This study explores how digital media enhances geography learning in Indonesian high schools, specifically focusing on SMA Swasta Budi Agung Medan. In the context of global advancements in educational technology, the integration of digital media in geography education has become increasingly relevant, particularly given the subject’s emphasis on spatial and visual understanding. This research aims to examine the role of digital media in supporting geography learning and to identify the challenges teachers face during its implementation. A qualitative descriptive approach was used, involving interviews with teachers, students, and school administrators at SMA Budi Agung Medan. The findings reveal that digital tools such as Quizizz, Wordwall, and Google Earth are actively used and have increased student motivation, engagement, and comprehension of complex geographical concepts. However, several challenges were identified, including limited access to digital devices among students, insufficient teacher readiness to integrate technology effectively, and difficulties maintaining classroom discipline during interactive sessions. The study concludes that while digital media significantly enriches geography learning, its success depends on improving infrastructure, providing continuous professional development for teachers, and adopting effective classroom management strategies. These findings offer valuable implications for policy development, teacher training programs, and curriculum planning to optimize the integration of digital media in geography education.
Abstract Understanding spatiotemporal changes in land use, land cover (LULC), and vegetation dynamics is crucial for sustainable environmental management and planning. This study investigated LULC and vegetation changes in the Gambela region of Ethiopia using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite data from 2004 to 2024. This study relied on MOD13A3 (NDVI, 1 km, monthly) to track vegetation changes from to 2004–2024, as well as Landsat image classification was used to LULC estimation. The IGBP was refined using a random forest with NDVI thresholding to identify shifts. The accuracy was 87% through Sentinel-2 and ground truth, and NDVI deviations were associated (0.80) with yields. Geospatial and statistical techniques were employed to detect and quantify transitions between land cover classes and fluctuations in greenness in the study area. Six LULC classes, namely forest, agricultural land, grassland, irrigated land, built‑up area, and water bodies, were mapped and analyzed. Between 2004 and 2024, forest cover declined by 2 693.9 km2 (from 74.2% to 65.3%), agricultural land expanded by 4 618.4 km2 (from 5.3% to 20.6%), and grasslands contracted by 2 397.8 km2 (from 19.5% to 11.5%). Irrigated areas more than tripled (0.4% to 1.2%), and built‑up extent grew nearly five‑fold (0.2% to 0.9%), whereas water bodies remained largely stable during this period. NDVI analysis revealed a 12% reduction in high-greenness areas, typically corresponding to NDVI values ≥ 0.6 (often 0.6–0.8), and a mean NDVI drop from 0.62 to 0.59 in non-forest zones, indicating declining vegetation health in converted landscapes. The study found significant LULC changes driven by agricultural expansion, settlement growth, and climate variability, with declining natural vegetation and increasing cultivated and built-up areas in the western and central regions. MODIS data are valuable for environmental monitoring, offering insights into land management and climate adaptation.
Noémie Bailly, Clémence Perrin-Malterre, Laine Chanteloup
El distanciamiento de la ganadería respecto a los entornos urbanos ha modificado las interacciones con los animales de producción, que ahora solo tienen lugar en lugares específicos como las granjas pedagógicas o los refugios. Las trashumancias turísticas son ejemplos de encuentros entre humanos y animales en espacios regulados, donde las interacciones están controladas por mediadores. Estos eventos ofrecen oportunidades de encuentro, pero mantienen a los turistas alejados de la verdadera cotidianidad de las explotaciones ganaderas. En la montaña, en los pastos de altura, las interacciones entre animales y humanos están menos mediadas. Las fronteras se difuminan, ya que ambos grupos comparten los mismos espacios e itinerarios. Estos encuentros, a menudo marcados por comportamientos diversos de atracción o de conflicto, revelan relaciones más directas y complejas entre el ser humano y el animal.
Vegetation restoration is one of the most effective means to reestablish wetlands. However, little is known about how plant communities expand and compete after wetland restoration because of the dearth of data from long-term monitoring. In this study, we monitored a restored Carex tussock wetland over a 15-year period, assessed the extent of Carex tussock expansion, analyzed the effects of interspecific competition and environmental factors on Carex tussock growth, and explored the driving mechanisms of the expansion of Carex tussock community. Our results demonstrate that the Carex tussock community continued its outward dispersal after restoration, with a total expansion area of 770 m2. The ecological characteristics and species diversity in the restoration area were higher than those in the expansion area. Additionally, both the density and biodiversity of Carex tussock in the restoration area decreased with the age of the restoration. Experiments indicated that competition and water level significantly influenced the growth of Carex tussock and Carex exhibited weaker competitiveness in a mixed constructure model. The structural equation model revealed that topography was the primary driver of Carex tussock expansion. The priority effect of Carex dispersal mitigated the impact of competition on expansion. This study offers new insights for future wetland restoration practices, particularly concerning Carex tussock ecosystems.
<p>Climate warming in the Arctic results in thawing permafrost and associated processes like thermokarst, especially in ice-rich permafrost regions. Since permafrost soils are one of the largest organic carbon reservoirs of the world, their thawing leads to the release of greenhouse gases due to increasing microbial activity with rising soil temperature, further exacerbating climate warming. To enhance the predictions of potential future impacts of permafrost thaw, a detailed assessment of changes in soil characteristics in response to thermokarst processes in permafrost landscapes is needed, which we investigated in this study in an Arctic coastal lowland. We analysed six sediment cores from the Arctic Coastal Plain of northern Alaska, each representing a different landscape feature along a gradient from upland to thermokarst lake and drained basin to thermokarst lagoon in various development stages. For the analysis, a multiproxy approach was used, including sedimentological (grain size, bulk density, ice content), biogeochemical (total organic carbon (TOC), TOC density (<span class="inline-formula">TOC<sub>vol</sub></span>), total nitrogen (TN), stable carbon isotopes (<span class="inline-formula"><i>δ</i><sup>13</sup>C</span>), TOC<span class="inline-formula"><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M3" display="inline" overflow="scroll" dspmath="mathml"><mo>/</mo></math><span><svg:svg xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="8pt" height="14pt" class="svg-formula" dspmath="mathimg" md5hash="e653eaf840568ee76bb20ba3bf368ae0"><svg:image xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="bg-22-2871-2025-ie00001.svg" width="8pt" height="14pt" src="bg-22-2871-2025-ie00001.png"/></svg:svg></span></span>TN ratio, mercury (Hg)), and lipid biomarker (<span class="inline-formula"><i>n</i></span>-alkanes, <span class="inline-formula"><i>n</i></span>-alkanols, and their ratios) parameters. We found that a semi-drained state of thermokarst lakes features the lowest OC content, and TOC and TN are generally higher in unfrozen deposits, hinting at a more intact state of organic matter. Indicated by the average chain length (ACL), <span class="inline-formula"><i>δ</i><sup>13</sup>C</span>, <span class="inline-formula"><i>P</i><sub>aq</sub></span>, and <span class="inline-formula"><i>P</i><sub>wax</sub></span>, we found a stronger influence of aquatic organic matter (OM) in the OM composition in the soils covered by water compared to those not covered by water. Moreover, the results of the <span class="inline-formula"><i>δ</i><sup>13</sup>C</span>, TOC<span class="inline-formula"><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M10" display="inline" overflow="scroll" dspmath="mathml"><mo>/</mo></math><span><svg:svg xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="8pt" height="14pt" class="svg-formula" dspmath="mathimg" md5hash="3af55808dad7e355d8e0b0b2a0272ce7"><svg:image xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="bg-22-2871-2025-ie00002.svg" width="8pt" height="14pt" src="bg-22-2871-2025-ie00002.png"/></svg:svg></span></span>TN ratio, and CPI indicate that the saline deposits contain stronger degraded OM than the deposits not influenced by saltwater. Additionally, we found positive correlations between the TOC and <span class="inline-formula">TOC<sub>vol</sub></span> and the Hg content in the deposits. The results indicate that thermokarst-influenced deposits tend to accumulate Hg during thawed periods and thus contain more Hg than the upland permafrost deposits that have not been impacted by lake formation. Our findings offer valuable insights into the dynamics of carbon storage and vulnerability to decomposition in coastal permafrost landscapes, reflecting the interplay of environmental factors, landform characteristics, and climate change impacts on Arctic permafrost environments.</p>
Gulnaz Kahar, Yakupjan Haxim, Xuechun Zhang
et al.
Chitinases are enzymes that catalyze the hydrolysis of chitin and play a significant biophysiological role in fungal growth, development, and pathogenesis. <i>Valsa mali</i> is a necrotrophic fungus that is a primary contributor to apple <i>Valsa</i> canker. Our study focused on the identification of chitinase gene families from <i>V. mali</i> and the analysis of their expression profiles during infection and nutritional growth. A phylogenetic analysis and conservation of catalytic domains were used to classify these genes into three classes, and their chromosome distribution was random. The qRT-PCR analysis identified five differentially expressed VmGH18 genes during infection and nutritional growth. GH18 chitinases use glutamate, whereas VmGH18-4 (VM1G_05900) and VmGH18-10 (VM1G_03597) use glutamine as the catalytic motif. To further test whether it can induce cell death in apple, the recombinant protein was produced in <i>E. coli</i>. It showed that the purified VmGH18-4 recombinant protein retained cell-death inducing activity, and it could also induce cell death in apple. But the enzyme activity shows that neither VmGH18-4 nor VmGH18-10 have chitinases enzyme activity. These results suggest that VmGH18-4 can elicit cell death in multiple plant species, while VmGH18-10 cannot.
Biologists all over the world use camera traps to monitor biodiversity and wildlife population density. The computer vision community has been making strides towards automating the species classification challenge in camera traps, but it has proven difficult to to apply models trained in one region to images collected in different geographic areas. In some cases, accuracy falls off catastrophically in new region, due to both changes in background and the presence of previously-unseen species. We propose a pipeline that takes advantage of a pre-trained general animal detector and a smaller set of labeled images to train a classification model that can efficiently achieve accurate results in a new region.
Starting from the relationship between urban planning and mobility management, TeMA has gradually expanded the view of the covered topics, always following a rigorous scientific in-depth analysis. This section of the Journal, Review Notes, is a continuous update about emerging topics concerning relationships among urban planning, mobility, and environment, thanks to a collection of short scientific papers written by young researchers. The Review Notes are made up of five parts. Each section examines a specific aspect of the broader information storage within the main interests of the TeMA Journal. In particular: the Town Planning International Rules and Legislation. Section aims at presenting the latest updates in the territorial and urban legislative sphere. The current challenges that today's cities have to face, from climate change to environmental and social ones, have led to urban planning being accompanied by the mobility system from a sustainable point of view. In turn, sustainable mobility constitutes that important link in the chain of development of cities. In this direction, the contribution explores in the first part how the scientific community is addressing the issue of sustainable mobility and what the new paradigms are, however, in the second part it focuses on the urban policies issued by the Italian government.
Transportation engineering, Urbanization. City and country
Elaine Cristina de Medeiros Pereira, Tânia Cristina Meira Garcia
As mudanças trazidas pelo COVI-19, fez com que a vivência diária nas instituições educacionais passasse por adequações instantâneas. Por esse motivo, escolas e professores tiveram que buscar introduzir em sua rotina, novos métodos e práticas de ensino que viessem a atender a essa realidade. Partindo disso, esse artigo versa sobre as experiências e reflexões adquiridas pela execução de uma proposta didática, planejada para o ensino remoto e ancorada nos procedimentos teórico-metodológicos do modelo híbrido, tendo como base, o conteúdo curricular da disciplina de Geografia para o 3º ano do Ensino Fundamental, Anos Iniciais. Portanto, organizar uma atividade didática com estes aspectos, possibilitou autonomia para o aluno em relação ao seu processo de aprendizagem e contribuiu para a reflexão do professor em relação a sua prática e a importância de se presar por um planejamento didático flexível, tendo como objetivo, o progresso individual de cada educando.
For the detection of overheated areas of electrical equipment, in order to accurately segment out the overheated areas and reduce the fault detection range, this paper proposes a new overheated area detection algorithm. Firstly, the Ostu algorithm is used to remove the background and segment the general area of the electrical equipment area; secondly, the active contour model is used to refine the edge of the target area to remove the redundant edge points; finally, FCM clustering algorithm is used to suppress over segmentation and accurately divide the overheated area. The experiment proves that the algorithm can accurately divide the overheated area, and has certain practical value.
Jorge Reyes-Jaramillo, Ángel Ordóñez-Castillo, Elvia Ruiz-Bustán
et al.
La presente investigación consiste en un estudio de caso con el objetivo de describir el comportamiento histórico de la estructura poblacional en las provincias de El Oro, Loja y Zamora Chinchipe, que conforman la Región Sur de Ecuador, durante el periodo 1962-2010 y comprender el proceso de envejecimiento. La investigación se basó en la información oficial de los censos de población y vivienda, y se emplearon las variables población general, sexo, área geográfica, ciclos de vida, índices de infancia, juventud, generacional de ancianos, de vejez y de sobreenvejecimiento poblacional. Para determinar el ritmo de crecimiento se calculó la tasa de crecimiento anual geométrica, y para el envejecimiento, las medias, medianas y cuartiles poblacionales. La población de la Región Sur del Ecuador envejeció en 7,6 años, con variaciones significativas a nivel de las provincias: en El Oro envejeció 8,1 años, en Loja, 7,6 años, y en Zamora Chinchipe, 4,5 años. El análisis por ciclos de vida muestra escenarios disímiles que sirven como contexto de los procesos de salud, enfermedad y mortalidad, a pesar que no aborda toda la dinámica poblacional. En general, se evidencia una transición demográfica compleja, asimétrica, en espacios político-geográficos heterogéneos, en donde se han generado históricamente procesos de reproducción biológica-social interrelacionados, pero al mismo tiempo, disímiles.
Stefan Ossyssek, Jürgen Geist, Petra Werner
et al.
Planktic diatom ecology in the mountain lakes of the northern European Alps has only been studied sparsely so far. To fill this knowledge gap, the driving parameters of planktic diatom assemblage composition in the euphotic zones of twenty lakes located between 955 and 2,060 m a.s.l. were assessed. The mean August water temperature, concentration of major ions, total phosphorous, and lake physical parameters explained significant amounts of variation within the diatom assemblages, as identified by redundancy analysis and consecutive backward selection. Cyclotella comensis was the most abundant taxon in these oligotrophic (<17 total phosphorus µg/L), phosphorous (P) limited, stratified study lakes, particularly when the calcium concentration was high (>35 mg/L). The results of generalized linear models and generalized additive models further revealed that August surface temperature, thermocline depth, and nitrate-N positively and significantly influenced C. comensis growth. These results shed light on the interplay between physical and chemical parameters as important drivers of C. comensis abundance in temperate mountain lakes. They may aid in the interpretation of past and the prediction of future climate-driven changes in planktic diatom composition in these lakes.
The peculiarities of the development of tourism at Yavoriv National Natural Park (YNNP) are highlighted, tourist and resource potential of the park is evaluated. YNNP – nature-protected, recreational, cultural and educational, scientific and research institution of national importance, established to preserve, reproduce and efficiently use of natural complexes and objects of Roztochchia which have special ecological, healthy, historical and cultural, scientific, educational and aesthetic value. The problems and perspectives of tourist development and recreation at this ecological territory. Yavoriv national park has significant recreational potential for the development of eco-educational, historical, cultural, and sacral tourism, and sports (equestrian, cycling and skiing) tourism, and at the surrounding areas – qualified tourism (hunting, fishing). The park already operates a number of walking and bus routes, ecological and cognitive trails fixed places for rest are equipped.
This contribution aims to produce a critical literature review of the recent collaborative works dealing with the notion of tourist experience (Sharpley and Stone, 2012; Filep and Pearce, 2013; Prebensen, Chen and Uysal, 2014; Decroly, 2015). Organized around four questions (what is not/does not produce experience in tourism?, what is the use of the tourist experience?, what is an unsuccessful tourist experience? and can forms of inauthentic experiences exist?), it particularly tries to highlight what these studies, stemming from different disciplines and traditions of research (management sciences, psychology, geography, anthropology, education sciences, etc.) have in common. It also intends to show that through the plurality of approaches emerge zones of friction and tension in the definition of this central notion of tourism.It thus shows that there are today three main approaches to this notion: in a first sense, the tourist experience can be understood as “everything that happens in a tourist situation”. In a second sense, the tourist experience can be conceived as a learning process of the different world and otherness. Finally, within the framework of the third approach, which is highly influenced by management sciences, it becomes a program for consumption for tourist action. This last meaning in particular highlights the fact that the tourist experience thus defined is perhaps less the experience of otherness than the experience of the consumption of another, or, to say it differently, the fact that the tourist experience is maybe ultimately only an experience of the frameworks of tourist consumption.
Much of the research done on environmental impacts by Amazonian indigenous peoples in the past focus on certain areas where archaeological remains are particularly abundant, such as the Amazon River estuary, the seasonally inundated floodplain of the lower Amazon, and various sites in the forest-savannah mosaic of the southern Amazon The environmental history of interfluvial upland areas has received less attention. This study reconstructed the history of human use of natural resources in an upland area of 1400 km2 surrounding the indigenous Kichwa community of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon, based on oral history elicited from local elders as well as historical source documents and some modern scientific studies. Although data is scarce, one can conclude that the impacts of humans on the environment have varied in time and space in quite intricate ways. Hunting has affected, and continues affecting, basically the whole study area, but it is now more concentrated in space than what it has probably ever been before. Also forest clearing has become more concentrated in space but, in addition, it has gone from affecting only hilltops forests to affecting alluvial plains as well as hilltops and, lately, also the slopes of the hills.