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CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LONG BEACH

Geography 640-02:
Seminar in Physical and Environmental Geography

Spring 2019 Topic: Hazards

W 7-9:45 p.m., PH1-230
Ticket #11013
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Readings by Week

Research Symposium Organized and Hosted by GEOG 640 (8 May):
The colloquium was held, discussion starting over four posters outside PH1-230 and then moving into PH1-230 to hear and discuss a spoken paper. Announcement, call for papers, and program designed by Ms. Saldana:
Research community work continues (1 May):
After deciding last week to move the colloquium to 8 May, the groups worked on finalizing their research projects and discussing remaining sticking points and how to resolve them. Ms. Saldana took on the tasks of publicizing the colloquium: flyer announcing the event and a call for papers, which Dr. Rodrigue got printed, distributed, and e-mailed. Ms. Saldana developed the program/proceedings for the event, printing abstracts for the three seminar presentations and two outside presentations.

Preparing for Symposium (24 April):

The seminar symposium for presenting group research results is on 1 May! Let us spend Wednesday, 24 April, going over a near-final version of what you have, discuss what needs still to be done, and make some "executive decisions" about what's not feasible to do in time (material for your "Conclusions and Recommendations" section).

No class on 17 April!

I want to give you this evening off for three reasons. First, I'll be picking Dr. Villanueva-Colón up at LAX and could not get back to campus on time. Second, I like to give students "comp time" for their field and lab research projects and this would be great timing for that. Third, most of you went to the AAG and I thought you'd enjoy the break because you didn't really get a spring break! However, there is a fourth and really important ulterior motive: I would very much like to see you seminarians at one or both of Dr. Villanueva-Colón's talks as they are directly relevant to the hazards theme of our seminar (and, since you've read up on the topics she'll be discussing, I thought she would enjoy having a particularly conversant audience!).
Preparing for Visit of Dr. Nancy Villanueva-Colón on 18 and 22 April (by 10 April)
This is an unusual week: We are changing gears from the wildfire issues that have occupied us so far this semester and dominate your research projects. Because Geography, ES&P, and Chicano and Latino Studies are bringing a Scholarly Intersections guest to campus from the 18th through the 22nd, Dr. Nancy Nancy Villanueva-Colón, I would like us all to prepare for that by familiarizing ourselves with the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season, the political-economic context in Puerto Rico at the time Hurricane María struck, and the broader picture of climate change in island countries and territories. Here are links to flyers for her talks:

The readings are all media stories, not refereed articles, so we don't need formal moderators this week. One of our crew, Ms. Pacheco-Colón, was there during the hurricanes and maybe she can share with us what it actually felt like in the path of something like this?

While I hope you all read all three of these, time is short, so I'd like you at a minimum to read two of them. To make sure each is read by a critical mass, I am suggesting the following pairs of articles for each of you:

Levenson, Eric. 2017. 3 storms, 3 responses: Comparing Harvey, Irma and Maria. CNN (27 September). Available at https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/26/us/response-harvey-irma-maria/index.html

  • Mr. Guidimadjegbe, Ms. Yang, Mr. Emmons, Ms. Lastra-Morales, Mr. Siwabessy

Sullivan, Laura. 2018. How Puerto Rico's debt created a perfect storm before the storm. NPR Special Series: Blackout in Puerto Rico (2 May). Available at https://www.npr.org/2018/05/02/607032585/how-puerto-ricos-debt-created-a-perfect-storm-before-the-storm.

  • Ms. Saldana, Mr. Siwabessy, Ms. Pacheco-Colón, Ms. Lastra-Morales

Anonymous. 2017. Climate impacts in the U.S. islands. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Climate Change Impacts web page archive, 19 January2017snapshot. Available at https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/climate-impacts/climate-impacts-us-islands_.html.

  • Ms. Pacheco-Colón, Mr. Guidimadjegbe, Ms. Yang, Mr. Emmons, Ms. Saldana

No Seminar: Spring "Break" and Nearly All of You are at the AAG (3 April)

Fine-Scale Risk Assessment and Firefighting with Geospatial Technologies (by 27 March)

The LAGS has (finally) updated their web page, with information about the Student Research Symposium and how to submit an abstract: http://lageography.org. The California Geographical Society deadline for registration ($85) and abstracts is April 1st: http://calgeog.org/conferences. Let's have working drafts of the abstracts by next week, so that they can be submitted in time.

Burkett, Brice, and Curtis, Andrew. 2011. Classifying wildfire risk at the building scale in the Wildland-Urban Interface: Applying spatial video approaches to Los Angeles County. Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy 2, 4, 6: 1-20. doi: 10.2202/1944-4079.1093. Available through CSULB Library e-collection.

Aydin, Burchan; Selvi, Emre; Tao, Jian; and Starek, Michael J. 2019. Use of fire-extinguishing balls for a conceptual system of drone-assisted wildfire fighting. Drones 3, 17: 1-15. doi: 10.3390/drones3010017. Available at https://www.mdpi.com/2504-446X/3/1/17/pdf.

Optional resource: Dr. Laris and I did a long talk this past Friday for the Emeritus and Retired Faculty and Staff luncheon. It brought together a lot of our observations about wildfire hazard in California. I turned the viewgraphs into web pages and then put our remarks up, too.

  • Laris, Paul S., and Rodrigue, Christine M. 2019. Changing Fire Régimes in California, Changing Geographies of Hazard. What Now? Invited presentation to the Emeritus and Retired Faculty and Staff luncheon (15 March), California State University, Long Beach. Available at https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/ERFAS/.

Wildfire Effects on Native Plant Succession (by 20 March)

Syphard, Alexandra D.; Brennan, Teresa J.; and Keeley, Jon E. 2019. Drivers of chaparral type conversion to herbaceous vegetation in coastal Southern California. Diversity and Distributions 25, 1: 90-101. doi: 10.1111/ddi.12827. Available at:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/ddi.12827.

Guo, Qinfeng. 2017. Temporal changes in native-exotic richness correlations during early post-fire succession. Acta Oecologica 80: 47-50. doi: 10.1016/j.actao.2017.03.002. Available at:
https://forestthreats.org/products/publications/Temporal_changes_in_native-exotic_richness_correlations.pdf

Content Analysis: Traditional Media and Social Media (by 13 March)
Davis, Charles. 2006. Western wildfires: A policy change perspective. Review of Policy Research 23, 1: 115-127. doi: 10.1111/j.1541-1338.2006.00188.x. Available through CSULB Library e-collection.

Wang, Zheye; Ye, Xinyue; and Tsou, Ming-Hsiang. 2016. Spatial, temporal, and content analysis of Twitter for wildfire hazards. Natural Hazards 83, 1: 523-540. doi: 10.1007/s11069-016-2329-6. Available through CSULB Library e-collection.

Optional resource: Next week, the readings are going to focus on the ecological impacts of wildfires and post-fire succession processes. This is an overview of wildfire in both chaparral and California sage scrub and its impacts on animals.

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Differential Social Vulnerability to Wildfire (by 6 March)

Collins, Timothy W., and Bolin, Bob. 2009. Situating hazard vulnerability: People's negotiations with wildfire environments in the U.S. Southwest. Environmental Management 44, 3: 441-455. doi: 10.1007/s00267-009-9333-5. Access through CSULB Library e-collection.

Davies, Ian P.; Haugo, Ryan D.; Robertson, James C.; and Levin, Phillip S. 2018. The unequal vulnerability of communities of color to wildfire. Public Library of Science (PLoS ONE) 13, 11: e0205825. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0205825. Available from https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0205825. Note: You saw this research in a popularized The Conversation format two weeks ago -- this is the refereed article detailing their methods.

Optional resource(s): Here is a basic overview of the variety of content analysis techniques and approaches. Ms. Lastra-Morales, no doubt, may find this pretty absorbing <G>, but I understand another group of you is also thinking of applying content analysis to triangulate on their own topic. So, I wanted to get the technique out to you a week before assigning a formal article for all of us to read:

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Wildfire Air Pollution (by  27 February)

Liu, Jia C.; Pereira, Gavin; Uhl, Sarah A.; Bravo, Mercedes A.; and Bell, Michelle L. 2015. A systematic review of the physical health impacts from non-occupational exposure to wildfire smoke. Environmental Research 136: 120-132. doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2014.10.015. Access through CSULB Library e-collection. McClure, Crystal D., and Jaffe, Daniel A. 2018. US particulate matter air quality improves except in wildfire-prone areas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) 115, 31: 7901-7906.doi: 10.1073/pnas.1804353115. Available at: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/31/7901.full.pdf. Explore the Worldview application and how you can extract MODIS data and imagery by type, region, and dates:
NASA. 2018. Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Worldview interactive application for viewing data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on the Earth Observing System Terra and Aqua satellites. Available at https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/.

Check out the site-based database from which McClure and Jaffe drew some of the data used in their paper:
Federal Land Manager Environmental Database. Available at: http://views.cira.colostate.edu/fed/.

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Thinking about Doing Original Research... (by  20 February)

This week, we'll do something a little different from the standard seminar and moderated discussions. We need to start thinking about setting up seminar projects that include an original research component. There are all kinds of directions these could take, including content analysis of media coverage of recent extreme events, demographic analysis of the vulnerable, creating an interactive GIS about one of the disasters, using drones to measure wildfire burn intensity and post-fire succession, doing some kind of physical measurement of fire effects on other physical geography parameters. So, here is a list of methodological approaches and data on which they could be tried:. In each case, I've tried to keep the articles bite-sized and, in order to do that, I'm pulling in material that is not directly on topic, just to get across a method or technique.

Media content analysis:

Interactive GIS (and demographic analysis): Post-fire physical impacts: hydrology and mass-wasting

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Climate Change and Wildfire in California (by  6 13 February)

Harvey, Chelsea. 2017. Here's what we know about wildfires and climate change: Scientists think that global warming may already be influencing fire seasons. Scientific American, reprinted from E&E News Climatewire. Available at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heres-what-we-know-about-wildfires-and-climate-change/.
  • No moderators: Read this before the next two articles as a context piece and think about how each article reïnforces or questions the impressions you got from it

Westerling, Anthony LeRoy. 2016. Increasing western US forest wildfire activity: Sensitivity to changes in the timing of spring. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 371, 20150178: 1-10. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2015.0178. Available at: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2015.0178.

Keeley, Jon E., and Syphard, Alexandra D. 2016. Climate change and future fire regimes: Examples from California. Geosciences 6, 37: 1-14. Available at: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3263/6/3/37.

Telecommuting: Mr. Siwabessy's online contribution to discussion of both articles

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Trends in Disaster Losses (by 30 January)

Gall, Melanie; Borden, Kevin A.; Emrich, Christopher T.; and Cutter, Susan L. 2011. The unsustainable trend of natural hazard losses in the United States. Sustainability 3: 2157-2181. doi: 10.3390/su3112157. This journal is not available through CSULB. Use this link: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/3/11/2157/pdf.

Löw, Petra. 2017. The new NatCatSERVICE analysis tool: Downloadcenter for statistics on natural catastrophes. Munich RE website. Available at: https://www.munichre.com/topics-online/en/climate-change-and-natural-disasters/natural-disasters/natural-catastrophies-natcat-service-analysis-tool.html. Read this to get a basic sense of the Munich RE NatCatSERVICE interactive database. Watch the video shown in the article.

Explore the NatCatSERVICE interactive database. Available from the web article above or, directly, from https://natcatservice.munichre.com/.

Anonymous. 2018. Wildfire trends in the United States. SciLine web site, American Association for the Advancement of Science. Available at: https://www.sciline.org/evidence-blog/wildfires.

Anonymous. 2018. Attribution science: Climate change & extreme weather. SciLine web site, AAAS. Available at: https://www.sciline.org/evidence-blog/climate-attribution.

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Last revision: 05/08/19

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