Browsing by Subject "Urbanization"
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Item Open Access 911, Is There an Emergency? The Effects of Gentrification on 911 Calls in Durham, NC(2021-02) Vila, AudreyIn recent years, urbanization in the United States has led to the displacement of low-income, minority communities for middle and high-income individuals, a process termed gentrification. Scholars debate the benefits and consequences of these changes for the existing populations. One possible effect is the changing of expectations and norms in city neighborhoods as the population shifts. Similarly, it raises questions about the interactions between new populations and existing residents. The following analysis uses urban block groups and Calls to Service data in Durham County between 2006 and 2018. According to established indicators of gentrification, Durham block groups are gentrifying within this time period with increased population, decreased Black populations, increased rent, increased education levels, and increased income. Importantly, the majority of Durham’s urban block groups are experiencing an influx of Hispanic residents, which is different from previous gentrification trends. Next, the paper assesses implications from previous literature that with population mixing, conflict from changing norms and perceptions would lead to increased conflict and result in greater use of the police for minor incidents. The paper uses simple linear regression with all indicators on a dependent variable that measures per capita call frequency. For 911 noise complaints, disturbances, alcohol and drug incidents, and suspicion calls, the regression results demonstrate that gentrification’s common indicators did not correlate with increased calls. The same result is found when focusing on block groups generally susceptible to the effects of gentrification. Therefore, the paper concludes that the city of Durham did not experience an increase in disturbance calls with gentrification as predicted by the literature, providing important information as the city continues to grow.Item Open Access A Preliminary Delineation of Shark Nursery Grounds in Two South Carolina Estuaries(2004) Prosser, Christopher MI hypothesize that urbanization Murrells Inlet will affect the total number of elasmobranches present and the species diversity of elasmobranchs. I believe predation is the controlling factor for newborn sharks and young juveniles, and so I would expect to find those individuals in the areas least accessible to adult sharks. This idea is supported by Gilliam and Fraser (1987) who looked at foraging behavior in response to predation pressure. They found fishes will move to the habitats that afford them the greatest chances of survival. However, once animals grow in size, and the risk of being eaten becomes substantially less, they move to areas that are less environmentally stressful.Item Open Access An Assessment of Urbanization as it Relates to Caries Prevalence and its Determinants in Children in Copan, Honduras(2012) Damgaard, Michael BoydObjective: To determine if a significant association exists between urbanization and dental caries prevalence, and whether or not similar relationships occur between community type and principal determinants of youth oral health in children ages 2 to 12 in the region of Copan, Honduras.
Methods: The investigator conducted a cross-sectional two-part interview with each participant. First, a survey was administered to the parent to collect information surrounding dental caries determinants. Second, the investigator performed a brief examination of child dentition to determine the number of existing caries. Data was collected from two separate patient populations: an urban sample of children within Copan Ruinas, and an indigenous sample from 15 surrounding rural villages.
Results: Samples consisted of 203 individuals from the urban population and 221 from the rural. While there was no visible association between caries prevalence and urbanization, teeth brushing, parent education, and sugar intake demonstrated highly significant correlations (P<0.01). Mean DMFT Score for the combined samples was 5.15.
Conclusion: There is a clear need for dental interventions both in urban and rural communities in Copan, Honduras. Sugar consumption is likely contributing to increased caries prevalence in the urban community. Other factors such as water fluoridation could be influencing DMFT scores in Copan's more rural villages.
Item Open Access Bayesian Methods to Characterize Uncertainty in Predictive Modeling of the Effect of Urbanization on Aquatic Ecosystems(2010) Kashuba, Roxolana OrestaUrbanization causes myriad changes in watershed processes, ultimately disrupting the structure and function of stream ecosystems. Urban development introduces contaminants (human waste, pesticides, industrial chemicals). Impervious surfaces and artificial drainage systems speed the delivery of contaminants to streams, while bypassing soil filtration and local riparian processes that can mitigate the impacts of these contaminants, and disrupting the timing and volume of hydrologic patterns. Aquatic habitats where biota live are degraded by sedimentation, channel incision, floodplain disconnection, substrate alteration and elimination of reach diversity. These compounding changes ultimately lead to alteration of invertebrate community structure and function. Because the effects of urbanization on stream ecosystems are complex, multilayered, and interacting, modeling these effects presents many unique challenges, including: addressing and quantifying processes at multiple scales, representing major interrelated simultaneously acting dynamics at the system level, incorporating uncertainty resulting from imperfect knowledge, imperfect data, and environmental variability, and integrating multiple sources of available information about the system into the modeling construct. These challenges can be addressed by using a Bayesian modeling approach. Specifically, the use of multilevel hierarchical models and Bayesian network models allows the modeler to harness the hierarchical nature of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Effect of Urbanization on Stream Ecosystems (EUSE) dataset to predict invertebrate response at both basin and regional levels, concisely represent and parameterize this system of complicated cause and effect relationships and uncertainties, calculate the full probabilistic function of all variables efficiently as the product of more manageable conditional probabilities, and includes both expert knowledge and data. Utilizing this Bayesian framework, this dissertation develops a series of statistically rigorous and ecologically interpretable models predicting the effect of urbanization on invertebrates, as well as a unique, systematic methodology that creates an informed expert prior and then updates this prior with available data using conjugate Dirichlet-multinomial distribution forms. The resulting models elucidate differences between regional responses to urbanization (particularly due to background agriculture and precipitation) and address the influences of multiple urban induced stressors acting simultaneously from a new system-level perspective. These Bayesian modeling approaches quantify previously unexplained regional differences in biotic response to urbanization, capture multiple interacting environmental and ecological processes affected by urbanization, and ultimately link urbanization effects on stream biota to a management context such that these models describe and quantify how changes in drivers lead to changes in regulatory endpoint (the Biological Condition Gradient; BCG).
Item Open Access Changes in stream ecosystem structure as a function of urbanization: Potential recovery through stream restoration(2007-05) Cada, PeterI documented reach scale changes in the physical structure of 12 stream channels in the summer months of 2006, comparing four small streams draining forested catchments with eight streams from developed watersheds of similar catchment size. Study sites in four of the urban streams are within recently implemented natural channel design restoration projects. To assess whether restoration projects increase stream habitat and flow heterogeneity and increase water exchange with floodplain and hyporheic sediments I compared reach-scale geomorphic (e.g. slope, cross section, degree of incision, variation in water depth) and hydrologic (e.g. transient storage volume (TS), surface-water groundwater exchange, fine scale variation in velocity) features of each stream. I used ArcGIS to compile watershed maps and to produce detailed maps of reach habitat for each stream, and the hydrologic model OTIS-P to estimate transient storage from field rhodamine releases. Minimally impacted reaches were found to have shallower average depths with a greater variation in depth than urban or restored stream reaches. Streams restored to provide habitat had the lowest flow habitat heterogeneity of the three stream classes. Channel incision was the only physical channel feature for which the urban restored streams were more similar to the forested streams than the urban degraded condition. Surprisingly, I was unable to detect significant differences in transient storage volume or hyporheic exchange between our three stream classes. My results suggest that restoration designs are placing inadequate attention on recreating the physical template seen in less degraded streams.Item Open Access Culture in the Age of Biopolitics: Migrant Communities and Corporate Social Responsibility in China(2013) Chien, JenniferThis dissertation examines the conjuncture of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and migrant social life in the urban space of Beijing as a problematic of what Foucault called biopower, where distinct logics of market and state power deploy techniques of civil society and culture in the form of public-private partnerships. The unique effect of this conjuncture is an expanding logic of power that obfuscates lines of antagonism between capital and labor, requiring new theoretical and methodological insight into how power, resistance, and antagonism might be conceived in the biopolitical era.
Drawing on recent work on biopower and new theories of antagonism and subjectivity, I argue (following Badiou's work) that both power and resistance must be articulated in their divided tendencies, which allows us to work through how certain tendencies may be contradictory and complementary, and to redraw the lines of antagonism at the level of subjectivity in terms of these divided tendencies. These lines of antagonism don't fall between public/private, market/state, or civil society/state, but along a process by which subjectivities are produced and sustained at a "distance" from the logic of their placement in society, or integrated into power by various strategies of civil society and culture. The practices and theoretical productions of one migrant cultural organization in Beijing, whose project centers on the production of new migrant subjectivity and culture in the transformation of self and society, provides insight into how we might conceive of politics as new forms of "distance" from the logic of biopower.
Through over twelve months of intensive fieldwork from 2010-2011 and follow up trips the following year on the intersection between Corporate Social Responsibility and migrant social life in Beijing, I trace the techniques by which antagonistic subjectivity is intervened upon. First, I examine the surrounding discourses, logics, and conditions of knowledge production on culture that inform the projects of migrant subjectivity from a historical perspective, and reveal a theoretical impasse in the displacement and disavowal of revolutionary culture to grapple with how to re-think antagonistic contradictions in the pervading market logic of difference. The continuation of this impasse into the biopolitical era is brought into focus through the state and market turn to "culture industries" that include, mirror, and delimit migrant social life in Beijing. Problematizing the rise of self-articulated migrant subjectivity and migrant culture amidst these public-private projects, I then turn to the practices of one migrant organization whose project draws upon a legacy of struggle for self-organized and self-run migrant collective practices to successfully confront and block a situation of forced demolition and displacement. Analyzing how elements from state, market, and "civil society" interacted through public-private partnerships in the situation of daily migrant struggles, I identify the importance of the rise of Corporate Social Responsibility in the urban space of Beijing and the growth of biopolitical practices of intervention upon the migrant issue. I argue that the effect of the diffusion of Corporate Social Responsibility as a social practice is to enroll migrants as active participants in a social life that makes their subjectivities and productive activities visible to the public sphere. Lines of antagonism can thus be drawn by taking up distinctions between subjectivities oriented toward "the public," "self-governance," and the CSR "community," versus collective self-organizing. I conclude by arguing that if biopower seeks to mirror practices of resistance and power by drawing upon the self-activities of cooperative subjects, then thinking about the self-organized and self-run migrant organization as a new form of "distance" may shed light on how antagonism and political struggle might be redefined today.
Item Open Access Effects of urbanization on stream ecosystem functions(2011) Sudduth, ElizabethAs the human population continues to increase, the effects of land use change on streams and their watersheds will be one of the central problems facing humanity, as we strive to find ways to preserve important ecosystem services, such as drinking water, irrigation, and wastewater processing. This dissertation explores the effects of land use change on watershed nitrate concentrations, and on several biogeochemical ecosystem functions in streams, including nitrate uptake, ecosystem metabolism, and heterotrophic carbon processing.
In a literature synthesis, I was able to conclude that nitrate concentrations in streams in forested watersheds tend to be correlated with soil solution and shallow groundwater nitrate concentrations in those watersheds. Watershed disturbances, such as ice storms or clear-cutting, did not alter this relationship. However both urban and agricultural land use change increased the nitrate concentrations in streams, soil solution, and groundwater, and altered the correlation between them, increasing the slope and intercept of the regression line. I conclude that although the correlation between these concentrations allows for predictions to be made, further research is needed to better understand the importance of dilution, removal, and transformation along the flowpaths from uplands to streams.
From a multi-site comparison of forested, urban, and urban restored streams, I demonstrated that ecosystem functions like nitrate uptake and ecosystem metabolism do not change in a linear unidirectional way with increasing urbanization. I also showed that Natural Channel Design stream restoration as practiced at my study sites had no net effect on ecosystem function, except those effects that came from clearing the riparian vegetation for restoration construction. This study suggested further consideration is needed of the ecosystem effects of stream restoration as it was practiced at these sites. It also suggested that more study was needed of the effects of urbanization on ecosystem metabolism and heterotrophic processes in streams.
In a 16-month study of ecosystem metabolism at four sites along an urbanization gradient, I demonstrated that ecosystem metabolism in urban streams may be controlled by multiple separate effects of urbanization, including eutrophication, light, temperature, hydrology, and geomorphology. One site, with high nutrients, high light, and stable substrate for periphyton growth but flashy hydrology, demonstrated a boom-bust cycle of gross primary production. At another site, high benthic organic matter standing stocks combined with low velocities and high depths to create hypoxic conditions when temperature increased. I propose a new conceptual framework representing different trajectories of these effects based on the balance of increases in scour, thermal energy and light, eutrophication, and carbon loading.
Finally, in a study of 50 watersheds across a landscape urbanization gradient, I show that urbanization is correlated with a decrease in particulate carbon stocks. I suggest that an increase in dissolved organic matter quality may serve to compensate for the loss of particulate carbon as fuel for heterotrophic microbial activity. Although I saw no differences among watershed landuses in microbial activity per gram of sediment, there was a strong increase in the efficiency of microbial activity per unit organic sediment with increasing watershed urbanization. Ultimately, I hope that this research contributes to our understanding of stream ecosystem functions and the way land use change can alter these functions, with the possibility of better environmental management of urban streams in the future.
Item Open Access Examining Urban Wildlife Conservation and Green Space Development Opportunities for Triangle Land Conservancy(2015-04-23) Wu, CharleneRapid urban development has led to the displacement of wildlife and the disturbance of natural landscapes. As a result, biodiversity conservation and human access to natural resources are threatened. Through a city plan analysis, in which I quantitatively score and rank 30 U.S. cities on urban conservation approaches, and a case study on an urban land trust, I evaluate existing urban conservation tools to determine best practices and areas of improvement. With a focus on urban wildlife protection and green space development, results from the methodology are used to form guidelines for Triangle Land Conservancy, a land trust in Durham, North Carolina. Key points and recommendations include: 1. Secure vacant lots to transform into green spaces for community use and wildlife protection; 2. Implement conservation-focused community projects in urban areas in order to improve urban habitats and engage city residents in environmental activities; and, 3. Raise public awareness of urban environmental issues in order to garner collective action and public support. The final product is an Urban Habitat Improvement Plan for Triangle Land Conservancy that incorporates specific conservation strategies and tactics for the organization to implement in urban environments.Item Open Access Forest Preferences & Urbanization: Perspective from four Sacred Groves in India’s National Capital Region(2017-04-27) Grace, DavidThe sacred grove, a forest abode of a deity or deities, exists in contemporary myths and landscapes. This study analyzes sacred groves as complex socio-ecological systems and approaches the plight of four extant sacred groves amidst the urbanization in India’s National Capital Region as a collective action problem. Utilizing demographic and ecological variation in Willingness to Pay (WTP) – by revealed and stated preference measures – for visits to sacred forest, non-sacred forest, and worship sites outside of sacred forests, I analyze shifts in demand in this socio-ecological system. This data provides nuance to the hypothesis that Sanskritization – transition from local, folk to global, Hindu deity worship – results in degradation of the sacred grove institution. While increased urban and Sanskritization characteristics correspond with a trade-off of sacred forest for temple preference, these characteristics also correspond with increased perception of non-sacred forests as useful for ecosystem services. These results suggest attention to nonlinear dynamics in collective action settings sensitive to cultural evolution.Item Embargo Inventing Public and Private: The Development of Spatial Dynamics and State Organization within Archaic Central Italic Cities(2024) LoPiano, Antonio RobertThis dissertation demonstrates that the development of monumental public architecture occurred contemporaneously in urban centers of both Latium and Etruria in the late 6th century BC and argues that its catalyst was a profound shift in socio-political organization that took place throughout Central Italy. It analyses these developments through a lens of spatial theory, especially that of environment behavior studies, to understand how they impacted urban societies of Central Italy. The link between the construction of novel public structures in the Roman Forum and the political upheaval of the late 6th century BC has been well established in previous scholarship. New architectural forms lent shape to the Forum, providing the built environment of Rome with an explicitly public space reflective of its new Republican organization. Yet it was not an isolated phenomenon. It can be detected in the urban form of several contemporaneous Latin and Etruscan cities. While the historical record of these cities is far less robust than that of Rome, their archaeological record supports the conclusion that a similar political shift transpired across the larger region of Central Italy during the late 6th and early 5th centuries. In addition to Rome, cities such as Satricum, Caere, and Vulci constructed monumental tripartite temples, public squares, and assembly halls for the first time. These structures appear as a linked assembly and are innovative in their architectural form, but more importantly in their conceptual configuration as explicitly public structures. They not only facilitated the habitual behaviors of the offices of state and citizen bodies that were gradually introduced during this period but also symbolically represented the authority of the state itself. Previously, the regiae and domestic courtyard complexes of local rulers had served as loci for both private and public activity in early archaic cities. The newfound spatial delineation between public and private is reflective of the elaboration of state level organization that saw individual identity and political authority formally separated through the institution of official offices.
Item Open Access Legacy source of mercury in an urban stream-wetland ecosystem in central North Carolina, USA.(Chemosphere, 2015-11) Deonarine, Amrika; Hsu-Kim, Heileen; Zhang, Tong; Cai, Yong; Richardson, Curtis JIn the United States, aquatic mercury contamination originates from point and non-point sources to watersheds. Here, we studied the contribution of mercury in urban runoff derived from historically contaminated soils and the subsequent production of methylmercury in a stream-wetland complex (Durham, North Carolina), the receiving water of this runoff. Our results demonstrated that the mercury originated from the leachate of grass-covered athletic fields. A fraction of mercury in this soil existed as phenylmercury, suggesting that mercurial anti-fungal compounds were historically applied to this soil. Further downstream in the anaerobic sediments of the stream-wetland complex, a fraction (up to 9%) of mercury was converted to methylmercury, the bioaccumulative form of the metal. Importantly, the concentrations of total mercury and methylmercury were reduced to background levels within the stream-wetland complex. Overall, this work provides an example of a legacy source of mercury that should be considered in urban watershed models and watershed management.Item Open Access Linking Urban Land Use to Aquatic Metabolic Regimes(2021-04-30) Kindley, SierraMetabolism is a foundational property of ecosystems, and the productivity of rivers determines their capacity to retain and transform nutrients as well as support biodiversity. Stream metabolism has been increasingly used to assess waterway health due to its relevance across sizes and types of streams, sensitivity to stressors, and ability to be measured continuously. Land use change can affect metabolism through numerous mechanisms, including hydrology, light regimes, and nutrients, which may respond to changes in land use at different scales. This study used existing high frequency metabolism records and geospatial data to examine relationships among measures of catchment and riparian condition and stream Gross Primary Production (GPP). The primary goals were to identify the mechanisms by which urbanization and land use change affect metabolism, the scales at which these drivers exert the most influence, and any variance present across regions. Quantifiable proxies for each mechanism were used to characterize and assess its effect on GPP response along an urban land use gradient and spatial scale. This study focused on small headwater streams located in mesic environments. The study area for this project included a collection of stream gage sites in the eastern United States, each of which is located east of 96 degrees west longitude and has a total catchment area of less than 26 square kilometers. Four primary regions of focus were selected based on their display of a complete urban gradient (low total percent urban area to high total percent urban area within the catchment) among stream gage sites: Atlanta metropolitan area, Kansas City metropolitan area, Mid-Atlantic region, and Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Overall, we found that watershed scale urban cover was weakly correlated with stream characteristics that affect metabolism. Total percent tree canopy cover appears to exert control over metabolism at the local reach scale, while total percent urban land cover, total percent imperviousness, and total road density do this at the whole watershed scale. In all cases, GPP was negligible above a threshold land cover, and the higher variance in GPP at low to moderate urbanization levels is controlled by local canopy. This suggests that metabolic regimes arise from processes at multiple scales. Differences in GPP among the four focal regions are likely due to differences in climate, impervious surface, and riparian canopy among urban areas. These findings suggest that effective interventions may require catchment scale efforts to preserve and restore hydrologic regimes as well as local interventions to improve riparian condition. This has implications for resource protection, mitigation, and future planning. Understanding the relative importance of these processes and the scales at which they affect streams is critical for environmental management decisions, including the conservation and rehabilitation of streams, as well as designing appropriate interventions. Ultimately, this project demonstrates how richer and larger datasets can expand our understanding and inform decision making at new scales. Future temporal scale analyses that assess the seasonality or disturbance recovery trajectories of these data may further benefit our understanding of these processes and relationships. Additionally, we suggest conducting comparative analyses of these data in terms of seasonal patterns and how temporal patterns differ between GPP and ecosystem respiration (ER).Item Open Access Linking Urban Land Use to Aquatic Metabolic Regimes(2021-04-30) Kindley, SierraMetabolism is a foundational property of ecosystems, and the productivity of rivers determines their capacity to retain and transform nutrients as well as support biodiversity. Stream metabolism has been increasingly used to assess waterway health due to its relevance across sizes and types of streams, sensitivity to stressors, and ability to be measured continuously. Land use change can affect metabolism through numerous mechanisms, including hydrology, light regimes, and nutrients, which may respond to changes in land use at different scales. This study used existing high frequency metabolism records and geospatial data to examine relationships among measures of catchment and riparian condition and stream Gross Primary Production (GPP). The primary goals were to identify the mechanisms by which urbanization and land use change affect metabolism, the scales at which these drivers exert the most influence, and any variance present across regions. Quantifiable proxies for each mechanism were used to characterize and assess its effect on GPP response along an urban land use gradient and spatial scale. This study focused on small headwater streams located in mesic environments. The study area for this project included a collection of stream gage sites in the eastern United States, each of which is located east of 96 degrees west longitude and has a total catchment area of less than 26 square kilometers or less. Four primary regions of focus were selected based on their display of a complete urban gradient (low total percent urban area to high total percent urban area within the catchment) among stream gage sites: Atlanta metropolitan area, Kansas City metropolitan area, Mid-Atlantic region, and Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Overall, we found that whole watershed scale urban cover was weakly correlated with stream characteristics that affect metabolism. Total percent tree canopy cover appears to exert control over metabolism at the local reach scale, while total percent urban land cover, total percent imperviousness, and total road density do this at the whole watershed scale. In all cases, GPP was negligible above a threshold land cover, and the higher variance in GPP at low to moderate urbanization levels is controlled by local canopy. This suggests that metabolic regimes arise from processes at multiple scales. Differences in GPP among the four focal regions are likely due to differences in climate, impervious surface, and riparian canopy among urban areas. These findings suggest that effective interventions may require catchment scale efforts to preserve and restore hydrologic regimes as well as local interventions to improve riparian condition. This has implications for resource protection, mitigation, and future planning. Understanding the relative importance of these processes and the scales at which they affect streams is critical for environmental management decisions, including the conservation and rehabilitation of streams, as well as designing appropriate interventions. Ultimately, this project demonstrates how richer and larger datasets can expand our understanding and inform decision making at new scales. Future temporal scale analyses that assess the seasonality or disturbance recovery trajectories of these data may further benefit our understanding of these processes and relationships. Additionally, we suggest conducting comparative analyses of these data in terms of seasonal patterns and how temporal patterns differ between GPP and ER.Item Open Access Patterns of Song across Natural and Anthropogenic Soundscapes Suggest That White-Crowned Sparrows Minimize Acoustic Masking and Maximize Signal Content.(PloS one, 2016-01) Derryberry, Elizabeth P; Danner, Raymond M; Danner, Julie E; Derryberry, Graham E; Phillips, Jennifer N; Lipshutz, Sara E; Gentry, Katherine; Luther, David ASoundscapes pose both evolutionarily recent and long-standing sources of selection on acoustic communication. We currently know more about the impact of evolutionarily recent human-generated noise on communication than we do about how natural sounds such as pounding surf have shaped communication signals over evolutionary time. Based on signal detection theory, we hypothesized that acoustic phenotypes will vary with both anthropogenic and natural background noise levels and that similar mechanisms of cultural evolution and/or behavioral flexibility may underlie this variation. We studied song characteristics of white-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys nuttalli) across a noise gradient that includes both anthropogenic and natural sources of noise in San Francisco and Marin counties, California, USA. Both anthropogenic and natural soundscapes contain high amplitude low frequency noise (traffic or surf, respectively), so we predicted that birds would produce songs with higher minimum frequencies in areas with higher amplitude background noise to avoid auditory masking. We also anticipated that song minimum frequencies would be higher than the projected lower frequency limit of hearing based on site-specific masking profiles. Background noise was a strong predictor of song minimum frequency, both within a local noise gradient of three urban sites with the same song dialect and cultural evolutionary history, and across the regional noise gradient, which encompasses 11 urban and rural sites, several dialects, and several anthropogenic and natural sources of noise. Among rural sites alone, background noise tended to predict song minimum frequency, indicating that urban sites were not solely responsible for driving the regional pattern. These findings support the hypothesis that songs vary with local and regional soundscapes regardless of the source of noise. Song minimum frequency from five core study sites was also higher than the lower frequency limit of hearing at each site, further supporting the hypothesis that songs vary to transmit through noise in local soundscapes. Minimum frequencies leveled off at noisier sites, suggesting that minimum frequencies are constrained to an upper limit, possibly to retain the information content of wider bandwidths. We found evidence that site noise was a better predictor of song minimum frequency than territory noise in both anthropogenic and natural soundscapes, suggesting that cultural evolution rather than immediate behavioral flexibility is responsible for local song variation. Taken together, these results indicate that soundscapes shape song phenotype across both evolutionarily recent and long-standing soundscapes.Item Open Access Road Traffic Injury Prevention Initiatives: A Systematic Review and Metasummary of Effectiveness in Low and Middle Income Countries.(PLoS One, 2016) Staton, C; Vissoci, J; Gong, E; Toomey, N; Wafula, R; Abdelgadir, J; Zhou, Y; Liu, C; Pei, F; Zick, B; Ratliff, CD; Rotich, C; Jadue, N; de Andrade, L; von Isenburg, M; Hocker, MBACKGROUND: Road traffic injuries (RTIs) are a growing but neglected global health crisis, requiring effective prevention to promote sustainable safety. Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) share a disproportionately high burden with 90% of the world's road traffic deaths, and where RTIs are escalating due to rapid urbanization and motorization. Although several studies have assessed the effectiveness of a specific intervention, no systematic reviews have been conducted summarizing the effectiveness of RTI prevention initiatives specifically performed in LMIC settings; this study will help fill this gap. METHODS: In accordance with PRISMA guidelines we searched the electronic databases MEDLINE, EMBASE, Scopus, Web of Science, TRID, Lilacs, Scielo and Global Health. Articles were eligible if they considered RTI prevention in LMICs by evaluating a prevention-related intervention with outcome measures of crash, RTI, or death. In addition, a reference and citation analysis was conducted as well as a data quality assessment. A qualitative metasummary approach was used for data analysis and effect sizes were calculated to quantify the magnitude of emerging themes. RESULTS: Of the 8560 articles from the literature search, 18 articles from 11 LMICs fit the eligibility and inclusion criteria. Of these studies, four were from Sub-Saharan Africa, ten from Latin America and the Caribbean, one from the Middle East, and three from Asia. Half of the studies focused specifically on legislation, while the others focused on speed control measures, educational interventions, enforcement, road improvement, community programs, or a multifaceted intervention. CONCLUSION: Legislation was the most common intervention evaluated with the best outcomes when combined with strong enforcement initiatives or as part of a multifaceted approach. Because speed control is crucial to crash and injury prevention, road improvement interventions in LMIC settings should carefully consider how the impact of improvements will affect speed and traffic flow. Further road traffic injury prevention interventions should be performed in LMICs with patient-centered outcomes in order to guide injury prevention in these complex settings.Item Open Access The City and the State: Construction and the Politics of Dictatorship in Haiti (1957-1986)(2018) Payton, Claire A“The City and the State: Construction and the Politics of Dictatorship in Haiti (1957-1986)” charts a new history of place-making in the Caribbean. It analyzes construction practices in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince—ranging from slum clearance, transportation infrastructure, to the political economy of cement—to reveal the multifaceted relationship between the Duvalier dictatorship and rapid urban transformation in the mid-20th century. It argues that through the patterns and practices of building Port-au-Prince, the social, political and economic dimensions of the Duvalier regime became embedded in material space of the city. At the same time, the nature of these spatial and material changes informed the regime’s tumultuous internal dynamics. This thesis also situates these intertwined themes within a broader context of uneven geographies of power produced through the country’s long transition from slavery to freedom.
Item Open Access The City Novel After the City: Planetary Metropolis, World Literature(2019) Soule, Jacob Guion WadeLiterary scholars have long identified a formal correspondence between city and novel. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the city became embedded in the narrative forms of fiction as the latter attempted to map the coordinates of the rapidly expanding and increasingly complex social formations the former produced. In our moment, the older idea of the “city” as a discrete, identifiable form of human settlement is almost universally theorized as having been displaced by what is variously called “the metropolis”, “city everywhere”, or “planetary urbanization”. Without any outside to its parameters, how can the idea of the city still have meaning? This dissertation explores how the contemporary city novel can illuminate the bewildering new spaces in which we live and the seemingly inevitable "becoming-planetary" of the urban.
Item Open Access The effects of urbanization on reptiles and amphibians in the Sandhills Region of North Carolina(2009) Sutherland, Ronald WorthRapid urbanization threatens the survival of native wildlife species worldwide. In order to fully grasp the implications of the ongoing growth of urban areas on biodiversity, conservationists need to be able to quantify the response patterns of a wide range of different species to the expansion of urban and suburban land use. In this study, we set up two road-based transects across gradients of urbanization and habitat loss in the diverse longleaf pine forests of the Sandhills region of North Carolina, USA. With funding provided by the NC Wildlife Resources Commission, we drove the transects repeatedly at night in the field seasons of 2006-2008, tallying all vertebrate animals encountered (live or dead). The first transect (driven in all three years; 75 km long) ran from the urban areas of Southern Pines and Pinehurst down to the remote and relatively pristine habitats associated with the state-owned Sandhills Gamelands. The second transect (driven in 2007 and partially in 2008; 69 km long) began at the terminus of the first transect in the Gamelands, and then stretched down to the urban zones of Hamlet and Rockingham.
A total of 4900 vertebrate animals representing 69 species were observed on or near the road routes after driving a total of 16,625 km. This total includes 592 nightjars (ground-nesting nocturnal birds; e.g. whip-poor-wills) that we heard while driving the transects. In addition, in 2007 we surveyed for the nightjars and for quail (a high-priority game species that also nests on the ground) using 75 point count locations evenly distributed along the northern road route.
Regression tree analysis (a robust, nonparametric technique with minimal assumptions) was used to model the animal observation rates for a given 1 km road segment or point count as a function of various habitat variables measured within corresponding buffer zones for each segment. We also modeled snake and bird encounter rates as a function of mesopredator mammal observations.
Our results reveal that amphibian, snake, and ground-nesting bird observation rates are negatively associated with increasing levels of traffic and impervious surface. Conversely, mesopredator mammals (and domestic cats in particular) responded slightly positively to increasing urbanization, and negatively to protected area coverage. Both ground-nesting birds and snakes showed signs of negative correlations with mesopredator encounter rates, although these trends were not always significant due to high variability in the mesopredator data.
In order to try and confirm the results of the regression tree analyses, we also used a multivariate ordination approach (non-metric multidimensional scaling) to visualize the integrated community structure of all of the major vertebrate groups we observed in the Sandhills. The ordinations revealed that while the snake, ground-nesting bird, and amphibian groups were similar to each other in terms of their avoidance of urban conditions, the cats and native mesopredator species actually seemed to define widely divergent axes of community variation. Cats in particular were separated from the other groups on 2 out of 3 axes of the species-space ordination. Still, as we noted above for the regression tree models, it is difficult to sort out with our correlative data set whether cats and other mesopredators truly played an independent role in structuring and/or depleting the other wildlife guilds along our route. More experimental approaches are recommended for trying to resolve whether overabundant predators or road mortality and inappropriate habitat are more to blame for the much reduced encounter rates we observed for the snakes, birds, and amphibians in urban areas. Future studies will also be needed to confirm the logical assumption that road encounter rates provide a reasonably accurate index of the relative abundance of the different animal groups along the survey routes.
Item Open Access Urban Growth and Water Quality: Applying GIS to identify vulnerable areas in the Sandhills region of NC(2007-05) Soroko, TatyanaThe Sandhills region, located in central North Carolina, is expected to experience dramatic population growth in the next 5 years. Population growth triggers urbanization, which may result in impairment of local water bodies. This study applied GIS analysis and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Analytical Tools Interface for Landscape Assessments (ATtILA) to investigate the effects of alternative patterns of future urban development on water quality in the Sandhills region. GIS tools, along with considerations for population growth and future planned roads, were used to develop two scenarios for future land use: “Less Sprawl” and “More Sprawl.” The “Less Sprawl” refers to a case of land cover associated with high housing density, 9 units per acre, and new developments occurring near existing urban developments and major roads. The “More Sprawl” scenario is represented by lower housing densities and more dispersed new developments. Then ATtILA was applied to model relative changes for nitrogen and phosphorus area loadings in 12-digit hydrologic units between each scenario. Finally, the site ranking was developed to identify areas of the highest concern. The ranking was based on the projected level of impact of urban growth on the water quality and the amount of conservation areas in each hydrologic unit.Item Open Access Visualizing Vulci: Reimagining an Etruscan-Roman City(2021) McCusker, Katherine LynnThe Etruscan-Roman city of Vulci is one of many Etruscan cities which lacks a detailed and holistic understanding of its urban development. Vulci represents a rare site that was not covered by modern structures and thus presents a unique opportunity for a city-scale examination of the transformation of urban space over a millennium of occupation. In order to address this query while most of the site is still unexcavated, an innovative method was created for this project. This ‘n’-dimensional approach layers a series of geospatial and historical data, largely relying on new, non-invasive remote sensing surveys. The main sensors and data sets include a series of older aerial photographs (1954, 1975, 1986), a geological and landscape survey from 2014, multi-spectral aerial images from surveys between 2015 and 2017 ranging from normal-colored to red edge to near infrared bands, and two ground penetrating radar (GPR) surveys from 2015 and 2018. The analyses and interpretations from this multi-modal method builds a more holistic and nuanced understanding of the urbanization and transformation of Vulci. Conclusions from spatial analysis suggest a relative order for the development of the Etruscan-Roman street-grid, offering a new framework for the contextualization of other urban features. Further, evidence points to the northeast area with its unique structure orientation and connection to Northeastern Acropolis as the first settled space on the plateau during the 8th century BCE after shifting away from the Villanovan era settlement on La Pozzatella. Analysis also indicates numerous new features, including multiple public buildings in the Western Forum with major phases of transformation first in the 6th-5th century BCE while under Etruscan control and then again during the early Imperial period while under Roman control. Other features include a ‘basilica’-like/Augusteum structure, at least one additional temple, several administrative buildings, and multiple residential structures with atriums and impluviums. The urban development of Vulci implies a revitalization of the city and re-emergence of power during the Roman Imperial period, contradicting the previous notion that Vulci slowly but steadily declined post-conquest. These conclusions situate Vulci in a new place in not only in Etruscan urbanization but also in period the cultural transformation during Rome’s expansion into Etruria. Furthermore, the success of the multi-perspective, layered approach allows for its use in other studies as well as further refinement and advancement of the methodology.