Editorial: Geography challenged

The low enrolment and poor academic achievement of female students in Geography compared to their male counterparts in secondary schools of Ganye Educational Zone necessitated this study. Studies have it that the instructional strategies adopted by Geography teachers in teaching could interact with gender to influence students’ academic achievement. To this end, the study investigated the Effect of Gender on Senior Secondary School Students’ Academic Achievement in Geography when Mastery Learning Strategy and Conventional Method are used for instruction. The quasi-experimental non-randomized pre-test, post-test control group design was used. The study also employed the multi-stage random sampling technique at four levels to select 207 (120 Male and 87 Female) senior secondary school two (SS II) students offering Geography from six intact classes in six co-educational secondary schools in Ganye Educational Zone in Nigeria. A 40-item Geography Achievement Test (GAT) constructed by the researcher and validated by experts in Geography education was used to obtain data. After pilot testing the instrument using 89 students from two intact classes, the data obtained was analyzed using Pearson product moment correlation coefficient statistic. A reliability index of 0.78 was obtained. Data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics of Mean, independent t-Test and Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA). The study revealed that Female students exposed to learning Geography through Mastery Learning Strategy performed better than their Male counterparts. A significant interaction effect of treatment and gender on students’ achievement in Geography was also observed. It was recommended that Geography teachers should re-assess their classroom instructional strategies used in teaching and adopt that which will give the students equal opportunities to excel in Geography. Article visualizations:

For most of the nineteenth century in the United States, a young learner’s first exposure to what we now call social studies came through the field of geography. Geography was—according to United States Commissioner of Education William Torrey Harris (1889–1906)—the most important subject after reading, writing, and mathematics. He lauded the way it gave students a “practical, real knowledge which will be useful later in life.”1 This notion of practicality, coupled with the relative availability of pedaogical resources for teaching geography, made the subject more common-place in nineteenth-century grammar schools than history was.2 Moreover, suggestions from the Committee of Ten’s Geography Conference in 1894 prompted educators to conceptualize the subject as a broader field than just physical geography; the report suggested that elementary geography include “astronomy, meteorology, zoology, botany, history, commerce, governments, races, religions, etc.”3 Called “home geography” in the primary grades, this curriculum emphasized the use of resources in the local community to teach about the social world, in order to provide a foundation for future scholastic work in history, geography, and the then fledgling field of anthropology.4 “Social units,” focused on subjects like communication, industry, and societal roles, held equal importance with lessons concerning physical geography.5

As more data are produced by location sensors, mobile devices, and online participatory processes, the field of GIScience has grappled with issues of information quality, context, and appropriate analytical approaches for data with heterogeneous and/or unknown provenance. Data quality has often been viewed through a bifurcated lens of experts and amateurs, but consideration of what the nature of geographical expertise is reveals a much more more nuanced situation. We consider how adapting frameworks from the field of studies of experience and expertise may provide a conceptual basis and methodological framework for evaluating the quality of geographic information. For contributed geographic information, quality is typically derived from a data user’s trust in and/or perception of the reputation of the data producer. Trust and reputation of producers of geographic information has typically been derived from the presence or absence of professional qualifications and training. However this framework applies exclusively to ‘crisp’ notions of data quality, and has limited utility for more subjective contributions associated with volunteered geographic information which may provide a rich source of geographic information for many applications. We hypothesize that a conceptual framework for geographical expertise may be used as the basis for assessing information quality in both formal and informal sources of geospatial data. Two case studies are used to highlight the new concepts of geographical expertise introduced in the paper.

With the development of search engines (e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.), people is ambitiously expecting higher quality and improvements of current technologies. Bringing human intelligence features to these tools, like the ability to find implicit information through semantics, is one of the must prominent research lines in Computer Science. Information semantics is a very wide concept, as wide as the human capability to interpret, in particular, the analysis of geographical semantics gives the possibility to associate information with a place. It is estimated that more than 70\% of all information in the world has some kind of geographic features \cite{Jones04}. In 2012, Ed Parsons, a GeoSpatial Technologist from Google, reported that between 30\% and 40\% of the user queries at Google search engine contain geographic references \cite{Parsons12}. This thesis addresses the field of geographic information extraction and retrieval in unstructured texts. This process includes the identification of spatial features in textual documents, the data indexing, the manipulation of the relevance of the identified geographic entities and the multi-criteria retrieval according to the thematic and geographic information. The main contributions of this work include a custom geographic knowledge base, built from the combination of GeoNames and WordNet; a Natural Language Processing and knowledge based heuristics for Toponym Recognition and Toponym Disambiguation; and a geographic relevance weighting model that supports non-spatial indexing and simple ranking combination approaches. The validity of each one of these components is supported by practical experiments that show their effectiveness in different scenarios and their alignment with state of the art solutions. In addition, it also constitutes a main contribution of this work GEIR, a general purpose GIR framework that includes the implementations of the above described components and brings the possibility of implementing new ones and test their performance within an end to end GIR system.

The vulnerability of microhylid frogs, Cophixalus spp., to climate change in the Australian Wet Tropics

Starting from the premise that a curriculum must be about knowledge, this article notes the marginalisation of disciplinary knowledge in the Anglo-American school curriculum in recent decades and how contemporary approaches to knowledge (constructivism, instrumentalism and neo-conservatism) are deficient some respect. Instead, the theory of social realism is proposed as a better way to understand the significance of disciplinary knowledge to the education of children and how it can be re-contextualised in the school curriculum. Social realism takes a sociological and epistemological approach to knowledge, moving beyond the positivist/constructivist divide. Geography’s epistemology is examined as comprising systematic geography (propositional knowledge), regional/place-based geography (contextual knowledge) and methods (procedural knowledge), and the relations between each explored. Inducting students into geography depends upon a foundational understanding of all three types of knowledge. Therefore, a robust school curriculum must be constructed with all three knowledge types such that students can enter into its conceptual framework and ways of thinking. Finally, the use of knowledge types in geography curriculum and assessment documents in the UK is discussed.

Objective Through the application of geographic information system in Sanjiangyuan Region to observe the epidemic trend of brucellosis and do prevention and control study. Methods Brucellosis epidemiological investigation data of 9 counties and Tanggula Town from 2011 to 2013 from Qinghai Institute for Endemic Diseases Prevention and Control were collected. The information of Brucella strains separated from people, animals and wild animals from 1958 to 2013 in Sanjiangyuan Region were collected, too. Geographical information technology software was applied to build database information system for brucellosis and to retrieve the time and spatial distribution. Results A total of 6 310 people from 2011 to 2013 were investigated, patients with brucellosis were 33, and prevalence was 0.52%. Twenty-seven strains were separated which distributed in 10 counties of Sanjiangyuan Region. These strains contained 3 species (22 Brucella melitensis strains, 4 Brucella abortus strains and 1 Brucella suis strains). Database for brucellosis was successfully built which was used to query brucellosis' time and spatial distribution of this area and other information such as infection and prevalence. Conclusion Through the application of geographic information system, the informationization degree of brucellosis prevention and control has been improved, so as to formulate effective prevention and treatment measures. Key words: Brucellosis; Preventive medicine; Geographic information system

This research develops from a set of basic geographical questions about the outbreak of Covid-19 out of China in Europe The questions dealt with why and why with such strength Italy has been seriously hit, one of the most important cases in terms of death toll out of Hubei Province and mainland China, in the world, making the country a worldwide study case for epidemic concentration and diffusion Questions were also related to geographical similarities among the areas hit, and particularly the Po Valley region and Wuhan metropolitan region in Hubei province, and also related to why such a divide of the virus spreading was identified in Italy between Northern and Central and Southern regions and provinces In order to try to give an answer these questions, authors realized a vast and articulated database of indicators at provincial level in Italy, performing several geographical analyses - ecological approach - based on Spatial autocorrelation and Geographical Weighted Regression, coming to the conclusion that aspects such as land take, pollution can seriously influence the phenomenon and justify a pattern as that observable in Italy The analyses and observation of the phenomenon also suggests that policies based on urban regeneration, sustainable mobility, green infrastructures, ecosystem services can create a more sustainable scenario able to support the quality of public health

Land use and urban development surveys involve the interpretation of a large volume of data coming from satellite images processing as well as from remote sensors networks. In order to facilitate this interpretation, the development of a multipurpose Intelligent Data Analysis (IDA) framework for supporting geographical data perception is proposed here. The framework makes use of semantic technologies and relies on a novel knowledge model composed by a foundational ontology (DOLCE Ultra-Lite, also called DUL), three core reference ontologies (the Temporal Abstraction Ontology or TAO, the Semantic Sensor Network ontology or SSN and the SWRL Temporal Ontology or SWRLTO) and two specific domain ontologies (the Urban Ontology or URO and the Geographic Data ontology or GeoD, developed by our team). They play different and well specific roles in the whole process of perception. The paper shows how to apply SSN to manage measurements of geographical regions provided by satellite images processing software. In a similar way, TAO has been extended to deal with the abstractions resulting from geographical data interpretation. An example shows a SWRL based implementation of a perception process that gradually abstracts geographical features and objects.

This study investigated the relationship between variety of learning resources and students’ academic performance. The objective of the study was to assess the influence that access to a variety of learning resources has on students’ academic performance in geography in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) in public secondary schools in Makueni County. The study was guided by the Classroom Instruction Theory using the descriptive survey design. Both stratified and simple random sampling methods were applied in drawing a sample. Data was collected from 422 respondents who included 29 principals, 30 teachers of geography and 363 Form Three students. Data was collected using questionnaires and an observation checklist. Questionnaires were used to collect data from principals, teachers and students. The observation checklist was used in observing geography lessons. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse collected data and included means frequencies, cross-tabulations, percentages, correlation and regression analysis. Qualitative data analysis was done using a mixed method of case by case analysis as well as cross case analysis. The findings of the study showed that there was a correlation between variety of learning resources and performance in geography at 0.196. The null hypothesis on variety was rejected. The study therefore concluded that access to variety of learning resources promoted academic performance in geography in KCSE in public secondary schools in Makueni County. It was recommended that teachers should be encouraged to use a variety of learning resources in the teaching process in Makueni County. Article visualizations:

Landscape features, including vegetation type, elevation, and topography, can influence the dispersal and distribution of animals, and lead to variation in spatial population genetic structure. According to the isolation-by-distance (IBD) model, the genetic distances among populations can be positively correlated with geographic distances. Recently, researchers have started to use the least-cost-path distance instead of Euclidean distance in examining IBD because of the unrealistic meaning of the latter to organisms. In this thesis, I studied the influences of landscape features on population genetic structure of two rodent species, the Taiwan field vole (Microtus kikuchii) and the Formosan field mouse (Apodemus semotus Thomas) in central Taiwan. Through amplifying the D-loop sequence in mtDNA from animal tissues from 6~8 populations of each species, I computed the genetic distance among populations, the FST value. I calculated the geographic distances under three models: Euclidean distance and two least-cost-path distances based on topography or vegetation type, using geographic information system (GIS). I then analyzed the correlation between genetic distance and the geographic distances conducted from the three models. The results showed that there was no population genetic structure among Apodemus semotus, yet a strong genetic structure was present among Microtus kikuchii populations, and significantly positively correlated with vegetation type.

About the book: Geography and Revolution examines the ways that place and space matter in a variety of revolutionary situations. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers assemble a set of essays that are themselves revolutionary in uncovering not only the geography of revolutions but the role of geography in revolutions.

This study was conducted to investigate for the first time the genetic variability among Hungarian isolates of P. teres f. teres, the causal agent of the net form of net blotch of barley. A total of 68 monoconidial isolates were tested for mating type (MAT) and RAPD profiles using a MAT-specific PCR assay and 30 random decamer primers, respectively. Isolates were derived from symptomatic leaves of barley sampled in commercial fields and experimental plots of four geographical regions from 2006-2010. In total, 29 MAT1 and 39 MAT2 cultures were identified. Both mating types were found on different spatial scales, i.e. the same leaf, the same field or geographical region, and across several years, indicating the potential for sexual reproduction. Of the 188 distinct RAPD bands 171 were polymorphic. All isolates exhibited unique RAPD patterns. UPGMA clustering revealed four main isolate groups, but no general correlation between clusters and mating type or geographical origin of the isolates was detected. Nei's gene diversity analysis showed that genetic diversity within sampling units accounted for most of the total genetic diversity, while that between sampling units represented a small proportion of the total diversity. Genetic differentiation was not observed between MAT1 and MAT2 isolates. Although a low level of allelic differentiation was obtained according to field type (commercial vs. experimental) and geographical origin of the isolates, both UPGMA clustering of multilocus RAPD haplotypes and Nei's gene diversity analysis supported the view that seasonal changes had the greatest effect on the genetic divergence of isolates.

Google Earth, which is one of the newest tools of geographic information available on the Worldwide Web, has a strikingly great potential in providing students the opportunity to explore countries around the world. This article is about a class assignment designed to allow students to explore a European country with the help of the Google Earth Program. The assignment is based on asking university students taking a class in European geography to create a travel journal, following the instructions devised for this purpose by the researcher. The assignment entails instructing students to use Google Earth to do research along a particular itinerary in a European country, then turning this into a travel story. Eighty-four students at Balikesir University, Necatibey Faculty of Education, Department of Social Sciences Teaching participated in the project. The researcher developed a travel journal assessment scale to be used in interpreting the travel stories created by the students. The scale indicated that the characteristics of human geography along the routes were better described (70.6% students described these on an adequate level) than physical geographic characteristics (26.2% described them on an adequate level). In addition, a focus group discussion was held with the students in order to establish how Google Earth facilitated or hindered their efforts in creating a travel journal. The discussions showed that Google Earth provided a significant resource in the creation of a travel story but that some problems were experienced either due to the content of the program itself or because of student deficiencies in geographic knowledge, skills and perspective. Key words: Geography education, Google earth, European geography, travel journal.

Comparison of the Hydro-Climatological Characteristics for the Extra-Ordinary Flood Induced by Tropical Cyclone in the Selected River Basins