IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Shown above is a partial view of Harrison Cole’s map, “Finding Refuge in Prince William Sound” published on visionscarto.net This map is a snapshot of marine traffic during the busiest months of 2017, which shows the paths of over 1,000 unique vessels and many thousands of trips. While minimizing damage to the environment is an important factor when considering a PPOR, the continued use of Prince William Sound as a high-volume thoroughfare both by oil tankers as well as other marine vessels means that damage to the environment will remain a matter of course rather than an exceptional tragedy.
GOOD NEWS
Esri is holding a Teaching with ArcGIS Notebooks Webinar on Thursday, May 21, 2020, at 10:00 a.m. (PDT) to learn how to teach with ArcGIS Notebooks in higher education and the options available to incorporate it into your curriculum. Topics include: Introducing ArcGIS Notebooks; Using Notebooks in ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online, and ArcGIS Enterprise; Best practices, useful resources, and a case study. For more information and to register
Spring 2020 graduate Joseph Nadonley accepted employment as a GIS Production Analyst for Fugro Earthdata, Inc. His primary responsibilities will revolve around the development of their ROAMES Power project.
The May 2020 issue of the Newsletter of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) is available.
NEWS
How the Streets Got So Mean
When Don Mitchell was a master’s student in geography at Penn State in the late 1980s, he came across a newspaper article on homelessness that struck him. Homelessness was surging in many U.S. cities — from 1984 to 1987 the number of people living on the streets almost doubled — and the article attempted to explain the trend by looking into the characteristics of those experiencing homelessness: age, race, gender, work history, drug or alcohol abuse. That didn’t seem like a satisfactory approach to Mitchell.
The Software That’s Powering All the Coronavirus Dashboards
With roughly a zillion different sources out there for coronavirus information, experts and authorities are rapidly iterating on ways to best present useful information to the public. Are deaths spiking, or is the curve flattening? How is the virus moving around, and how can it be stymied? To collate all of this information, many groups are leaning on geographic information system (GIS) software. It’s often used by governments and large businesses that need to account for changes in the physical world, usually meaning disaster preparedness and mitigation, as well as monitoring public infrastructure, such as plotting the location of 911 calls.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
Carbon isotope ratios in tree rings respond differently to climatic variations than tree-ring width in a mesic temperate forest
Stockton Maxwell, Soumaya Belmecheri, Alan H. Taylor, Kenneth J. Davis, Troy W. Ocheltree
Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2020.108014
Determining the response of forest growth and productivity to climate variability is crucial for understanding and modeling forest carbon sequestration in mesic temperate forests. Most tree-ring analyses have used monthly climate data. Daily climate data may be more appropriate to use in the determination of tree-ring response to climate because cell division, enlargement, and thickening occur during discrete periods of the growing season. We analyze annual tree-ring width and δ13C from Tsuga canadensis (1992–2012) at ten sites in the northeastern US to test the null hypothesis that tree-ring width and δ13C respond similarly to critical climate periods using daily climate data and linear regression. There was a significant difference in the climate response of ring width and δ13C. Precipitation predicted both δ13C and ring width with the highest r2 and greatest level of significance overall. δ13C integrated climate over longer periods of the year (and previous year) than ring width at most sites. δ13C showed a more consistent seasonal signal across sites for each climate variable than ring width. Our work provides a new perspective on the response of annual tree growth and δ13C to climatic variability that can inform ecosystem productivity, carbon cycle, and earth system models.
Virtual reality for student learning: Understanding individual differences
Ping Li, Jennifer Legault, Alexander Klippel, Jiayan Zhao
Human Behaviour and Brain
DOI: 10.37716/HBAB.2020010105
https://blclab.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/HBAB_Vol1_issue1.pdf
Virtual reality (VR) is emerging as a rapidly developing technology that holds significant promises to impact student learning. In this review, we focus on the features of this technology regarding levels of immersion and interaction and individual differences in cognitive characteristics of VR learners. We attempt to parse the specific technological features that enable effective learning and examine how students mentally process these features. While VR helps to create situated learning conditions, its theoretical significance lies in its ability to provide perception-action enabled experiences to the learner, and it is these experiences that lead to positive behavioural and brain outcomes compared to traditional methods of learning. Our discussion highlights the understanding of VR learning with respect to individual differences, especially in spatial abilities of the learner, and how variability in spatial abilities might impact both spatial learning and language learning.
