Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers

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Cunha, Stephen F.

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ABSTRACT: The Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan are a crossroads of diverse natural and human phenomena. Defining geographic traits include earthquakes, debris flows, snow avalanches, flooding, dust storms, high-velocity winds, and altitudinal variation of plant and animal communities. This relentless mountain environment effectively separates three broad ethnic groups from each other: Lowland Tajiks, Mountain Tajiks (also called Pamirians), and Kirghiz. Within each group are scores of diverse clan and family subdivisions that make cultivating a unified national identify difficult. The mountain economy centers on market and subsistence agriculture, pastoralism, and limited mining, with small service and government sectors. There is an evolving focus on developing abundant water resources and tourism infrastructure. Soviet-era geographers divided the Pamir into subregions of the Western foothills and Academy Range, and the Eastern Pamir Plateau. However, their scheme does not fully account for the unique cultural and biophysical differences found east and west of the Pamir crest. This essay further subdivides the Pamir into four subregions of distinct climate, landforms, resources, people, and economy. These include the Western Pamir, the High Pamir ( Academia Nauk ), the Eastern Pamir and Pianj River Corridor, and the Pamir Plateau. The ongoing post-Soviet era environmental and demographic change is deepening human-cultural geographic variance across the range.

Salim, Zia

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ABSTRACT: This cross-sectional study examines spatial and thematic patterns of murals in East Los Angeles, a barrio that has long been one of the traditional focal points for the Mexican-American community in Los Angeles, to determine how exterior wall murals mark the cultural landscape. To do this, approximately two-hundred-fifty murals were field surveyed, mapped, and photographed, with the results being subjected to content analysis. Data from secondary sources, including the neighborhood’s history and demographics, were used to contextualize the results. The results indicate that most murals are located on commercial buildings, with sub-concentrations on public-serving and residential buildings. A majority of murals in East Los Angeles convey one of three main themes: the community’s origins, its struggles, or its religious identity; these themes have changed over time in response to sociopolitical and urban contexts. By anchoring murals to the local context through the use of local elements, muralists in East Los Angeles create a specific sense of place. Although murals are an ephemeral subject, I conclude that an analysis of mural locations and themes helps to explain their aesthetic and socialization functions and demonstrates their role in the cultural landscape in East Los Angeles.

Dallman, Suzanne

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ABSTRACT: California’s cycles of drought and flood, and the persistent idea that there is some such thing as “normal” conditions, shape the way water is managed in fundamental ways. California’s most recent drought began in the winter of 2011–12. Governor Jerry Brown declared a drought emergency in January 2014, at the onset of a third dry year, calling on Californians to (voluntarily) conserve water. Early response to the governor’s drought proclamation was strikingly ambivalent, and in some cities water use actually went up. In April 2015, the governor announced a first-ever mandate requiring urban areas to cut water use by twenty-five percent. At the local level, many cities and water districts pushed back, stating that the targets were too high or that they needed credit for earlier conservation measures. Yet overall, statewide targets were met by that summer. In Australia, the so-called “Millennium Drought” ending in 2012 significantly changed the way Australia manages its water resources. It inspired policy changes at the national and local levels as well as wide public participation in conservation strategies. As California’s drought wanes with record winter rains, will conservation successes fade into memory as well? This paper compares drought response in California and Queensland, Australia, at various scales, and evaluates opportunities for leveraging these potential crises to reshape water policy.

Baldwin, Jeff

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ABSTRACT: Across the American West, stream flows are becoming more seasonal. Climate models predict that this trend will intensify for the foreseeable future. As a result, moist habitats and human water sources are likely to be diminished in dry seasons while flows will intensify in wet seasons. Through their dam/pond systems, beaver have been shown to increase water storage in ponds and surrounding floodplains, thus slowing winter flows, increasing riparian and meadow water availability, and extending stream flow up to six weeks into dry summer seasons. Thus, allowing an increase in historically low beaver populations could provide a low-cost means of addressing both habitat and seasonality concerns. Yet, in Oregon, beaver are absent from the official discourses on adapting human systems and habitats to climate change. Through forty key informant interviews and an analysis of official policy and publications, this study identifies and critically examines five institutional blockages to beaver recolonization. That analysis clarifies the imprint of political pragmatism and institutional sub-cultures upon beaver presence in Oregon today.

Flower, Aquila

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ABSTRACT: A dramatic reconfiguration of the subalpine ecotone is underway in many mountainous regions. One of the changes occurring in subalpine ecosystems is the shrinking and fragmentation of subalpine meadows. In July 2016, we investigated the encroachment of conifers into a subalpine meadow on the south side of Mount Rainier as part of the North American Dendroecological Fieldweek, a unique experiential learning program dedicated to training participants in the theories and techniques of dendrochronology. We collected increment cores and cross-section disks from conifers in a subalpine meadow to determine their dates of establishment. We compared these establishment dates with climatic and environmental variables to assess potential drivers of encroachment. Our results show that the establishment of conifer seedlings occurred in distinct pulses over the twentieth century coinciding with periods of low summer snowfall. We found that seedling establishment rates were much higher on locally convex micro-topographic settings and in areas with a dense cover of woody shrubs. The spatiotemporal patterns of seedling establishment we observed appear to be the result of the complicated and highly scale-dependent interplay between climatic fluctuations and both biotic and abiotic microsite conditions. While our results should be considered a preliminary analysis, they reveal a compelling story of the spatiotemporal patterns of conifer encroachment and suggest potential causal mechanisms that warrant further investigation.

Graves, Steven M.

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ABSTRACT: The convenient store may be the quintessential post-modern landscape artifact. This essay explores the evolution of our notion of convenience, design strategies, and business practices used by convenience store operators who have sought to capitalize on American’s evolving sensitivity to the passage of time. Also discussed is the mechanism by which effective delivery of time-savings through clever landscape design reinforces an ever-increasing sense of entitlement to time-efficient conveniences across a broad spectrum of daily practices.

Schrager, Benjamin

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ABSTRACT: Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, this paper introduces a dialogic approach that draws attention to how meaning is created by viewer responses to social texts. Focusing on the depiction of aliens in popular films, this paper analyzes different representations of aliens and viewer responses to those depictions. The Avengers (2012) draws on traditional geopolitical understandings of United States hegemony to create its fictional Marvel Universe. Avatar (2009) and District 9 (2009) feature strikingly different transformations of the protagonist into the alien other. As mediascapes become increasingly fractured, popular geopolitics and related fields will benefit from engaging more closely with the diversity of viewer responses.

Boroushaki, Soheil

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ABSTRACT: This paper presents an integration of entropy-based weights and a modified TOPSIS algorithm within a GIS-based multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA). Geospatial multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) problems typically involve a set of spatially feasible alternatives that are evaluated by multiple and conflicting evaluation criteria that vary in importance to the decision-maker(s). However, often in complex spatial decision-making problems the decision-maker(s) may be unable or unwilling to provide cohesive and exact numerical judgments regarding the relative importance or weights of criteria. An entropy-based object weighting scheme determines the weights for a set of criteria by quantifying the amount of information within the decision matrix and based on evaluation values. Information entropy is a measure of the degree of disorder within a system. It can quantify the amount of expected and useful information content within criterion values, and it measures the contrast intensity among a set of spatial criteria. This paper will present the implementation of entropy-based weights within a vector-based spatial problem for calculating the Heat Vulnerability Index within San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles.