Shipshaping and Fiafia (or How I Became a Geographer)

This video was recorded live at the annual Spatial Lightning Talks on February 27, 2013 at the Mosher Alumni House, UC Santa Barbara. Each speaker was allotted three minutes to present a topic related to space—geographic or otherwise

Shipshaping and Fiafia (or How I Became a Geographer)

This video was recorded live at the annual Spatial Lightning Talks on February 27, 2013 at the Mosher Alumni House, UC Santa Barbara. Each speaker was allotted three minutes to present a topic related to space—geographic or otherwise

Mapping with strings attached: Kite aerial photography of Durai Island, Anambas Islands, Indonesia

<p>A 1:2,000 scale orthophoto map of the southern coast of Durai Island, Indonesia, was created using kite aerial photography and computer vision software. Photographs were taken using a consumer-grade digital camera suspended from the line of a kite that was towed by boat along Durai's coastline. Three hundred and fifty-seven aerial photographs were combined into a mosaic, orthorectified and georeferenced using Agisoft PhotoScan software with ground control points collected via a GPS field survey. The map was created in conjunction with underwater ecological surveys of the coral reefs surrounding the island, and it supports ongoing monitoring and educational outreach efforts. Kite aerial photography provides a low-cost, portable, and technologically straightforward means of collecting large-scale aerial imagery in situations where a conventional, aircraft-based photographic survey is not practical.</p

Planning for the future: mapping anticipated environmental and social impacts in a nascent tourism destination

Tourism is a significant driver of social and ecological change in developing countries, particularly in small-island states, which are susceptible to tourism impacts due to their particular social and environmental characteristics. In this article we present a participatory mapping approach to obtaining spatially explicit local perceptions of future environmental and social change resulting from tourism development, as well as addressing the different community conflicts that may arise through the introduction of tourism in the future in a Solomon Islands community. The results show that spatial conflicts within a community over territory and associated resources are likely to occur when designing natural resource management and tourism development plans. This knowledge can help us increase the future sustainability of tourism in nascent small-islands destinations, particularly in vulnerable regions such as Roviana, which have experienced very little tourism development and will likely experience more in the near future