Peter Klein & Trina Vithayathil: Spatial Patterns of Land Use in the Brazilian Amazon, 1990-2007

We use municipio level data from the Brazilian agricultural census and decennial population census to examine the spatial relationship between transportation networks, migration, and land use in the Amazonian states of Pará and Mata Grosso. Our initial analysis looks at land use changes related to soy and rice production between 1990 and 2007, as the production of soy quintupled during this period and rice production doubled. We find the north to south movement of soy, with soy production intensifying along the Cuiba Santarém Highway in Mata Grosso. By the end of the study period, we begin to see the production soy in a few municipios in Pará, both along the major highways in the state and near the new port in Santarém. The intensification of soy production parallels the creation of Brazilian government programs that provide incentives for the production of soy for export. We have not yet mapped the changing spatial distribution of rice production, but expect to observe a different story spatially over time. We hope to complete two animated maps to illustrate the annual change in the percentage of land in production for soy and rice. We also look at the spatial variation in migration using retrospective data from the 2000 decennial census and find clustering by region and along transportation networks.

Andrew Arnaud: Location of Low-Income Housing Tax Credit in Allegheny County

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) was established in 1986 to give investors a financial incentive to invest in rental housing for low-income households. Over the past 20 years, the program has become the most significant source of federal funding for new subsidized housing units. Since its inception, the tax credit has subsidized 1.5 million rental units, making it the most productive housing program in terms of new units and the second largest federal low-income housing program overall.

This research is an exploratory analysis of the location of LIHTC units in Allegheny County, the primary county of the Pittsburgh metropolitan region. A goal of low-income housing policy over the past decade has been the de-concentration of subsidized housing away from low-income neighborhoods. At the same time, the tax credit appears to be used as a tool to encourage investment in low-income communities.

The analysis finds that LIHTC units in Allegheny County are clustered at the municipal level, but only among the City of Pittsburgh and a few of its older, inner ring suburbs. The Moran I statistic is weak, yet statistically significant. The City of Pittsburgh is the largest municipality so it is not surprising that the City would have a large number of LIHTC units. On the other hand, many of the region’s municipalities have no LIHTC units. The analysis also finds that LIHTC units are clustered at the census tract level but, once again, the Moran I statistic is weak.

Finally, OLS and a spatial lag model at the municipal level did not find a relationship between LIHTC units and the current availability of jobs within the municipality. But, the models did find that a greater municipal unemployment rate in 1990 was associated with a greater number of LIHTC units produced from 1987 to 2006 even when controlling for the municipality’s size. This finding indicates that the LIHTC might used more as a tool for community redevelopment than for the de-concentration of low-income housing to a broader range of communities.

Orly Clerge: Neighborhood Housing Foreclosures: A Look at Providence, RI

Providence, RI has been one of the American cities hardest hit by that mortgage crisis. Recent studies have demonstrated the housing market has fared well in 2009, but we are interested in mapping out the ways in which foreclosure notices have been distributed in the past several years. Using ArcMap, we will examine how many housing foreclosure notices have been advertised in the Providence Journal since 2004 in ProvidenceSouth Providence, Hope, Elmwood and Olneyville. Comparisons across neighborhoods will be made controlling for the number of housing units, percent poor, education, house values, and the percent of units that are renter/owner occupied. neighborhoods such as Data on Providence neighborhoods was attained through the use of census tract shape files and corresponding demographic census data. Because neighborhood boundaries were not in line with census tract boundaries, manipulation was done to dissolve the tract boundaries and demographic information. This has allowed for the creation of demographic estimates for each neighborhood. The comprehensive foreclosure data was attained from media sources that advertised foreclosures in Providence. Although the foreclosure notices that are advertised are not always foreclosed, we will gain a basic understanding of the number of homes at risk of foreclosing and the ways this risk manifests across neighborhood overtime..

Khalil Abdallah Motawih Amro: Planning and Directing Urban Growth of Ramallah and Al Bireh by Using (GIS) and (RAPID)

This study focus on directing and organizing the urban growth of the towns of Ramallah and El Bireh. Work is focused in this study to guide urban growth of the twin cities, taking into account the needs of present generations and ensure the rights of future generations of the population, in the context of the sustainable development of the two cities..

Sailesh Tiwari: Migration, Remittances and Forests

International migration has increased tremendously in the last decade and with it, private transfers of migrants to their home countries in the form of remittances has reached unprecedented levels. As a result, various aspects of the impact of migrants on the host countries have been studied intensively across the social sciences. However, despite the fact that most emigrants from developing countries originate from rural, predominantly agricultural communities that rely heavily on the natural environment (land, forests, rivers, etc.), there have been very few studies that look into the environmental impact of migration on the sending communities. In this paper I intend to fill the gap in this literature by investigating the relationship between migration and common property natural resource use in the Himalayas. Combining remote sensing data on forest cover with various rounds of census and living standards survey data for Nepal, my goal is to understand the spatial aspects of the relationship between rural out-migration, the accompanying remittances and Nepal’s Himalayan forests. What makes Nepal an ideal setting for this enquiry is that the country has experienced a sharp increase in rural emigration and this has been accompanied by an unprecedented increase in remittance receipts. Additionally, not only is Nepal heavily dependent on subsistence agriculture but its forests have been found comparable to the Amazon in bio-diversity and are instrumental in regulating the Himalayan rivers that are lifeblood to the vast food growing regions in the Indo-Gangetic plain. For the Institute presentation, I will focus on analyzing the spatial aspects of domestic and international migration in Nepal.

Natalie Wiatrowski: Nursing Home Resident’s Quality at the End of Life: Going to a Hospital in the last three days of life

Older adults experiencing transitions between health care facilities has been associated with discontinuity of care, risk of medical errors, and alteration of chronic disease management. In particular, previous studies have found care transitions among long term nursing home residents with cognitive impairment have been associated with relocation stress, morbidity, and mortality. This study examined the spatial relationships among nursing homes in the United States who transferred a client, with a cognitive performance scale score of 4 or higher (moderate to severe cognitive impairment), in the last three days of life, to a hospital. The number of patients per facility transitioning to a hospital ranged from one to eighty-one. Clusters of high and low transitions were identified for the United States and spatial relationships were examined using Moran’s I to examine spatial dependence.

Jiachen Zhou: Spatial clustering of overweight and obesity in rural South Africa

Overweight and obesity are prevalent among South Africans. The South Africa Demographic and Health Survey, a national cross-sectional study in 1998, found that 29.2% of adult men and 56.6% adult women were overweight or obese. In a large population-based survey of body mass and blood pressure in rural KwaZulu/Natal, South Africa in 2003-2004, 58% adults were overweight or obese. Overweight and obesity have been found associated with various cardiovascular diseases, so there is a clear rationale to plan programs of health promotion and primary prevention of obesity to reduce the incidence of cardiovascular disease in South Africa. Although genetic factors have been found to relate to overweight and obesity, it is unlikely that addressing genetic factors alone will be sufficient to fully prevent and manage the epidemic. Environmental factors, including the sociocultural and physical environment, promote increased caloric intake and decreased energy expenditure and underlie much of the high prevalence of overweight and obesity. The prevention and management of overweight and obesity obviously needs a blending of medical expertise and insight into an array of community and environmental factors. In this study, I plan to use spatial analysis techniques to explore whether people with high BMI are living near other people with high BMI, which will indicate the existence of potential environmental predictors of overweight and obesity. Local Moran’s I will be used to measure the spatial autocorrelation.

Jie Yang: Geographic Access to Hospital Care

Access to health care is always a global issue. Access describes people’s ability to use health services when and where they are needed. One of the main goals for health care facility planning is to achieve the equitable geographic distribution of health care resources. In the United States, health care access problems for vulnerable populations such as ethnic minorities, poor groups are attracting increased attention. In addition, for medical conditions that require regular contact with service providers, travel time and distance can create barriers to effective service use. GIS provides a set of tools for describing and understanding the spatial organization of health care, and for exploring how the delivery of health care can be improved. In my study, I will mainly focus on two research questions: 1. Are all communities in Rhode Island within a reasonable distance to a hospital? If not, what are the communities that are farther away from a hospital? 2. Some diseases can be categorized as ambulatory care sensitive conditions (ACSC), which are medical problems that can be treated and managed outside the hospital. Since the admission of such kind of diseases in a hospital shows that a problem in primary care; does the admission rate look high in certain areas? ESRI ArcGIS is used to construct aggregated drive time service area for 11 Rhode Island general hospitals based on 10, 20, and 30 minutes of driving time. ArcView is used to compare the demographic information including population, age, per capita income and unemployment rate in these areas. Hospital admission rates of ACSC are marked at the census tract level using a hospitalization dataset from Rhode Island Department of Health.

Alissa Cordner: Polluters and People: Environmental Justice in Massachusetts

Environmental Justice research suggests that polluting facilities are more likely to be located in poor and minority neighborhoods than in white or high-income neighborhoods. This project looks at the locations of hazardous polluting facilities in Massachusetts and asks whether these facilities are disproportionately located in low-income or minority neighborhoods. I examine demographic data at the Census Block Group level, and, following guidelines from the state’s Environmental Justice Policy, I consider a Block Group to be an “Environmental Justice Community” if it is more than 25% minority, if more than 25% of the households do not contain an English-speaking adult, or if the average household income for the Block Group is below 65% of the state’s median income. In Massachusetts, approximately 30% of Census Block Groups meet these qualifications, and Local Moran’s I Statistics demonstrate that they are spatially clustered. To examine whether polluting facilities are excessively located near or in Environmental Justice Communities, I mapped four types of hazardous polluters in Massachusetts: Superfund locations, facilities that provide a Toxic Release Inventory to the EPA, Oil or Hazardous Materials facilities, and facilities that are described as ‘Major Polluters’ by the state of Massachusetts. Density mapping of these polluters shows that non-Environmental Justice Census Block Groups contain an average of .17 facilities, while Environmental Justice Census Block Groups contain an average of 1.8 facilities, a dramatic difference. Creating spatial buffers around hazardous facilities also demonstrates that Environmental Justice Communities are disproportionately exposed to hazardous polluters. This analysis implies that disadvantaged populations experience the bulk of exposures to toxic chemicals in the state of Massachusetts. Although proximity to a polluter is not a direct proxy for exposure to hazardous pollution, public health research demonstrates that neighborhoods with a higher number of polluting facilities also have higher exposure to the chemicals released by those polluters. This project demonstrates that Environmental Justice Communities in Massachusetts are unequally exposed to toxic polluting facilities.

Laureno Gherardi: Global warmings effect on soil water content

Climate change will modify primarily temperature and precipitation (PPT) and both of these factors affect ecosystem functioning. Precipitation affects primary production directly and positively in most terrestrial ecosystems from grasslands and steppes to forests. Temperature affects ecosystem functioning and specifically primary production directly and indirectly. The direct effects of increased temperature occur via positive changes in recruitment and metabolic rate and by extreme temperatures that might damage tissue and even cause death of individual plants. The latter may only occur in the warm edge of the species distribution. Indirectly, increased temperature affects ecosystem functioning via negative changes in the water balance. Increased temperature would increase potential evapotranspiration, accelerate water losses through bare-soil evaporation and transpiration and reduce soil water availability. The objective of this project is to assess the relative effects of increasing temperature and decreasing precipitation on soil water availability. Specifically, the project attempts to determine the reduction in precipitation equivalent to the soil-water relations consequences of increases in temperature being proposed by three different scenarios described in the Fourth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I calculated soil water losses (converted to mm of PPT), in hyper arid, arid, semiarid, and sub-humid ecosystems as defined by Le Houérou, H. 1996; where the ratio between PPT and evapotranspiration (PET) was taken as a parameter to distinguish among those ambient types. PPT is the input of water to an ecosystem while PET is the output from the ecosystem to the atmosphere and its ratio determines the level of aridity of an ecosystem. Results indicate that the biggest changes would happen in the middle of the aridity range. The rationale behind these results is that in extremely arid conditions, where PET >> PPT, changes in PET resulting from warming would have minimal effects on average soil water availability. In contrast, small changes in PET may have large effects on soil water availability – and also on ecosystem responses to changes in soil water – in ecosystems where PPT is close to PET. In very wet ecosystems (PPT>>PET), soil water availability would be insensitive to changes in either demand (PET) or supply (PPT) since these soils remain saturated most of the time. For example, a 4 ºC warming in the Atacama Desert would have a very small effect on average soil-water availability because precipitation is so low that soil water content is insensitive to changes in water demand. Put simply, if soil water content is below a biotic activity threshold 95% of the time, warming will have little additional effect. Similarly, a 4 ºC warming in a rainforest in Hawaii, which receives 4000 mm of precipitation per year, will have no effect on soil-water availability because soils are always saturated and again are insensitive to changes in demand.

Mim Plavin: Hospitals, Spatial Relationships, and PARO Politics: Do Spatial Relationships Affect Organizational Attitudes Regarding Legal Change?

Diffusion is a prominent concept in discussions of how innovation spreads. It has been mostly conceived of as a ’spatial’ concept. At the same time the organizational literature discusses archetypes of attitudes towards compliance with regulations. There are four archetypes, each a different combination of proactiveness (high/low) and acceptance of new regulation (accept/oppose), leading to the categories of Proponents, Acceptants, Reluctants, and Opponents. Using a multi-level stratified random sample of nearly 600 U.S. hospitals (in 16 states, two in each of 8 Federal Circuit Court jurisdictions), we wanted to evaluate what affects which archetype a hospital embraces. The survey was designed to understand the practices and beliefs affecting both Clinical Information Technology (CIT) adoption and regulatory compliance. I used a multinomial logistic regression model to evaluate whether hospitals that actively seek to influence others in terms of responses to privacy regulations have an impact on what archetypes of compliance other nearby hospitals embrace. In the model, I evaluated the effect of the hospital’s mission, ownership type (for-profit, not-for-profit, etc.), community orientation, membership in a hospital system, involvement of different groups in privacy decision-making, and the distance between a hospital and the nearest ‘influencer’. I controlled for hospital size, Federal Court Circuit, teaching hospital, and the percentage of for-profit hospitals in the metropolitan area. I found that when compared to Proponents, spatial distance to an ‘influencer’, or broadcaster, had no significant effect on whether hospitals were Acceptants or Reluctants, and a marginal effect on whether hospitals were Opponents. One reason that we may not have found a stronger spatial effect is that the legal and social relationships between hospitals is not adequately measured by distance. In other words, hospitals that are part of a system may be influenced in their attitudes toward privacy by other system members, or by system headquarters, regardless of their proximity, or lack thereof.

Please use the comment window below to submit a TITLE and ABSTRACT describing your institute project.  Your abstracts should not exceed 500 words.  I’ll use the titles and abstracts to assemble the program for our conference on Friday.  Abstracts are due on Wednesday June 9th at 5pm.  Don’t hesitate to get in touch with any questions.

-SS