ALBERT

Description: Zusammenfassung Der Umgang mit den Folgen des Klimawandels stellt Biosphärenreservate als Modellregionen für nachhaltige Entwicklung vor neue Herausforderungen. Obwohl Einflüsse auf Ökosysteme oder Landschaften nur begrenzt steuerbar und schwer absehbar sind, besteht der Auftrag, Klimawandelfolgen strategisch aufzugreifen. Zudem sind zahlreiche Akteure mit unterschiedlichen Perspektiven in Entscheidungen einzubeziehen, die vor dem Hintergrund unsicherer Zukunftsprognosen getroffen werden müssen. Der Beitrag zeigt am Beispiel des UNESCO-Biosphärenreservates Flusslandschaft Elbe-Brandenburg, welche konkreten Handlungsfelder sich abzeichnen und welche Arbeitsphasen ein planvoller Umgang mit dem Klimawandel haben kann. Es werden mögliche Maßnahmen für die Themen Landschaftswasserhaushalt, Vegetation, Fauna und Landnutzung aufgezeigt. An der Elbe kommt dem Flussgebietsmanagement eine besondere Bedeutung zu. Die Diskussion möglicher strategischer Handlungsfelder erläutert, welche Rollen die Verwaltung von Biosphärenreservaten in einem Prozess der Anpassung an den Klimawandel einnehmen kann. Die Möglichkeiten und der Umfang, in dem sich Biosphärenreservate zu Modellregionen für die Anpassung an den Klimawandel entwickeln, werden sich in der Praxis nach den vorhandenen Kapazitäten und der Expertise richten.

Description: “The space of vulnerability” – the title of the influential paper by Michael Watts and Hans-Georg Bohle from 1993 highlights the importance of spatiality for vulnerability research. As geographers have fundamentally shaped the concept of vulnerability, the issue of spatiality has been crucial for vulnerability from the outset. However, what notion of space have scholars adopted in their vulnerability analysis? The aim of the paper is to assess the ways in which space has been conceptualised in vulnerability research. We conduct this assessment behind the background of the conceptual development of space in human geography. Of particular interest is the question of how the successive socio-spatial turns identified by Jessop et al. (2008), which evolved around the categories of place, scale, network and territory, are reflected in publications on vulnerability. The assessment is based on a review of literature. We found that all four key socio-spatial categories have been taken up by scholars for vulnerability analysis. Following Jessop et al. we argue that a critical geography of vulnerability should acknowledge the polymorphy of socio-spatialities and assess the interplay of place, network, scale, and territory in the (re)production of vulnerability. We exemplify the argument with case studies from Bangladesh and Thailand and conclude that the full repertoire of spatial and social theories are needed in order to fully understand the social and spatial (re)production of vulnerability.

Description: My emphasize on Bohle’s distinctive approach to vulnerability is related to the arc of  my broad concern in this contribution, namely how vulnerability has since his writings on the topic in the early 1990s has become attached to three other keywords – or concepts – in novel ways that dominate both current analytical and prescriptive work across many domains from global poverty to conflict to urban governance to global pandemics and financial crashes: namely security, resilience and risk. Take for example, the new book by the President of the Rockefeller Foundation, Judith Rodin, entitled The Resilience Dividend .  She has, according to the blurb on the back cover, recalibrated the foundation to address the disruptions, shocks and stresses associated with our interconnected world. In this age of complexity says Rodin, the ability to quickly and effectively bounce back is an urgent social and economic issue.  The five characteristics of resilience (2015:14) – awareness, diversity, integration, self-regulation and adaptiveness – provide the building blocks of the “adaptive cycle” - a four-phase model integrating the ideas of Brian Holling (“resilience”), Jay Forrester (“systems thinking”) and Joseph Schumpeter (“creative destruction”). Rodin is of course not alone. In our times, resiliency has become a keyword (Williams 1985)  for understanding the challenges of inhabiting, and living with the consequences of the Anthropocene (Schoon 2006). In this sense one might say that resiliency (along with its siblings security, and risk) has become a powerful technology of contemporary governance and neoliberal rule.   Building resilient persons, communities and institutions is the sine qua non of twenty-first century forms of liberalism. Resilience provides an indispensable road-map by which all of us are purportedly able to anticipate and tolerate the disturbances, dangers and radical contingencies of inhabiting a complex world in which, to again quote the President of the Rockefeller Foundation in its new resilience manifesto, “we cannot predict where the next major shock to our well-being will manifest” (Rockefeller Foundation 2013:1). The argument I want to make is that in incorporating vulnerability into what is now a rather major academic industry operating under the sign of socio-ecological complexity, resilience thinking and risk management, much of the critical edge – the dialectical quality – of Bohle’s work has been lost.  My focus will be on issues of food, famine and climate  – topics of great interest to Hans-Georg and indeed on which he published extensively – and  what resilience theory may, or may not, have to offer in light of the vulnerability analyses of the sort developed by Bohle and others.

Description: Climate change affects the circulation of lakes and has already induced mixing regime shifts for 9 several sites. The pre-alpine Lake Ammersee, Germany, is usually dimictic, but exhibits rarely a 10 complete ice cover. Furthermore, it has potentially shown some monomictic years in the past. Based 11 on vertical profile data of water temperatures (WT) and dissolved oxygen (DO) the mixing behavior 12 of the lake is visualized and analyzed for the period of 1986 – 2014. The classification of mixing 13 depicts 22 dimictic years and eight monomictic years, which approves the assumption of of 14 occasional monomixis in the lake. No significance of a trend of shift in mixing pattern can be found. 15 By also deriving also the mixing depths from the vertical DO distribution, one year without complete 16 overturn (meromictic) is detected. The results show that no regime shift has set in for Lake 17 Ammersee until 2014. Considering the high percentage of monomictic years and the potential 18 occurrence of meromixis, it can be assumed that the lake’s mixing pattern will alter due to predicted 19 climate change in the future.

Description: This paper critically examines our framework of social resilience (Obrist et al. 2010) in the light of recent literature and has two objectives: First, it intends to refine our understanding of social resilience through a conceptualization of agency, and secondly, it aims at contributing to the growing body of literature on resilience, ageing and health. In the language of sustainable development, “agency” is commonly used as a synonym for “capacity” or “capability”. We will draw on approaches developed in the social and cultural theory to sharpen the analysis of the relationship between resilience and agency. To illustrate this refined perspective, we draw on empirical research on ageing, agency and health in Tanzania. We will take the threat of old age frailty and disability as a starting point, explore empirical situations of old age care as an engagement (or disengagement) by actors of the multiple social and cultural configurations that constrain or enable actions, and examine whether, through the interplay of habit, imagination, and judgment, these engagements reproduce or transform those structures and thus build social resilience to the threat of old age frailty and disability. This approach enabled us to identify several constellations which opened up interactive spaces for the public or private deliberations of available options (practical-evaluative agency), the active generation of possible future trajectories (projective agency) and sometimes even for structural modifications (transformative agency) with regard to old age care. Our findings further indicate that individual and collective actors positioned at the intersection of diverse fields of practice can develop more evaluative, projective and even transformative agency.

Description: The everyday meanings of key words about urban topics in South Africa differ markedly from their received definitions in much of the international geographic literature. Terms such as urban , city , rural , modern , and developed are used in everyday settings to represent concepts that are sometimes subtly and in other cases markedly in contrast with Global North norms, and embody problematic racialized values and histories.  This article briefly describes the authors’ experiences of the everyday meanings of these key terms through engagement with South African students and research participants. We suggest research tactics that may enable better understandings of implicit urban concepts used in South Africa and (potentially) elsewhere in the Global South. This is particularly important for understanding urban participants’ reactions to and narratives about rapidly evolving patterns of development in postcolonial contexts.

Description: The scale-invariant feature transform algorithm and its many variants are widely used in feature-based remote sensing image registration. However, it may be difficult to find enough correct correspondences for remote image pairs in some cases that exhibit a significant difference in intensity mapping. In this letter, a new gradient definition is introduced to overcome the difference of image intensity between the remote image pairs. Then, an enhanced feature matching method by combining the position, scale, and orientation of each keypoint is introduced to increase the number of correct correspondences. The proposed algorithm is tested on multispectral and multisensor remote sensing images. The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the matching performance compared with several state-of-the-art methods in terms of the number of correct correspondences and aligning accuracy.

Description: Radar backscatter from a vegetated surface is sensitive to direct backscatter from the canopy and two-way attenuation of the signal as it travels through the canopy. Both mechanisms are affected by the dielectric properties of the individual elements of the canopy, which are primarily a function of water content. Leaf water content of corn can change considerably during the day and in response to water stress, and model simulations suggested that this significantly affects radar backscatter. Understanding the influence of water stress on leaf dielectric properties will give insight into how the plant water status changes in response to water stress and how radar can be used to detect vegetation water stress. We used a microstrip line resonator to monitor the changes in its resonant frequency at corn leaves, due to variations in dielectric properties. This letter presents the in vivo resonant frequency measurements during field experiments with and without water stress, to understand the dielectric response due to stress. The resonant frequency of the leaf around the main leaf of the stressed plant showed increasing diurnal differences. The dielectric response of the unstressed plant remained stable. This letter shows the clear statistically significant effect of water stress on variations in resonant frequency at individual leaves.

Description: For aperture synthesis radiometers, sparse samplings on the $u$ - $v$ frequency plane cause undesirable sidelobes in the synthesized beam. Through these sidelobes, artificial sources emitting in the protected 1400–1427 MHz band contaminate the retrievals of the soil moisture and ocean salinity (SMOS) from MIRAS measurements. One effective way to correct the artificial interferences is to create a synthetic signal to compensate for the interference’s impact. Based on the similar idea, in this letter, we describe an algorithm to compensate for the interference’s impact by constructing an artificial signal as close as possible to the Gaussian beam. Numerical studies using synthetic and real SMOS data have been carried out to demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the classical CLEAN algorithm in correcting the impact of the extended radio frequency interference source.