ALBERT

Description: Geodemographic classifications are categorical measures representing salient multidimensional population and built environment attributes of small areas. The UK Output Area Classification (OAC) is one such classification, created on behalf of the Office for National Statistics, and was built with an open methodology and entirely from 2011 Census variables. However, one criticism of national classifications such as OAC is that they do not adequately accommodate local or regional structures that diverge from national patterns. In this paper we explore this issue with respect to Greater London. We develop a London classification based upon the OAC methodology, and explore the extent to which these patterns are divergent from the national classification.

Description: Information has always had geography. It is from somewhere; about somewhere; it evolves and is transformed somewhere; it is mediated by networks, infrastructures, and technologies: all of which exist in physical, material places. These geographies of information about places matter because they shape how we are able to find and understand different parts of the world. Places invisible or discounted in representations are invisible in practice to many people. In other words, geographic augmentations are much more than just representations of places: they are part of the place itself; they shape it rather than simply reflect it. This fusing of the spatial and informational augmentations that are immutable means that annotations of place emerge as sites of political contestation: with different groups of people trying to impose different narratives on informational augmentations. This paper therefore explores how information geographies have their own geographic distributions: geographies of access, of participation, and of representation. The paper offers a deliberately broad survey of a range of key platforms that mediate, host, and deliver different types of geographic information. It does so using a combination of existing statistics and bespoke data not previously mapped or analysed. Through this effort, the paper demonstrates that in addition to the geographies of uneven access to contemporary modes of communication, uneven geographies of participation and representation are also evident and in some cases are being amplified rather than alleviated. In other words, the paper comprehensively shows one important facet of contemporary information geographies: that geographic information itself is characterised by a host of uneven geographies. The paper concludes that there are few signs that global informational peripheries are achieving comparable levels of participation or representation with traditional information cores, despite the hopes that the fast-paced spread of the internet to three billion people might change this pattern.

Description: Numerous exegeses have been written about the epistemologies of volunteered geographic information (VGI). We contend that VGI is itself a socially constructed epistemology crafted in the discipline of geography, which when re-examined, does not sit comfortably with either GIScience or critical GIS scholarship. Using insights from Albert Borgmann's philosophy of technology we offer a critique that, rather than appreciating the contours of this new form of data, truth appears to derive from traditional analytic views of information found within GIScience. This is assisted by structures that enable VGI to be treated as independent of the process that led to its creation. Allusions to individual emancipation further hamper VGI and problematise participatory practices in mapping/geospatial technologies (e.g. public participation geographic information systems). The paper concludes with implications of this epistemological turn and prescriptions for designing systems and advancing the field to ensure nuanced views of participation within the core conceptualisation of VGI.

Description: No abstract is available for this article.

Description: Global environmental images have become part of our everyday life experience. We encounter them in news reports, scientific articles and artistic interventions. Yet so far, only the most iconic of these images have received close critical attention from scholars coming mostly from two related fields, science studies and cultural geography. Some of those studies, as for instance research carried out on the famous Apollo photographs, have revealed that the icons of our environmental age do not provide simple readings, that they carry multiple, often contradicting messages, and that they can be vectors of highly ambiguous and even conflicting political beliefs. However, historically informed interdisciplinary research on visual cultures from an environmental perspective is still at its beginning. This essay thus calls for a systematic exploration of the crucial role the visual plays in the creation, circulation, interpretation and adaptation of global environmental knowledge. It is argued that this inquiry cannot be left solely to historians or geographers but calls for a truly interdisciplinary engagement. One central claim is that we need to better understand the constitutive role the visual and associated knowledge practices, conventions and infrastructures play in mediating global environmental phenomena. One possibility, it is argued, is to develop a broader historical framework for understanding how the visual actively shaped scientific and environmental discourse, and how it stimulated the rise of holistic and dynamic understandings of the environment from the nineteenth century onwards. A second important research area that is suggested concerns the crucial role global environmental images play at the interface of science discourse and environmental policy and governance. The essay concludes by suggesting three basic theses which seem particularly promising for future interdisciplinary inquiries into global environmental images. The paper calls for a historically informed interdisciplinary inquiry into global environmental images. e00020

Description: A growing body of work has explored the effects of visual imagery on shifting forms of environmental consciousness and politics. Circulating images of, for example, the ‘whole Earth’ have been ascribed agency in the emergence of new forms of planetary awareness and political globalism. This essay identifies a new form of global environmental image, in the shape of photographic montage depictions of future places transformed by the effects of climate change. Montage enables artists and designers to import the spatial formations of distant places into more familiar locations, in the process producing novel renderings of the interconnections of global environmental change. The future-conditional – ‘if x, then y’ – has become a key register of scientific and artistic engagement with climate change, and practices of visual montage have offered means of reconciling the transformations of space and time in the imagination of putative futures. The essay situates such images within a longer lineage of depictions of the tropical and the ruined, and focuses on contemporary montage depictions of climate-change-induced migration. It argues that many of these ‘global montages’ problematically reinforce extant notions of geographical otherness. Yet montage, as a technique, also renders visible the choices, cuts, juxtapositions and arguments which lie behind any representation, thus offering the seed of a more reflexive mode of future-conditional image-making. This article explores photomontage depictions of future cities under climate change as a novel form of global environmental image. Montages assemble new viewpoints through the juxtaposition of photographic fragments from diverse spaces, in a fashion which can reify conceptions of geographical otherness, but which also contains the seed of a more reflexive mode of future-conditional image-making. Montage makes the choices which underpin any image an object of representation itself, and therefore has a radical potential which is yet to be fully realised in imagings of climatic futures. e00019

Description: Field size distributions and their changes have not been studied over large areas as field size change datasets are not available. This study quantifies agricultural field size changes in a consistent manner using Landsat satellite data that also provide geographic context for the observed decadal scale changes. Growing season cloud-free Landsat 30 m resolution images acquired from 9 to 25 years apart were used to extract field object classifications at seven sites located by examination of a global agricultural yield map, agricultural production statistics, literature review, and analysis of the imagery in the US Landsat archive. High spatial resolution data were used to illustrate issues identifying small fields that are not reliably discernible at 30 m Landsat resolution. The predominant driver of field size change was attributed by literature review. Significant field size changes were driven by different factors, including technological advancements (Argentina and USA), government land use and agricultural policies (Malaysia, Brazil, France), and political changes (Albania and Zimbabwe). While observed local field size changes were complex, the reported results suggest that median field sizes are increasing due to technological advancements and changes to government policy, but may decrease where abrupt political changes affect the agricultural sector and where pastures are converted to arable land uses. In the limited sample considered, median field sizes increased from 45% (France) to 159% (Argentina) and decreased from 47% (Brazil) to 86% (Albania). These changes imply significant impacts on landscape spatial configuration and land use diversity with ecological and biogeochemical consequences.

Description: Small-scale decentralised facilities and household-level water purification technologies (HWTs) have become unconventional modes of delivering potable water. This paper examines how HWTs transformed from a temporary solution to unsanitary drinking water conditions in the global South to a legitimised technological fix for communities that experience chronic household water insecurity in the United States. We examine the discursive and material processes through which HWTs are applied in periurban and rural subdivisions on the Texas–Mexico border, called colonias. HWTs, through the intervention of social entrepreneurs, experts, and the state, mediate water governance by rearticulating the individual solution and foreclosing a collective or political process to improve community water systems for colonia residents.

Description: The contemporary tea industry in China is associated with high tea production and high nitrous oxide (N 2 O) emissions, due to the application of large quantities of nitrogen (N) fertilisers, and the intrinsic characteristics of tea field soils. In total, the Chinese tea plantations may have emitted 40.9 Gg N year –1 of N 2 O for 2013, accounting for 85% of emissions from global tea plantations. Such emissions are significant, unneglectable and need to be incorporated into the national greenhouse gas inventory. The current average N 2 O emission rate and emission intensity of tea plantations in China are as high as 16.6 kg N 2 O-N ha –1 year –1 and 21.3 g N 2 O-N per kg tea production (several times greater than in other croplands), respectively, severely damaging the ‘green’ signature of Chinese green teas. To reduce the risk of a sudden collapse of the currently booming tea industry, due to the dramatic decline of economic profit in the event of an agricultural carbon tax scheme being implemented in the near future, investigations of the mechanisms for the high rate of N 2 O emissions and the effective N 2 O mitigation practices in tea plantations are urgently needed. Of the counties with large tea plantations, only China, India and Japan have contributed data. The measurement and research of N 2 O emissions from other large tea plantations in Africa, South and Central Asia should be alerted by this report to close the global gap of N 2 O emissions from tea plantations. This paper raised an issue on the significant contribution of Chinese contemporary tea industry to greenhouse gas emissions, which has not yet been incorporated into the current national greenhouse gas inventory. It reported that the average nitrous oxide emission rate and emission intensity of tea plantations in China are as high as 16.6 kg N ha -1 yr -1 and 21.3 g N per kg tea production, respectively, suggesting that the current Chinese tea industry is not on the right track for “green” or sustainable development, and therefore steps need to be taken to decrease its nitrous oxide emissions. e00021

Description: Seabirds play an important role in coastal environments, serving as key indicators of marine ecosystem variability as well as biovectors that influence terrestrial productivity and carbon storage. Long-term estimates of seabird populations remain rare, but lakes that support large seabird populations in their watersheds can archive a history of seabird activity in their sediment records. Here we present a seabird guano-influenced sediment record from Genovesa Crater Lake, Galápagos Islands, home to the world's largest reported colony of red-footed boobies ( Sula sula ) and smaller populations of other species. Influx of seabird guano into Genovesa Crater Lake produces high sedimentary δ 15 N values, and temporal variability in sediment δ 15 N primarily reflects changes in guano influx through time. Two abrupt increases in sedimentary δ 15 N occurred at 1835 AD and 1965 AD, and variance increased following the 1965 AD shift. The largest of these abrupt shifts at 1835 AD coincided, within age model error, with an abrupt increase in marine productivity indicators in sediment records off the coast of Perú and Chile. In the latter part of the twentieth century, δ 15 N values increased during periods of higher landings of Peruvian anchoveta and sardines. We hypothesise that seabird presence and activity on Genovesa increased during periods of higher regional marine productivity. Enhanced variance in Genovesa δ 15 N following the 1965 AD shift may reflect a modern population more susceptible to climate and environmental variability than at any other time in the last 400 years.