IMAGE OF THE WEEK
An apple cider social was held by Department of Geography on Friday, Nov. 5 at 3 p.m. on the lawn outside Walker Building. Faculty, staff, and students enjoyed hot cider, donuts, and conversation in the autumn afternoon sun.
GOOD NEWS
Today is Penn State GIS Day The virtual program starts at 1:30 p.m. EST and features geographers Josh Inwood, Brandi Gaertner, Louisa Holmes, and Harrison Cole.
Undergraduate students Rylie Adams (geography minor), Joe Bagala (geography B.S.), and Allie Lister (geography B.S.) are giving talks at the NASA Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium’s 2021 WISER | MURE | FURP Research Symposium on Wednesday, Nov. 17, at 7 p.m. EST
Ben Martini’s MGIS Capstone Project, “Using Object-based image analysis to detect laughing gull nests,” was published in GIScience & Remote Sensing. Doug Miller was his adviser.
Zachary Goldberg published, “Development through commodification: exploring apple commodity production as pesticide promotion in the High Atlas,” in Agriculture and Human Values.
Vivian D. Rodríguez-Rocha received a 2021research and writing grant from the Institute of Human Geography for, “Counter-topographies of care: care activism in the movement for women’s lives in Mexico.”
In lieu of a staff gift exchange for the holidays, the Department of Geography staff is instead collecting donations for Toys For Tots. Anyone is invited to participate by donating a new, unwrapped toy or by making a monetary donation and a staff member will shop for you. Drop off gifts with Darlene Peletski in 302 Walker Building by December 15.
COFFEE HOUR
Sarah Damaske on The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America
Drawing on interviews with one hundred men and women who have lost jobs across Pennsylvania, Sarah Damaske examines the ways unemployment shapes families, finances, health, and the job hunt. Damaske demonstrates that commonly held views of unemployment are either incomplete or just plain wrong. The unemployment system generates new inequalities that cast uncertainties on the search for work and on life chances beyond the world of work, threatening opportunity in America.
- 4 p.m. EST, Friday, Nov. 19
- 112 Walker Building
- Coffee Hour to Go on Zoom
NEWS
The Department of Geography annual printed newsletter, GEOGRAPH, is now online
Highlights from the summer 2021 issue
New associate head for DEI’s mission: To foster a sense of belonging
Lorraine Dowler, professor of geography and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies was named the associate head for diversity, equity, and inclusion for the geography department spring 2021. Associate heads were named for each department in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences as part of an ongoing initiative to build a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive department and college environment. The program was launched in January 2021, and Dowler was among the first appointed.
Seed grants support interdisciplinary applied research in geography
Geographers Helen Greatrex, Louisa Holmes, and Emily Rosenman, whose work crosses the subfields of human, environment, and society and geographic information sciences, received seed grants for their research projects.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
Using object-based image analysis to detect laughing gull nests
Benjamin F. Martini & Douglas A. Miller
GIScience & Remote Sensing
10.1080/15481603.2021.1999376
Remote sensing has long been used to study wildlife; however, manual methods of detecting wildlife in aerial imagery are often time-consuming and prone to human error, and newer computer vision techniques have not yet been extensively applied to wildlife surveys. We used the object-based image analysis (OBIA) software eCognition to detect laughing gull (Leucophaeus atricilla) nests in Jamaica Bay as part of an ongoing monitoring effort at the John F. Kennedy International Airport. Our technique uses a combination of high resolution 4-band aerial imagery captured via manned aircraft with a multispectral UltraCam Falcon M2 camera, LiDAR point cloud data, and land cover data derived from a bathymetric LiDAR point cloud to classify and extract laughing gull nests. Our ruleset uses the site (topographic position of nest objects), tone (spectral characteristic of nest objects), shape, size, and association (nearby objects commonly found with the objects of interest that help identify them) elements of image interpretation, as well as NDVI and a sublevel object examination to classify and extract nests. The ruleset achieves a producer’s accuracy of 98% as well as a user’s accuracy of 65% and a kappa of 0.696, indicating that it extracts a majority of the nests in the imagery while reducing errors of commission to only 35% of the final results. The remaining errors of commission are difficult for the software to differentiate without also impacting the number of nests successfully extracted and are best addressed by a manual verification of output results as part of a semi-automated workflow in which the OBIA is used to complete the initial search of the imagery and the results are then systematically verified by the user to remove errors. This eliminates the need to manually search entire sets of imagery for nests, resulting in a much more efficient and less error prone methodology than previous unassisted image interpretation techniques. Because of the extensibility of OBIA software and the increasing availability of imagery due to small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS), our methodology and its benefits have great potential for adaptation to other species surveyed using aerial imagery to enhance wildlife population monitoring.
Development through commodification: exploring apple commodity production as pesticide promotion in the High Atlas
Goldberg, Z.A.
Agriculture and Human Values
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-021-10280-4
Global development initiatives frequently promote agricultural commodity chain projects to improve livelihoods. In Morocco, development projects, including the Plan Maroc Vert (PMV), have promoted apple production in rural regions of the country. In order to access domestic markets, these new apple producers often use pesticides to meet market standards. Through situated ethnographic inquiry and commodity chain analysis, using a combination of surveys (n = 120) and interviews (n = 84) with apple wholesalers, government officials, along with farmers, this paper works to critique the PMV’s development approach that implicitly values commodification. By exploring interconnected processes of commodification, I link subsidized apple saplings and cold storage infrastructure to the dependence on pesticide usage, which has become a part of daily village life. This has important implications for community health and riparian ecosystems. Alternatively, I propose how we can imagine different development trajectories that decommodify livelihoods by focusing on local knowledge creation and diversification strategies.