Environmental Management and Cultural Geography Lightning Talks

Session topics

• Scaling Up Drone-Based 3D Mapping for Campus Facility Management
• Coastal Global Fatal Landslides and Cliff Failures
• Land Use Regression Modeling to Assess Impacts of Warehouse Intensification on Neighborhood Exposure in Southern California’s Inland Empire
• Interactively Communicating the History and Present Legacy of Freeway Siting in California
• Linguistic Landscapes through Mapping: Raising Awareness about Multilingual Communities

Zoom Link

Details

Scaling Up Drone-Based 3D Mapping for Campus Facility Management

Jingyi Huang (UC San Diego); Chi Kiu (Leo) Leung (UC San Diego)

  This lightning talk continues our work on using drones to enhance campus facility management. Since last year’s presentation, the project has expanded from mapping a small neighborhood to developing a detailed 3D model of the entire UC San Diego La Jolla campus. Utilizing drone-based photogrammetry with Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) positioning, we achieved high spatial accuracy across extensive areas. Ground Control Points (GCPs) collected with Bad Elf and FieldMaps ensured precision and consistency within a unified coordinate system. Drone imagery and GCP data were processed through ArcGIS SiteScan for geotagging and 3D mesh generation, with outputs integrated into the campus GIS database. The resulting 3D campus model supports virtual fieldwork, site analysis, and data-driven decision-making, offering new tools for planning, management, and research. The project remains under active development to further improve performance, usability, and integration with other campus systems.

Coastal Global Fatal Landslides and Cliff Failures

Malia Reiss (UC San Diego)

  Cliffs shape the world’s coastlines, providing areas of beauty, habitat, scientific discovery, and recreation. However, as erosional features, seacliffs can also pose fatal hazards. This paper presents and analyzes fatal landslides along the global coast, recorded in public databases and written media articles that were assembled into a new comprehensive database. In total, the coastal landslide fatality database contains reports showing that 294 people have been killed across 115 recorded fatal coastal landslide events from 1927 - 2024, with most fatalities from direct rockfall onto victims walking along beaches. Most fatalities occurred in temperate regions, with two seasonal peaks: one in wet and one in dry seasons. We suggest that this bimodal peak is from (a) elevated rainfall causing reduced cliff stability, leading to more failures in wet seasons and (b) increased summer tourism and local recreational beach activity in dry seasons, exposing more people to seacliff failure hazards. These observed peaks in coastal cliff-related fatalities during periods of elevated rainfall and during the peak beach tourism season can help inform beach hazard management decisions.

Land Use Regression Modeling to Assess Impacts of Warehouse Intensification on Neighborhood Exposure in Southern California’s Inland Empire

Azure Fisher (UC Riverside)

  The Inland Empire, California (IE) faces rapid land use change from farmland to warehousing, and downwind neighborhoods may face changes in near-source pollution exposures of criteria pollutants. The rise of e-commerce caused Los Angeles to meet capacity for warehouse availability, leading to warehouse intensification and sprawl in the IE in the new millennium. This intensification further accelerated after the establishment of the 2013 Amazon mega-warehouse on former farmland. This study utilizes satellite column data (TROPOMI) and dispersion modeling (AERMOD) to assess criteria pollutant exposure in a neighborhood downwind of former farmland that has been transitioned into a warehouse cluster. Scenarios will assess periods when farmland dominated and when warehouse intensification persists. Area-specific transportation emission rates are developed to inform AERMOD, while agricultural emission rates are retrieved from other studies. A GAM-based land use regression that is informed by satellite data and AERMOD output as independent variables allows for hybrid modeling. This hybrid model allows modeled exposure assessment to consider multiple input variables such as land use, meteorology, terrain, and emission rates. Results intend to assess the impact of criteria pollutant exposure from upwind former farmland and a recently formed warehouse cluster during a period of dramatic land use change in a suburban IE neighborhood.

Interactively Communicating the History and Present Legacy of Freeway Siting in California

Jacob Wasserman (UC Los Angeles); Jordan Grimaldi (UC Los Angeles)

  Historically, disadvantaged communities have been disproportionately affected by highway planning and freeway siting. This project uses empirical research to not only understand but also quantify and describe in detail the historical impacts of freeways on communities of color in California.

  This translational project communicates the findings of a series of case studies on the history of freeway routing in communities of color in California in innovative ways, making the historical research more relevant to policymakers, more visible to community members, and more accessible to the public.

  Our research team has created a number of storymaps that weave together audiovisual and textual elements to tell the story of freeway siting, construction, and legacy in Pasadena, Stockton, Pacoima, Fresno, and Colton.

  The construction of freeways was a contributing mechanism to the perpetuation of racial inequality, weakening social institutions, disrupting local economies, and physically dividing neighborhoods. However, outcomes varied across locations. In Pasadena and Pacoima, decision-makers chose routes that displaced a greater share of households of color than proposed alternatives. Stockton underwent spatial restructuring, and xenophobia and racism placed Stockton’s Chinatown, Japantown, and Little Manila in the path of freeway construction and “slum clearance.” In South Colton, a freeway was ultimately not built through its community of color, though largely for reasons of construction costs. West Fresno did face consequences from freeway development but was also unique in its diversity of residents pre-freeway. Freeway development contributed to transforming West Fresno into an overwhelming community of color.

  Across these cases, freeways fragmented communities, displaced residents, and reinforced pre-existing racial divides. White, affluent interests often succeeded in pushing freeways to more powerless neighborhoods. These racialized impacts stemmed from systemic socioeconomic marginalization and exclusion of people of color in the planning process. Understanding the history of racism in freeway development can inform restorative justice.

Linguistic Landscapes through Mapping: Raising Awareness about Multilingual Communities

Alicia Muñoz Sánchez (UC San Diego)

  This presentation demonstrates how GIS mapping can be utilized as a powerful tool to explore language use in public spaces and raise awareness of multilingual communities. The maps showcased were developed as part of two projects aimed at highlighting linguistic diversity in the greater San Diego area. The first project, conducted as a class assignment, focused on documenting Spanish language use in signage. The second project was open to the broader San Diego community and expanded the scope to include all languages other than English.

  In these projects, participants contributed by uploading photographs of signage featuring non-English languages in public spaces, following the linguistic landscape methodology (Landry and Bourhis, 1997). Each sign was categorized by type (e.g., storefront, poster, billboard), language use (monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual), dominant language, origin (bottom-up or top-down, i.e., created by individuals or institutions), and purpose (e.g., cultural or informational). GIS technology was then used to map this data, visualizing the distribution of linguistic landscapes across the region.

  The resulting maps provided students with valuable insights into the frequency and geographic concentration of signage, the purposes of the signs, the prevalence of bilingual or multilingual language use, and the broader significance of these findings. By combining community participation and GIS technology, this project illustrates how mapping can raise awareness of linguistic diversity and its presence in public spaces, while also fostering a deeper understanding of bilingual and multilingual communities.