Time-series of satellite images reveal important information about changes in 9 environmental conditions and natural or urban landscape structures that are of potential interest to 10 citizens, historians, or policymakers. We applied a fast method of image analysis using Self 11 Organized Maps (SOM) and, more specifically, the quantization error (QE), for the visualization of 12 critical change...

Explaining global variation in geographic and taxonomic diversity gradients represents a central focus of macroecology and macroevolution. Ultimately, these diversity gradients have been generated over deep timescales as a consequence of historical variation in rates of dispersal, diversification, and the capacity of different geographic areas to preserve taxa through time. Here, I assess the r...

Many federal and state programs require the geographic partitioning of states into regions for health services planning, monitoring, and/or administration. A common consideration for such programs is that region boundaries should be drawn so as to maximize the proportion of the state’s population that receives health care services in its region of residence. Defining region boundaries thus may ...

The most common and visible use of geographic information retrieval (GIR) today is the search for specific points of interest that serve an information need for places to visit. However, in some planning and decision making processes, the interest lies not in specific places, but rather in the makeup of a certain region. This may be for tourist purposes, to find a new place to live during reloc...

The characterization of specific places or more general geographic regions is essential to a variety of decision-making processes, particularly in the context of problems related with urbanism or demographic studies. In the context of my MSc thesis, I propose new ways of characterizing geographic regions, through the usage of georeferenced information extracted from location-based social networ...