamic modeling. Findings of the study will advance our process understanding of how an abrupt change in floodplain configuration due to hurricane-force wind influence the surface water induced interactions within river-floodplain systems and how this influence varies across a range of river-stage conditions.
REU Site: Cyber-Health GIS ? Multidisciplinary Research Experiences in Spacial Dynamics of Health
Geography; TAMU; https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14641/659; National Science Foundation
This project is funded from the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Sites program in the SBE Directorate. As such, it has both scientific and societal benefits, and it integrates research and education. This REU Site combines the fields of Computing, Geographic Information Science (GIS), and Health on the Texas A&M University (TAMU) campus in College Station, TX where undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds in Computing, GIS, and Health work together on collaborative research projects in a newly emerging field called Cyber-Enabled HealthGIS (Cyber-HealthGIS). Thirty REU students (ten each year) are engaged in research teams to promote discovery, teaching, and training through hands-on research and mentoring. Students are mentored and trained in the basics of research techniques, the responsible conduct of research, the need for diversity in research, and research designs and methods. The REU Site students collaboratively pose, execute, and evaluate research projects resulting in research advances in Cyber-HealthGIS. Through this approach, students learn research and problem-solving outside of their own discipline, and gain independence and confidence in their own ability to undertake research. This program will advance the new field of Cyber-HealthGIS by building theory, methods, and approaches which will lead to joint faculty-student publications in research journals, seminars, and conferences, and student presentations of their own research. This program fills a critical US workforce gap by creating a generation of students trained for and interested in research and scientific careers in Cyber-HealthGIS, a rapidly advancing field with the potential to improve human health and well-being. The student projects and example prototypes developed through this program will be made freely available to help foster innovation and development in the Cyber-HealthGIS industry. In this REU Site, the ideas from each student's academic/disciplinary domain is integrated to form a cohesive, achievable research goal under the umbrella of the core research themes of this project, which include (1) Outbreak surveillance through the combination of authoritative and social media data; (2) High-resolution chronic disease risk mapping with citizen-derived perceptions of community; and (3) Continuous time-enabled scalable outbreak planning. Students work closely with faculty mentors to pose the research question, develop testable hypotheses, obtain the necessary data, organize appropriate methods, engineer an approach, perform experiments, and undertake an evaluation of the results. This project will make freely available examples of prototype applications, thereby advancing the capabilities of Cyber-HealthGIS research through the development and release of free and open source (FOSS) code for the systems and example data sets used in the student research and experiments.
Urban Water Provisioning Systems and Household Water Security
Geography; TAMU; https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14641/592; National Science Foundation
Water security remains a major challenge for rapidly growing urban areas of the developing world and impoverished areas in developed countries where unregulated and informal domestic water provisioning practices persist despite increases in household access to piped water. Urban water provision is an assemblage of water vendors, networked pipes, plastic jugs, standpipes, water meters, rainwater and greywater collection tanks, and water trucks that convey and manage domestic water provision to help households cope and meet needs of everyday life. This project examines how and why urban households obtain water through these hybrid infrastructure systems and tests their efficacy in terms of household water security, defined as reliable, adequate and affordable water for a healthy life, using a scaled metric developed by the investigator. The project will be conducted in metropolitan Fortaleza, Brazil, where domestic water provision reflects typical configurations of water provision in the developing world. Research outcomes will provide meaningful insights as to the benefits and limitations of hybrid water-provisioning systems and inform development interventions, technological innovations for water provision, and infrastructure investments. Investigators will create a publicly available online portal to disseminate project information and photos, research findings, and a computational tool to standardize the household water security metric for cross-regional comparisons, allowing researchers to examine impacts of household water insecurity on diverse areas such as public health and water infrastructure planning. The project will also deepen research networks between Brazilian and US researchers, broaden participation of underrepresented groups in science through its research design, and contribute to the development of a globally competitive STEM workforce by training one computer science undergraduate and one geography graduate student. The emergence of regulated and unregulated water provisioning systems begs the question of its efficacy for human development and water security: Do hybrid urban water systems increase or decrease household water security? What particular configuration of formal and informal technologies and practices enhances or reduces household water security? How do different hybrid water-provisioning systems compare in terms of household water security? The major social scientific contribution of this project is to answer these questions by employing a mix of qualitative (observation; open-ended and semi-structured interviews), participatory (photovoice), and quantitative (survey) methods. The investigator will describe and develop a typology of water provision, assess how households interact with the existing systems, and measure household-level water security in selected urban communities. The household water security metric calculated from the survey data can be used to statistically test and model the relationship of water insecurity to several factors, including water-provisioning type, income, education, and health. This project will provide new empirical data to engage larger theoretical debates on the benefits of coexistence, the efficacy of centralized, piped water networks as the modern ideal of water provision, and urban water governance, more broadly.