Physical and political boundaries as barriers to the continuity of social vulnerability     

《Applied geography (Sevenoaks, England)》2013

The dynamics of social vulnerability are of key interest to many government agencies and departments. Identifying the geographic distribution of vulnerability within regions, and analysing how localised areas of social need change over time, is a key information requirement for decision-making, and the resultant allocation of resources. Typically, the delineation of areas for the determination of social vulnerability occurs using a combination of political and census boundaries. In many instances, the boundaries of these areas align to natural geographic features such as rivers or lakes. In other cases, a boundary is aligned to a man-made structure such as a road. The boundary may also be arbitrarily positioned based on some measure of distance and not align to any physical feature. In this research, we identify the various boundary types present in a political region. Using two measures of social vulnerability, we assess these boundaries as barriers to the continuity of social vulnerability. From our results, we identify motorways/highways and watercourses as potential barriers. We find no significant effects with lesser road structures suggesting there is no “wrong side of the street”. These results have implications for decision-makers and emphasise the need to recognise the “softness” of boundaries, and consider the relationships between areas, when allocating resources.  相似文献   

Spatial Modelling in Forest Ecology and Management: A Case Study. Edited by M. JANSEN,M. JUDAS and J. SABOROWSKI (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2002). [Pp. xiii+225]. ISBN 3-540-43357-0. Price €89.95. Hardback     

Richard Wadsworth 《International journal of geographical information science》2013,27(3):299-300

Urban segregation has received increasing attention in the literature due to the negative impacts that it has on urban populations. Indices of urban segregation are useful instruments for understanding the problem as well as for setting up public policies. The usefulness of spatial segregation indices depends on their ability to account for the spatial arrangement of population and to show how segregation varies across the city. This paper proposes global spatial indices of segregation that capture interaction among population groups at different scales. We also decompose the global indices to obtain local spatial indices of segregation, which enable visualization and exploration of segregation patterns. We propose the use of statistical tests to determine the significance of the indices. The proposed indices are illustrated using an artificial dataset and a case study of socio‐economic segregation in São José dos Campos (SP, Brazil).  相似文献   

The role of sub‐national government and the private sector in future spatial data infrastructures     

A. Rajabifard  A. Binns  I. Masser  I. Williamson 《International journal of geographical information science》2013,27(7):727-741

A Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) facilitates and coordinates the exchange and sharing of spatial data between stakeholders in the spatial data community. With this objective in mind, countries throughout the world are developing SDIs to manage and utilize their spatial data assets more effectively. These countries are developing SDIs to assist in various kinds of decision‐making at different levels of government jurisdictions that have an important impact within their national boundaries. However, current research shows that SDI is understood and described differently by stakeholders from different disciplines and different jurisdictional levels. Therefore, in many cases, SDI initiatives remain very much an innovation, even among practitioners. There are still uncertainties regarding the benefits and identities of SDIs, particularly in connection with how they evolve over time to meet user needs. This paper reviews and assesses the development of SDIs throughout the world over the past 15 years and the leadership role of national governments in SDI creation. This assessment is based on the SDI activities of various jurisdictions including Asia‐Pacific, Australia, North America, and Europe, and research into the worldwide effects of spatial information clearing houses. This assessment includes a discussion on emerging trends in SDI development, with particular reference to the increasingly important role played by sub‐national governments and the private sector within the framework of SDI development. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for future SDI development, including the delivery of a virtual world that has a particular focus on facilitating decision‐making at a community level within a national context.  相似文献   

Towards a potential research agenda to guide the implementation of Spatial Data Infrastructures—A case study from India     

Y. Georgiadou  S. K. Puri 《International journal of geographical information science》2013,27(10):1113-1130

Recently, Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) has been a rapidly expanding field and broadly assumed to underpin the development of information society and the knowledge economy. In this paper, we argue that the anticipated benefits of SDIs have largely not yet been generally realized in practice due to a lack of a robust theoretical framework as well as insufficient empirical research to guide the implementation efforts. We posit that learnings from the allied discipline of Information Infrastructures, which has matured during the 1990s in response to the proliferation of distributed, complex, and heterogeneous networked systems, can provide a useful theoretical lens to inform the emerging domain of SDIs. We focus on three key concepts identified in the domain of information infrastructure theory, viz. the installed base, reflexive standardization, and cultivation approach to design, to develop a theoretical framework, which is then applied to analyse the ongoing initiative to establish National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) in India. This analysis helps us to provide the basis to articulate a potential research agenda—for both theory and practice—which, we believe, offers the promise to better conceptualize and implement SDIs, particularly in developing country settings like India.  相似文献   

On the prediction error variance of three common spatial interpolation schemes     

Phaedon C. Kyriakidis  Michael F. Goodchild 《International journal of geographical information science》2013,27(8):823-855

Three forms of linear interpolation are routinely implemented in geographical information science, by interpolating between measurements made at the endpoints of a line, the vertices of a triangle, and the vertices of a rectangle (bilinear interpolation). Assuming the linear form of interpolation to be correct, we study the propagation of error when measurement error variances and covariances are known for the samples at the vertices of these geometric objects. We derive prediction error variances associated with interpolated values at generic points in the above objects, as well as expected (average) prediction error variances over random locations in these objects. We also place all the three variants of linear interpolation mentioned above within a geostatistical framework, and illustrate that they can be seen as particular cases of Universal Kriging (UK). We demonstrate that different definitions of measurement error in UK lead to different UK variants that, for particular expected profiles or surfaces (drift models), yield weights and predictions identical with the interpolation methods considered above, but produce fundamentally different (yet equally plausible from a pure data standpoint) prediction error variances.  相似文献   

An analysis of urban spatial structure using comprehensive prominence of irregular areas     

Changping Zhang 《International journal of geographical information science》2013,27(6):675-686

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new notion on prominent areas of a city defined by two types of comprehensive prominence for identifying urban spatial structure. Not only geometric attributes and topological attributes but also thematic attributes of irregular areas (e.g. districts of a city) are used to define these indices. In the paper, first the topological prominence related to geometric attributes such as size, location, and shape of areas is constructed by spatial weight matrix. Second, for finding comprehensive prominences, the principle axis factor model is adopted, and the first factor score is defined as the comprehensive prominence 1. Then, the proportion of thematic attributes of each area occupied in across the city is used to define the comprehensive prominence 2. Finally, we use these comprehensive prominences to extract some important regions in Matsudo City of Chiba Prefecture in Japan. The areas composing those regions show a high topological prominence, have a large population, have many offices, and are located around the train station.  相似文献   

Spatiotemporal analysis of rural–urban land conversion     

Bo Huang  Li Zhang  Bo Wu 《International journal of geographical information science》2013,27(3):379-398

Understanding the complexity of urban expansion requires an analysis of the factors influencing the spatial and temporal processes of rural–urban land conversion. This study aims at building a statistical land conversion model to assist in understanding land use change patterns. Specifically, GIS coupled with a logistic regression model and exponential smoothing techniques is used for exploring the effects of various factors on land use change. These factors include population density, slope, proximity to roads, and surrounding land use, and their influence on land use change is studied for generating a predictive model. Methods to reduce spatial autocorrelation in a logistic regression framework are also discussed. Primarily, an optimal sampling scheme that can eliminate spatial autocorrelation while maintaining adequate samples to allow the model to achieve the comparable accuracy as the spatial autoregressive model is developed. Since many of the previous studies on modeling the spatial complexity of urban growth ignored temporal complexity, a modified exponential smoothing technique is employed to produce a smoothed model from a series of bi‐temporal models obtained from different time periods. The proposed model is validated using the multi‐temporal land use data in New Castle County, DE, USA. It is demonstrated that our approach provides an effective option for multi‐temporal land use change modeling and the modeling results help interpret the land use change patterns.  相似文献   

Geographical Detectors‐Based Health Risk Assessment and its Application in the Neural Tube Defects Study of the Heshun Region,China     

Jin‐Feng Wang  Xin‐Hu Li  George Christakos  Yi‐Lan Liao  Tin Zhang  Xue Gu 《International journal of geographical information science》2013,27(1):107-127

Physical environment, man‐made pollution, nutrition and their mutual interactions can be major causes of human diseases. These disease determinants have distinct spatial distributions across geographical units, so that their adequate study involves the investigation of the associated geographical strata. We propose four geographical detectors based on spatial variation analysis of the geographical strata to assess the environmental risks of health: the risk detector indicates where the risk areas are; the factor detector identifies factors that are responsible for the risk; the ecological detector discloses relative importance between the factors; and the interaction detector reveals whether the risk factors interact or lead to disease independently. In a real‐world study, the primary physical environment (watershed, lithozone and soil) was found to strongly control the neural tube defects (NTD) occurrences in the Heshun region (China). Basic nutrition (food) was found to be more important than man‐made pollution (chemical fertilizer) in the control of the spatial NTD pattern. Ancient materials released from geological faults and subsequently spread along slopes dramatically increase the NTD risk. These findings constitute valuable input to disease intervention strategies in the region of interest.  相似文献   

Morphometric characterisation of landform from DEMs     

Daming Wang  Shawn W. Laffan  Yu Liu  Lun Wu 《International journal of geographical information science》2013,27(2):305-326

We describe a method of morphometric characterisation of landform from digital elevation models (DEMs). The method is implemented first by classifying every location into morphometric classes based on the mathematical shape of a locally fitted quadratic surface and its positional relationship with the analysis window. Single‐scale fuzzy terrain indices of peakness, pitness, passness, ridgeness, and valleyness are then calculated based on the distance of the analysis location from the ideal cases. These can then be combined into multi‐scale terrain indices to summarise terrain information across different operational scales. The algorithm has four characteristics: (1) the ideal cases of different geomorphometric features are simply and clearly defined; (2) the output is spatially continuous to reflect the inherent fuzziness of geomorphometric features; (3) the output is easily combined into a multi‐scale index across a range of operational scales; and (4) the standard general morphometric parameters are quantified as the first and second order derivatives of the quadratic surface. An additional benefit of the quadratic surface is the derivation of the R ² goodness of fit statistic, which allows an assessment of both the reliability of the results and the complexity of the terrain. An application of the method using a test DEM indicates that the single‐ and multi‐scale terrain indices perform well when characterising the different geomorphometric features.  相似文献   

玉树地震滑坡分布调查及其特征与形成机制   总被引：2，自引：2，他引：0  

许冲  徐锡伟  于贵华 《中国地震研究》2013,27(1):1-22

On April 14, 2010 at 07:49 (Beijing time), a catastrophic earthquake with MS7.1 occurred at the central Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. The epicenter was located at Yushu county, Qinghai Province, China. A total of 2036 landslides were determined from visual interpretation of aerial photographs and high resolution remote sensing images, and verified by selected field investigations. These landslides covered a total area of about 1.194km2. Characteristics and failure mechanisms of these landslides are listed in this paper, including the fact that the spatial distribution of these landslides is controlled by co-seismic main surface fault ruptures. Most of the landslides were small scale, causing rather less hazards, and often occurring close to each other. The landslides were of various types, including mainly disrupted landslides and rock falls in shallows and also deep-seated landslides, liquefaction induced landslides, and compound landslides. In addition to strong ground shaking, which is the direct landslide triggering factor, geological, topographical, and human activity also have impact on the occurrence of earthquake triggered landslides. In this paper, five types of failure mechanisms related to the landslides are presented, namely, the excavated toes of slopes accompanied by strong ground shaking; surface water infiltration accompanied by strong ground shaking; co-seismic fault slipping accompanied by strong ground shaking; only strong ground shaking; and delayed occurrence of landslides due to snow melt or rainfall infiltration at sites where slopes were weakened by co-seismic ground shaking. Besides the main co-seismic surface ruptures, slope fissures were also delineated from visual interpretation of aerial photographs in high resolution. A total of 4814 slope fissures, with a total length up to 77.1km, were finally mapped. These slope fissures are mainly distributed on the slopes located at the southeastern end of the main co-seismic surface rupture zone, an area subject to strong compression during the earthquake.  相似文献