GEOG420 RESEARCH PROJECT:
Staff have supplied the following topics areas (out of many possible options) that
might provide useful starting points for your own thoughts about project topics. You
are encouraged to talk topics over with your colleagues and with staff - but enter such
discussions with ideas to explore rather than expecting people to supply you with the
topic that "spins your wheels".
Deirdre Hart
1. Examine processes (geomorphic, hydrologic, ecological, remotely sensed)
operating in river-mouth lagoons on the East and West Coasts, NZ
2. Research tropical reef carbonate sediments
3. Studying the morphodynamics of composite beaches
4. Researching the risks of coastal inundation in response to storms-in-series and
tsunami using GIS. LIDAR and beach profile data available.
5. Examining the geomorphic development of Caroline Bay, Timaru.
Project has
direct management implications for the Timaru District Council shoreline
development plan and for sand-extraction permits.
6. Changes in land use and irrigation practices on the Canterbury Plains - water
resource and/ or coastal and fluvial implications
7. Coastal and beach water quality investigations
8. Re-visiting longshore sediment transport along Southern Pegasus Bay. Available
data sources: ECAN surveys, wave buoy, CamEra images, SWAN model
9. Testing the validity of the SWAN nearshore wave model
used to forecast
wave coastal conditions in Canterbury (http://www.niwa.co.nz/services/waves)
10. Investigating the effects of aquaculture farms on wave and current regimes,
seabed ecology and sediment transport
11. Coastal 'hut' and 'batch' settlements - recent changes in these NZ communities
associated with the rise in holiday home interest and real estate prices
12. Examining behaviour of nourished beach sediments along the Kaikoura
Esplanade. ECAN and Kaikoura District Council interest.
13. Investigating rates of meso-scale erosion on rock-shore platforms. Data is
available from over thirty years of research on rock-shore platforms at Canterbury
14. Examining the effects of large variations in seasonal rainfall on small high country
lakes -for more details see Martin Single.
Ross Barnett:
1.
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3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Barriers to health promotion
Health inequalities
Health service provision eg rural health issues
The credit crunch and what’s happened to urban revitalisation
Therapeutic landscapes in health
The end of homeownership?
Urban poverty and homelessness
Garth Cant:
1. Kaitiakitanga and tuatara
2. Kaitiakitanga and the management of sand, shingle and gravel
3. Ecological justice and the disposal of waste in Aotearoa New Zealand
Julie Cupples:
1. Cultural geography and cultural studies– use of critical/cultural theory, especially
Foucault, Gramsci, Deleuze, Latour, de Certeau, Baudrillard and feminist
approaches
2. Development geography – projects in Nicaragua (construction of citizenship,
environmental management, gender, municipal governance, energy politics,
postdevelopment) are possible but you must have Spanish
3. Media geography – media convergence, media production and consumption,
indigenous
Derek Todd:
1. Beach gravel by-passing at the Grey River mouth: Is it happening?
2. Profile changes at Christchurch dune lowering sites: comparison of pre-consent
and post-consent sites
3. Effect of ocean outfall on shoreline stability at Green Island, Dunedin
4. Beach volume growth at Caroline Bay, Timaru
5. Effectiveness of gravel extraction management on South Beach, Timaru
6. Sediment slug movements into Timaru Harbour Entrance channel.
Wendy Lawson
Nicole Gombay
1. The impacts of land claims on indigenous political processes and identity
construction
2. Common property systems and the impacts of state intervention on those systems
3. Food systems
4. Indigenous peoples’ territoriality and resource use
5. The construction of economic systems of indigenous peoples and interactions with
the market forces
6. Identity and community construction of indigenous peoples in settler societies
7. Contested knowledges
Greg Breetzke
Femke Reitsma
1. System Resilience & Sustainability
a) What is the potential of UC to generate its own energy given the latest sustainable
energy production technology (e.g. use a GIS to calculate solar insolation for roof
spaces, potential for other forms of micro energy generation)?
b) Using C.S Holling’s theory of resilience, how can we describe the UC system in a
GIS in order to model and measure system resilience?
c) How can we use a GIS to enhance an organisation’s sustainability reporting and
environmental accounting?
2. Virtual Environments and Geovisualisation
a) Create a 3D base map for the University of Canterbury. This would involve
creating a system for automatically converting and georeferencing the CAD files of
UC to GIS (i.e. for nightly builds).
b) What is the best way to visualize localised geographic knowledge? For example, if
someone were navigating through the UC campus, how could we best display
knowledge about local things they are passing (e.g. the type of tree they are passing)
on a handheld device (e.g. a mobile phone).
3. Geosemantics
a) Metadata Schema for Analytic GIS Operations
The analysis of spatial data changes that data set in some way, providing new
information that was not available in the form of the original data set. However, each
of these operations go unrecorded, which makes it impossible to determine whether
the data is still fit for the purposes by secondary or tertiary parties accepting it after
these changes have been made. What we need is a metadata schema that describes all
the basic types of analytical operations and specifies data restrictions on those types.
This metadata will then be associated with each data set. In future this schema will be
used to automatically log the analytical procedures applied to data, for the purposes of
recovering the original data, the automatic application of GIS operations, or
knowledge discovery of spatial data. Depending on the extent of work involved in
developing such a metadata specification, a prototype could be developed which
records analytical operations as they are implemented and writes it to a metadata file,
either in an existing GIS such as ArcGIS, a GIS software environment available in the
Geography Department, or as some form of service.
b) GIS operations
There are many GI (geographic information) operations available to a GIS user, and
their number grows as new techniques are developed and existing methodologies are
enhanced. However, the knowledge about how to use these operations and more
complex analytical procedures is not represented such that we can automatically
implement and chain together operations. We need an operational ontology. The
objective of an operational ontology is to encode expert knowledge about processes or
operations in order to achieve some goal, such as the steps one might take to bake a
cake. For GI we may be interested in expressing the GI processes that need to be
implemented in order to arrive at a specific solution, such as the delineation of a
watershed or the implementation of workflow? To delineate a floodplain or other
complex operations, there may not be a single service that will accomplish it, but
someone may have written an ontology describing how to chain a series of operations
(i.e. service providers may just focus on basic set of geo-operations where business
and academics need complex analytical processes). Although some of these
analytical processes are often available as a standard component in GIS packages or
as extensions to those packages, more advanced and domain specific processes are
not. Furthermore, operational ontologies support the development of open source GI
tools and geoservices, by making the knowledge of how GI processes are
implemented shareable.