Context and background
A typical character of land tenure or property systems in sub-Saharan Africa is that the systems exclude women (implicitly and explicitly) (Chigbu, 2019). Over the past twenty years, several African countries have done some efforts towards improving the state of women’s land rights as a means to achieve gender equality in land ownership. The problem is that, there is no research paper that has analyzed these efforts at sub-regional levels (North, Central, West, East and Southern Africa), by providing data on these sub-regional efforts (best practices and successful interventions) jointly made to achieve gender equality in land ownership.
Objective and research questions:
This paper seeks to provide analysis and understanding on how these sub-regional efforts can be used as triggers to pave the way for the adoption of a gender-focused continental guidelines on women’s land rights in Africa. Our research is centered around the following two joint questions: What are the efforts done at sub-regional levels to strengthen women’s land rights in Africa and what mechanisms can be put in place to pave the way for the adoption of a gender-focused continental guideline?
Methodology:
Using case studies and best practices from the five African sub-regions, our research adopts an approach that collected and analyzed data from existing policy documents, laws, academic papers, and other materials through a desk review on women's land rights and land tenure security. In this paper, we discuss the current state, gaps, challenges and opportunities in strengthening women's land rights in North, Central, West, East and Southern Africa, by highlighting the main best practices which can pave the way for a future without gender inequalities in land ownership. This review was conducted from January to September 2024.
Results:
The results obtained from my analysis are: the mechanisms for implementing women’s tenure security; the tools for codifying women’s land tenure; and the monitoring progress for strengthening women’s land rights in Africa. These mechanisms, tools and monitoring processes can serve as a trail (pathway) to the design and adoption gender-focused continental guidelines on women's land rights in Africa. These mechanisms are the main recommendations of my research work. Therefore, if adopted and enforced at the continental level by the African Union, these mechanisms, tools and monitoring processes can guaranty an equal ownership to land between men and women in Africa.
W pracy omówiono związki między intensywnością północnoatlantyckiej cyrkulacji termohalinowej (NA THC), charakteryzowanej przez wskaźnik DG3L, i liczbą dni z występowaniem ekstremalnie wysokiej temperatury powietrza nad Polską w latach 1951–2020. Za miarę warunków ekstremalnych przyjęto liczbę dni w roku z temperaturą maksymalną w ciągu doby ≥25°C (dni gorące; D5DG) i ≥30°C (dni upalne; D5DU) oraz liczbę dni z temperaturą średnią dobową ≥25°C (D5D25). Stwierdzono wysoce istotne zależności między zmiennością wskaźnika DG3L a D5DG, D5DU i D5D25, wskazujące, że im bardziej intensywna jest NA THC, tym więcej w roku występuje dni ekstremalnie ciepłych. Długookresowa zmienność liczby dni ekstremalnie ciepłych wyraźnie nawiązuje do zmienności warunków makrocyrkulacyjnych – epok cyrkulacyjnych według klasyfikacji Wangengejma-Girsa. Zwiększona w ciągu roku liczba dni ekstremalnie ciepłych jest powiązana ze wzrostem ponad średnią wieloletnią strefowego makrotypu W. Zmienność NA THC stanowi przyczynę zmian zasobów ciepła w wodach Atlantyku Północnego, co wpływa na kształtowanie się południkowych gradientów termicznych w środkowej troposferze. Wraz ze wzrostem NA THC gradienty te rosną. W wyniku wzrostu tych gradientów dochodzi w atlantycko-eurazjatyckim sektorze cyrkulacyjnym do wzrostu frekwencji fal długich o liczbie falowej 4 (makrotyp W) i spadku frekwencji fal o liczbie falowej 5 (makrotypy E i C; cyrkulacja południkowa). Rezultatem tego jest wzrost wysokości geopotencjału (h500) nad zachodnią i środkową Europą, na południe od 55°N. Nad tym obszarem dochodzi do wzrostu ciśnienia na poziomie morza, co w skali synoptycznej powoduje wzrost częstości występowania pogód antycyklonalnych, bez chmur warstwowych (As, Ns i St; frontalnych), silnego wzrostu usłonecznienia i redukcji opadów. W strukturze strumieni ciepła z powierzchni lądowych do atmosfery spada udział strumieni ciepła parowania, a rośnie udział strumieni ciepła jawnego, powodując silny wzrost temperatury powietrza. Silny trend wzrostowy, jaki zaznacza się w przebiegu wskaźnika DG3L po roku 1988, znajduje swoje odzwierciedlenie w rosnącej od tego momentu liczbie dni ekstremalnie ciepłych nad Polską.
The aim of the article is to prepare a model for making available metadata and digital objects of the new Globe Virtual Collection for the Map Collection of the Faculty of Science of Charles University. The globes are special cartographic documents; therefore, they are also described in a special way. The article deals with the digitization, visualization and accessibility of an old globe by Josef Jüttner from 1839, which comes from the depository of one of the most important central European collections. A simple model for a new virtual processing of the globe collection at Charles University is presented. SfM-MVS photogrammetry was chosen for digitization of the globe. The basic elements of the copperplate were set as basic parameters for image acquisition. Contrast, density, black line, line, dash and dot patterns and their complex use were observed for a good graphic design of the globe. Other parameters included a closer determination of the users for whom the resulting product is intended, as well as the profile of the users’ behavior on the site so far. New metadata were extracted from the bibliographic description. The virtual 3D globe was integrated into the database using the Cesium JavaScript library. Metadata and a 3D model of the globe were linked together and made available to the general public on the Globe page of the Map Collection of the Faculty of Science of Charles University. A comparison of web browsers was performed focusing on the loading time of the 3D model on the website. New graphic elements were identified with the new processing. It was possible to read the factual information written on the globe. Different possibilities and limitations of metadata description, photogrammetric methods and web presentation are described. This good practice can be applied by other virtual map collections.
The topicality of the topic is due to significant changes in the state of the components of the environment, namely the soil cover, and the use of agricultural land under the influence of the consequences of military operations in 2022-2023.
There is a need to assess the scale of changes in the environment, primarily the soil cover, as the most disturbed as a result of hostilities, under the influence of these factors, to determine their respective scales, spatial localization and ecological and legal consequences.
The main negative factors that lead to damage to agricultural land include (according to Kondratenko A.F. 2022): 1. Driving through the territory of heavy equipment (tanks and other types of tracked equipment, which leads to soil compaction and degradation); 2. The use of anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, which leads to changes in landscapes, relief and soil degradation; 3. Shelling and bombing of the territory, which leads to the formation of craters (funnels) and mixing of soil horizons. Sinkholes in places where shells fall are not only a factor of landscape damage and destruction of vegetation, but also a factor of soil pollution: they leave in the soil a significant amount of metal, sulfur and sulfur compounds, heavy metals, ammonia, phosphorus, coal dust, sulfuric acid and sulfate compounds, formaldehydes, lead, mercury; 4. Construction of trenches and other protective shelters for military personnel and equipment (soil disturbance and degradation); 5. Fires in natural areas and agricultural fields. As a result, the fertile soil layer burns out, dehydration and "sterilization" occurs - both pathogenic microorganisms and useful biota die, nutrients are lost. In our opinion, this classification generally covers well the spectrum of factors affecting the soil cover of military operations. At the same time, this classification is incomplete and does not cover some common cases, for example, the creation of systems of defensive structures leads to the violation of soil horizons and changes in the structure of the soil, the spread of erosion (Makarenko N. A., et al., 2022). Also, since it was developed for the conditions of military operations in Donetsk region as of 2014-2017, it needs to be supplemented and clarified, for example, it is worth adding the concepts of ecocide and destruction of infrastructure.
The use of indicators of soil condition, monitoring of the development of degradation processes based on operational data and the possibility of using geoportals, dashboards and other means of public access to open data plays a particularly important role in the context of the impact of the consequences of military actions on the soil cover, prospects for agricultural production and, in general, on the quality of life.
Key words: agricultural lands, soil cover, soil degradation, dynamics of land use, military operations.
Changes in ice shelf dynamics significantly impact the discharge rate of grounded ice, sea ice formation, and marine environments. In particular, changes of a sub-shelf pinning point induce complex dynamics of an ice shelf. In this study, we investigated decadal changes (2010–2020) in the area, ice velocity, and grounding line position of Campbell Glacier Tongue (CGT) in East Antarctica, which has an ice pinning point at the southwestern end, and analyzed the effect of the pinning conditions on the dynamics of CGT. Panchromatic band images of Landsat-7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus and Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager, COSMO-SkyMed X-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and Sentinel-1 C-band SAR datasets were employed. The surface area of CGT digitized from the optical and SAR imagery decreased by 8% in the last decade, during which four ice calving events that caused icebergs with an area range of 3.8–5.4 km2. The largest calving at the ice pinning point occurred in March 2014, which created an iceberg with 4 km2. The ice velocity of CGT was measured via the normalized cross-correlation-based image matching of the Landsat panchromatic images. The ice velocity along the flow direction and its anomaly of CGT hardly changed in the hinge zone from 2011 to 2020. The ice velocity increased by ~7% and the flow direction steered abruptly ~7° to the east in the freely floating zone after the 2014 calving at the ice pinning point. Considering the retreat of the local grounding line at the pinning point analyzed by COSMO-SkyMed double-differential interferometric SAR, the advancing glacier tongue came in contact with the sloping eastern flank of the locally elevated seabed at the pinning point after the calving, and the ice-bed contact area decreased, causing a sudden acceleration and eastward rotation of ice flow. It is expected that continuous calving at the ice pinning point of CGT may lead to an abrupt changes in glacier tongue dynamics again, and continuous monitoring is necessary.
The COVID-19 (coronavirus) disease has affected over 100 countries in a matter of weeks. The way humans live and work on planet Earth has changed profoundly over the last months. Many lives and livelihoods have been lost. Ways of working, shopping, and social interactions are all vastly different for most of us. We do not know when the current crisis will end, or how far we will “return” to the way things were before the pandemic. The world is experiencing one of the most transformative moments of the last 100 years. The social, economic, and political influences of the COVID-19 crisis have already been hugely momentous, we do not utterly understand it. Looking ahead, we have inevitably had to make important public health, economic, governance, and ecological decisions with less information than usual and to reverse recently adopted policies, which can lead to an era of disruptive transformations to sustainability. During these historic times, we must understand the hidden reality of the earth system and attempt to transform our needs so that we all have a sustained future on our planet.
<p>English-speaking hegemony shapes the geography of legitimate knowledge production in our discipline, pushing geographies in other languages and traditions to the periphery. The overall phenomenon has overshadowed these peripheries' diversity and what is at stake within them. I argue that continental European geographies occupy a specific position – they have been provincialized rather than peripheralized. This provincialization should not be lamented. Given our colonial past and Northern privilege, we should instead embrace this provincialization as long overdue and a moral imperative. I subsequently explore a few provincialization-embracing postures – all with merit, none unproblematic – that we can adopt for fieldwork and writing. I then propose practical steps that continental European geographies can take toward a more ethical and cosmopolitan praxis.</p>
Human ecology. Anthropogeography, Geography (General)
Florian Hruby, Rainer Ressl, Genghis de la Borbolla del Valle
Virtual reality (VR) is a frequently emphasized issue on the Digital Earth (DE) agenda. While current DE research is more engaged in the technical aspects of VR applications, this paper focuses on what is possible with immersive virtual environments (IVE) from the user's perspective. After a brief discussion of spatial presence and embodiment in the context of IVE, both concepts will be merged into a geovisualization immersion pipeline (GIP) as a framework with which to systematically link technical and cognitive aspects of IVE. We will then analyze the general criteria that must be met by IVE in order to facilitate the experience of spatial presence. Adapting these criteria to the special requirements of geospatial data, a definition of geovisualization immersive virtual environments (GeoIVE) is formulated. Finally, the theoretical considerations of this paper are set into practice, using a GeoIVE of a coral reef ecosystem as an example. As we shall see, while GIS do not provide data models or data compatibility for direct visualization of GeoIVE on VR output devices, game engines can serve as middleware to fill this gap.
Junia Lucio de Castro Borges, Ana Clara Mourão Moura, Priscila Lisboa De Paula
et al.
The use of Social Media Geographic Information in a planning process would improve our knowledge about local values, urban and landscape development and could support decision-making. This paper presents a case study of an environmental disaster that happened recently in one of the most important social economic areas in Brazil to understand how this type of information could be used as a systematized planning input. The authors seek to understand if it is possible to use VGI and SMGI (Volunteered Geographic Information and Social Media Geographic Information) to capture social values, such as genius loci (the essence of the place)and expectations, the values that should be considered in a disaster recovery plan. To do that, we tested an active VGI platform and passive SMGI posts' analysis. Our best results so far relied on a proposal for image analysis from Instagram posts to separate them in the themes of "everyday life", "landscape" and "memes". Presenting a logic and a tool to do this classification automatically, we provide a first step to be used in big-data, as they are characterized by a big amount of data, and we can develop a first analysis in the main pictures posted by people from that area. It is a contribution to use social media to measure values and collective expectations from a place.
The dynamic relationships between land use change and its driving forces vary spatially and can be identified by geographically weighted regression (GWR). We present a novel cellular automata (GWR-CA) model that incorporates GWR-derived spatially varying relationships to simulate land use change. Our GWR-CA model is characterized by spatially nonstationary transition rules that fully address local interactions in land use change. More importantly, each driving factor in our GWR model contains effects that both promote and resist land use change. We applied GWR-CA to simulate rapid land use change in Suzhou City on the Yangtze River Delta from 2000 to 2015. The GWR coefficients were visualized to highlight their spatial patterns and local variation, which are closely associated with their effects on land use change. The transition rules indicate low land conversion potential in the city’s center and outer suburbs, but higher land conversion potential in the inner near suburbs along the belt expressway. Residual statistics show that GWR fits the input data better than logistic regression (LR). Compared with an LR-based CA model, GWR-CA improves overall accuracy by 4.1% and captures 5.5% more urban growth, suggesting that GWR-CA may be superior in modeling land use change. Our results demonstrate that the GWR-CA model is effective in capturing spatially varying land transition rules to produce more realistic results, and is suitable for simulating land use change and urban expansion in rapidly urbanizing regions.
Nas últimas décadas, o crescimento da urbanização vem provocando grandes transformações nos aspectos sociais, econômicos e morfológicos nas áreas costeiras. As praias urbanas de Boa Viagem e Pina (Recife-PE) e a praia de Piedade (Jaboatão dos Guararapes-PE) têm apresentado estes aspectos, onde se observa vulnerabilidade costeira à erosão. O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar o deslocamento espacial e temporal da linha de costa. Para isto modelouse a massa de dados obtida do método de levantamento geodésico relativo cinemático, o qual possibilita o monitoramento da linha de costa, para os anos de 2007, 2009, 2010 e 2012. Foi empregado o método de transectos, o qual é necessário adotar uma linha de costa como base, 2007. E foi dividida a área de estudo em 6 setores para que se pudesse analisar o deslocamento médio da linha de costa. Os setores 1 e 5 apresentam acreção em todos os períodos analisados (2007-2009, 2007-2010, 2007-2012). O setor 2 apresentou erosão em todos os períodos analisados. Os setores 3 e 6 nos períodos de 2007-2009 e 2007-2010, apresentaram erosão, enquanto de 2007-2012 apresentaram tendência a acreção. Destacase que no setor 4 não se realizou o cálculo devido ser a área que apresenta enrocamento. Esse estudo tende a contribuir para análise do comportamento temporal nos projetos de tomadas de decisões em ambientes costeiros.
Some planning restrictions affecting mainly the altitude component
of the buildings. In the context of Comune di Bergamo, using GIS spatial analyst tools and accurate elevation data, were studied innovative methods of analysis in the field of landscape protection and air navigation obstacles.
Influenza viruses have been responsible for large losses of lives around the world and continue to present a great public health challenge. Antigenic characterization based on hemagglutination inhibition (HI) assay is one of the routine procedures for influenza vaccine strain selection. However, HI assay is only a crude experiment reflecting the antigenic correlations among testing antigens (viruses) and reference antisera (antibodies). Moreover, antigenic characterization is usually based on more than one HI dataset. The combination of multiple datasets results in an incomplete HI matrix with many unobserved entries. This paper proposes a new computational framework for constructing an influenza antigenic cartography from this incomplete matrix, which we refer to as Matrix Completion-Multidimensional Scaling (MC-MDS). In this approach, we first reconstruct the HI matrices with viruses and antibodies using low-rank matrix completion, and then generate the two-dimensional antigenic cartography using multidimensional scaling. Moreover, for influenza HI tables with herd immunity effect (such as those from Human influenza viruses), we propose a temporal model to reduce the inherent temporal bias of HI tables caused by herd immunity. By applying our method in HI datasets containing H3N2 influenza A viruses isolated from 1968 to 2003, we identified eleven clusters of antigenic variants, representing all major antigenic drift events in these 36 years. Our results showed that both the completed HI matrix and the antigenic cartography obtained via MC-MDS are useful in identifying influenza antigenic variants and thus can be used to facilitate influenza vaccine strain selection. The webserver is available at http://sysbio.cvm.msstate.edu/AntigenMap.