Topography, vegetation, climate, water table, and even the anthropogenic activities all are affected by urban growth through diverse mechanisms. The present study focuses on the implications of urban expansion on geomorphology in the historical city of Gwalior in central India. The expansion of urban area has been quantified by deriving data for four decades (1972&#x2013;2013) from the Landsat images. The results show that the urban built-up area has increased by 08.48&#x2009;sq. km during the first eighteen years (1972&#x2013;1990) which has increased to 16.28&#x2009;sq. km during the next sixteen years (1990&#x2013;2006). The built-up area has gone up to 23.19&#x2009;sq. km in the next seven years (2006&#x2013;2013). Overall during the last 40 years the growth of the urban built-up is nearly three times of the built-up areas in 1972. The average decadal growth rate of population is 27.28 percent while that of built-up land is 36.29 percent. The construction activities have affected important geomorphic features such pediplain, buried pediplain, residual hills, and denudational hills. It was concluded that, instead of shortsighted urban development, proper measures should be taken in accordance with scientific planning for the urban expansion of the city in the future.

S. N. Mohapatra

Padmini Pani

Monika Sharma

Rapid Urban Expansion and Its Implications on Geomorphology: A Remote Sensing and GIS Based Study

A meaningful CO<sub>2</sub> mitigation policy is unlikely at the national level in the United States. What is currently happening and what is much more likely to occur in the future are city and regional level efforts of mitigation and adaptation. This paper aims to understand the geographic and socioeconomic characteristics of metropolitan areas and regions that lead to engagement with the issue of climate change. We use geographically explicit, internet search data from Google to measure information seeking behavior, which we interpret as engagement, attention, and interest. Our spatial Hot Spot analysis creates a map that potentially could be harnessed by policymakers to gauge mitigation support or adaptation potential. The results of our multivariate analysis suggest that socioeconomic factors are the strongest determinants of search behavior and that climate and geography have little to no impact. With regard to political ideology, we find evidence of a nonlinear, inverse-U relationship with maximum search activity occurring in metropolitan areas with a near even political split, suggesting that parity may be good for engagement.

Patrick Cavanagh

Corey Lang

Xinran Li

Haoran Miao

John David Ryder

Searching for the Determinants of Climate Change Interest

This study highlights that the increasing urbanization and industrialization in Delhi are responsible for higher fluxes of atmospheric dust and its chemical constituents. Delhi has experienced a drastic change in land use and land cover area during the past two decades. Road lengths of the city have increased by 76&#x25; from 1985 to 2011. The number of mobile vehicles has reached 80,52,508 in 2014 from 24,32,295 in 1994. The industrial units in Delhi have increased by 39.54&#x25; in 2011 as compared to 1994 value. Atmospheric dust which is originated from soil in this region becomes carbon rich due to interaction of suspended soil with atmospheric pollutants. Emissions of carbonaceous aerosols from coal and petroleum combustions are mainly responsible for silica dominated soil dust transforming into carbon rich particulate matter. Such dust may play very important role in the atmosphere having significant influence on human health, global warming, climate change, radiative forcing, visibility, and cloud formation. It is expected that if the rate of development remains the same, green cover of the city invariably will be sized down in order to meet the demand of housing, transportation, industries, and so forth in proportion to the rising population.

Bablu Kumar

Kopal Verma

Umesh Kulshrestha

Deposition and Mineralogical Characteristics of Atmospheric Dust in relation to Land Use and Land Cover Change in Delhi (India)

This paper provides a critical engagement with state-of-the-art research from positive psychology and behavioral genetics that directly challenges social geographers&#x2019; working hypothesis that people&#x2019;s well-being and happiness can dramatically be improved by suitably modifying unjust social arrangements and exploitative economic relations. It is intended to generate interest in this neglected body of work in general and awareness of its politically regressive implications in particular.

Dragos Simandan

Omitted Variables in the Geographical Treatment of Well-Being and Happiness

Although land use/cover maps are widely used to support management and environmental policies, only some studies have reported their accuracy using sound and complete assessments. Thematic map accuracy assessment is typically achieved by comparing reference sites labeled with the &#x201c;ground-truth&#x201d; category to the ones depicted in the land use/cover map. A variety of sampling designs are used to select these references sites. The estimators for accuracy indices and the variance of these estimators depend on the sampling design. However, the tools used to assess accuracy available in the main program packages compute the accuracy indices without taking into account the sampling and give inconsistent estimates. As an alternative, we present free user-friendly tools that enable users beyond the Geographic Information Science Community to compute accuracy indices and estimate corrected areas of given categories with their respective confidence intervals. The tool runs in Dinamica EGO, a free platform for environmental spatial modeling as well as a Q-GIS plugin and a <i>R</i> package. Additionally, a practical application example is described using a case study area in central-west Mexico.

Jean-Fran&#xe7;ois Mas

Azucena P&#xe9;rez-Vega

Adri&#xe1;n Ghilardi

Silvia Mart&#xed;nez

Jaime Octavio Loya-Carrillo

Ernesto Vega

A Suite of Tools for Assessing Thematic Map Accuracy

The prime objective of this paper is to identify and map the water-logged areas within Moyna basin, India, and to explore their contemporary economic significances. The Landsat 5 TM, ASTER data, and topographical sheets have been taken into consideration with field observations. Maps on relief, slope, canal density, embankments, a supervised classification of the study area and then NDVI, NDWI, and modified NDWI or NDMI have been prepared here. At Moyna, the piezometric surface ranges from five to ten metres below the ground level. The percentage of clay particles is high throughout the surface soil. The total rainfall is nearly 1400&#x2009;mm and most of it happened during the monsoon period. Two well-marked depressions are observed there within the basin and the nearly central one is wide and is clearly identified from the relief map also. Problem of drainage congestion there accelerates the onset of water-logged situation. In general, water-logged areas are not suitable for humans. People once were worried about the water-logged environment due to underwater scenario of low-lying agricultural fields for a certain period, but today local people are taking this environmental condition as an opportunity for fishing activity and thus they are becoming economically benefitted as well.

Abhay Sankar Sahu

A Study on Moyna Basin Water-Logged Areas (India) Using Remote Sensing and GIS Methods and Their Contemporary Economic Significance

Mountainous rivers are the most significant source of water supply in the Himalayan provinces of India. The drainage basin dynamics of these rivers are controlled by the tectonomorphic parameters, which include both surface and subsurface characteristics of a basin. To understand the drainage basin dynamics and their usefulness in watershed prioritisation and management in terms of soil erosion studies and groundwater potential assessment and flood hazard risk reduction in mountainous rivers, morphometric analysis of a Himalayan River (Supin River) basin has been taken as a case study. The entire Supin River basin has been subdivided into 27 subwatersheds and 36 morphometric parameters have been calculated under four broad categories: drainage network, basin geometry, drainage texture, and relief characteristics, each of which is further grouped into five different clusters having similar morphometric properties. The various morphometric parameters have been correlated with each other to understand their underlying relationship and control over the basin hydrogeomorphology. The result thus generated provides adequate knowledge base required for decision making during strategic planning and delineation of prioritised hazard management zones in mountainous terrains.

Atrayee Biswas

Dipanjan Das Majumdar

Sayandeep Banerjee

Morphometry Governs the Dynamics of a Drainage Basin: Analysis and Implications

This paper identifies three types of model environmental cities in China and examines their levels of energy-related carbon emissions using a bottom-up accounting system. Model environmental cities are identified as those that have been recently awarded official recognition from the central government for their efforts in environmental protection. The findings show that, on average, the Low-Carbon Cities have lower annual carbon emissions, carbon intensities, and per capita emissions than the Eco-Garden Cities and the Environmental Protection Cities. Compared internationally, the Eco-Garden Cities and the Environmental Protection Cities have per capita emissions that are similar to those of American cities whereas per capita emissions from the Low-Carbon Cities are similar to those of European cities. The result indicates that addressing climate change is not a priority for some model environmental cities. Policy changes are needed to prioritize climate mitigation in these cities, considering that climate change is a cross-cutting environmental issue with wide-ranging impact.

Kevin Lo

Energy-Related Carbon Emissions of China&#x2019;s Model Environmental Cities

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