Land degradation and desertification have become complex environmental, social, and economic concerns in Ghana owing to decline in agricultural productivity, loss of biodiversity, and forced out-migration from degraded lands to cities in search of jobs or to rural forested communities for farming, resulting in further deforestation. In an attempt to address these complex land degradation and desertification problems, particularly in the northern areas of Ghana, land degradation was assessed in six major ecological zones of Sudan savanna, Guinea savanna, forest transition, moist semi-deciduous forest, evergreen forest, and coastal savanna. The objectives of the assessment were to: (a) analyze current satellite images to document land degradation, (b) model trends of land degradation, and (c) create a desertification hazard map for Ghana. Land degradation was modeled by using ArcGIS 9.3; satellite image analysis was conducted by using ERDAS Imagine software. Land degradation indicator data layers were soil, vegetation, climate, and land management data. The Modified Mediterranean Desertification and Land Use Model was adapted to model desertification and land degradation, which resulted in the production of a land degradation risk map for Ghana. In addition to the modeling, satellite image based land cover classification results from 2000 to 2008 showed evidence of approximately 880.006 sq km of land degradation in Ghana.

Environmental Practice 17: 3–15 (2015)

Shale gas development brings substantial and long-term change to rural landscapes, change that most citizens recognize by what they see—heavier traffic on the highway, pipeline right-of-ways at the skyline, and what they experience as a result of lost forest cover—fewer songbirds at the feeder, cloudier streams when it rains. This paper focuses on facilitating citizens’ ability to participate in the design and planning of large-scale changes to the landscape. In the absence of clear federal or state oversight, the leasing choices of individual citizen landowners and the gas industry are the land planning instruments affecting shale gas development. For citizen landowners, the visual consequences of change may be key to determining what is acceptable or unacceptable development. In a series of studies, the authors projected the areal land-use change resulting from access roads and pipelines that would be needed to support projections of gas development in North-eastern Pennsylvania. The authors identified planning scenarios derived from those projections and represented them as photo-renderings and GIS-based informational graphics. The TR-55 runoff calculator was used to estimate the impact on downstream flooding and a regression model of perceived visual quality to assess visual impacts and also represented these outputs graphically. All of these products were used in land-use planning workshops for citizens enrolled in a Community Science Volunteer program for informal science education of adults. This paper examines the evaluations of participants in the programs including citizens’ acquisition of new knowledge about land planning, their comprehension of planning principles, and their feelings of empowerment to engage in community and county-wide planning. While the number of respondents is restricted to the limited numbers attending community events, in all cases responses indicate the usefulness of our extensive use of visual representation and visual evaluation in interpreting land-use planning options available to citizens in these highly contested land-use scenarios.

Environmental Practice 17: 245–255 (2015)

Urban health is strongly linked to mental illness, being overweight, smoking behaviors, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and coronary disease; most of these are chronic diseases/conditions. Healthy Cities and Cittaslow are urban initiatives that acknowledge the importance of such societal and cultural contexts and factors as social determinants of health, whereas the more commonly considered factors such as access and use of health care services often have less impact. Changes in social environment and lifestyle are now major determinants of risk and disease at all ages. Based on the principles of Healthy Cities and Cittaslow, this research aimed to establish comparisons and formulate plausible hypotheses for the relationship between healthy cities and chronic diseases/conditions. It is a qualitative observational and comparative study from a socio-anthropological perspective carried out in five cities. Improved capacity of local communities to identify and address problems could be the best outcome from Healthy Cities and Cittaslow. The capacity to change urban environments and social habits to ones that promote a healthier lifestyle may help to lessen the impact of chronic diseases/conditions.

Environmental Practice 17: 16–24 (2015)

This study assessed current profiles of organochlorine pollutants in sediment of Escambia Bay and River in northwest Florida, United States (US), which experienced catastrophic environmental collapse in the 1970s as a result of unregulated industrial and domestic sewage releases. Fifty-seven composite sediment samples were collected with a ponar grab sampler. Organochlorines were extracted with United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) Method 3550 and concentrations were determined with USEPA Method 1668A for polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), USEPA Method1613B for polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins and dibenzofurans (PCDD/Fs), and USEPA Method 8081A for 4,4'-dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), 4,4'-Dichlorodiphenyldichloroethane (DDD), and 4,4'-Dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene (DDE). For PCBs, 12 (21%) out of the 57 samples exceed the Florida threshold effects level (TEL) of 21.6 µg/kg and no sample exceeds the Florida probable effects level (PEL) of 189 µg/kg. The 17 PCDD/F congeners that are considered to have significant toxicity have a mean of 1.9 µg/kg and a range of 0.022–11 µg/kg. The mean total toxic equivalence value (TEQ) of PCDD/Fs and dioxin-like PCBs for the sediments is 2.6 ng/kg. About 56% of the samples exceed the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) TEL for total TEQ, 23% of which also exceed the NOAA TEL, implying that these total TEQ toxicities can impact sediments adversely. DDT was detected in 25% of the samples. All but one of the detections were in the river and adjacent wetlands. The detected DDT concentrations exceed the Florida PEL (4.77 µg/kg) except for one sample that only exceeds the TEL (1.19 µg/kg). The common DDT degradation products, DDD and DDE, were not detected in the river and wetland sediments.

Environmental Practice 00: 1–13 (2015)

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) have made dramatic technical advances in the past decade. Their use domestically is currently tightly constrained by existing Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations. Within the next few years, the FAA is expected to provide a regulatory framework that allows for a greatly expanded role for UASs in domestic airspace for a wide variety of applications. One of those will be remote sensing for land and natural resource monitoring. While there has recently been a large body of published research on UAS applications to environmental monitoring, in practice, very little has been operationalized by private or public entities to date. In July 2014, Argonne National Laboratory hosted a workshop dedicated to environmental monitoring UAS applications with attendance by representatives from 11 federal agencies as well as academics. The workshop reviewed the UAS state-of-the-art within the federal arena and barriers to broader UAS use. While a number of agencies, the including National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, the United States Geological Survey, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Bureau of Land Management have conducted proof-of-concept UAS demonstrations, typically using surplus Department of Defense equipment, the promise of UAS systems at the moment remains untapped for a variety of reasons. The consensus was, however, that UAS systems will play an increasingly important role in cost-effectively supporting timely natural-resource and land-management monitoring needs.

Environmental Practice 17: 170–177 (2015)

The Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency (CREATE) Program is a nationally prominent rail-infrastructure program. It is managed by the unique partnership of the United States Department of Transportation (DOT), the State of Illinois, the City of Chicago, Metra, Amtrak, Association of American Railroads, and six of the nation’s Class I freight railroads. The CREATE 75th Street Corridor Improvement Project (CIP) received a National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) Record of Decision in September 2014. As a result of 75th Street CIP and other completed preliminary engineering and project environmental reviews within the 70 rail-improvements program, CREATE has set a national-policy example with regard to mitigation under the environmental justice Executive Order (EO) 12898. This article provides some background on the CREATE Program and examines the development of the CREATE Environmental Justice Policy. It describes the impetus for creating the policy, namely noise impacts on low-income and minority populations resulting from the 75 th Street CIP and other CREATE Program rail projects. This article also discusses the extensive coordination among Federal and State agencies, among the public and private CREATE partners, and among Community Advisory Groups and residents, all of which led to the specific mitigations addressed in the CREATE environmental justice policy. The result of these encompassing efforts, led by Federal Highway Administration and the Illinois Department of Transportation’s Division of Public and Intermodal Transportation, is a precedent-setting framework for analyzing and, when necessary, mitigating the potential environmental justice impacts of the CREATE Program rail projects. The CREATE Environmental Justice Policy is precedent setting in a few ways: (a) it establishes policy where none currently exists and where existing highway-oriented policies do not seem appropriate or applicable; (b) it provides greater specificity with regard to what mitigation measures are “practicable” to address predicted noise impacts of CREATE Program rail projects on low-income and minority populations; (c) it clarifies the lead agencies’ intent to maintain the transportation linkage and focus when developing and evaluating practicable mitigation measures for other (i.e., non-noise) impacts; and (d) it helps assure the equity of the transportation investment by better balancing the distribution of burdens and benefits at the project level. This article identifies the steps, when considering disproportionately high and adverse impacts to low-income and/or minority populations, on how to evaluate other practicable mitigation measures with merit under EO 12898. This article also describes the lessons learned and the dialogue necessary to receive broad support from the CREATE partners for both needed rail improvements and additional mitigations to provide offsetting benefits and opportunities to enhance Chicago-area communities, neighborhoods, and residents’ quality of life.

Environmental Practice 17: 256–269 (2015)

The future of the American West depends on sustainable water resource governance. A variety of uncertainties associated with limited freshwater supplies, population growth, land use change, drought, and climate change impacts present substantial challenges. To inform decision making, managers are adopting new techniques such as scenario planning to understand how water resources might change and what practices can support economic, environmental, and social sustainability. Scenario planning can be informed by understanding the normative future preferences of a variety of stakeholders, including decision makers, who influence water governance. This article presents a survey of central Arizona decision makers to understand their visions for a desirable future for the water system in terms of supply, delivery, demand, outflow, and crosscutting activities. Principle components analysis is used to identify patterns underlying responses about preferences for each domain of the system and correlation analysis is used to evaluate associations between themes across the domains. The results reveal two distinct visions for water in central Arizona—one in which water experts and policy makers pursue supply augmentation to serve metropolitan development, and another in which broadened public engagement is used in conjunction with policy tools to reduce water consumption, restore ecosystem services, and limit metropolitan expansion. The results of this survey will inform the development of a set of normative scenarios for use in exploratory modeling and anticipatory governance activities.

Environmental Practice 17: 25–35 (2015)

This article takes a new approach to studying food access. It combines environmental justice analysis with systems thinking in an examination of the food environment of Detroit. The article reviews food access literature and identifies how each body of scholarship’s underlying assumptions help or distort our understanding of urban food environments. The article argues for more comprehensive approaches to studying food access and demonstrates how such approaches can be implemented. We collected data from multiple sources, including ReferenceUSA, Orbis, and the Michigan Department of Agriculture, between 2011 and 2013 to build a database of food outlets in the city. We used SPSS 22 and ArcGIS 10.1 to analyze and map the data. The article analyzes the location of 3,499 food outlets in Detroit, comprising 34 categories food retailers, growers, supply chain, and food assistance programs. The study identified 96 supermarkets or full-line grocery stores; 1,110 small groceries, convenience stores, mini marts, and liquor stores; 279 specialty food stores; 306 pharmacies, dollar, and variety stores; 1,245 full-service and fast food restaurants and other food service outlets; 157 supply chain operations; 206 farms, community and school gardens, farmers’ markets, and produce markets; and 100 food assistance programs. The article finds that though Detroit has areas that lack food outlets, the portrayal of the entire city as a “food desert” is misleading. Moreover, the traditional approach of food desert research of using only or primarily the presence or absence of supermarkets and full-line grocery stores to study food access ignores many important venues from which people obtain food. It also ignores the strategies people use to cope with food insecurity and their responses to limited food access.

Environmental Practice 17: 102–133 (2015)

Experimental crop fields often contain large numbers of small spatial plots that require separate analysis. It can be difficult to precisely locate these plots in high-resolution imagery of the fields gathered by Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). This prevents UAS imagery from being applied in High-Throughput Precision Phenotyping and other areas of agricultural research. If the imagery is accurately geo-registered, then it may be possible to extract plots from the imagery based on their map coordinates. To test this approach, a UAS was used to acquire visual imagery of 5 ha of soybean fields containing 6.0 m 2 plots. Sixteen artificial targets were set up in the fields before flights to be used as Ground Control Points (GCPs) for geo-registration. Geo-registration accuracy was quantified based on the horizontal Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of targets used as checkpoints. Twenty test plots were extracted from the geo-registered imagery. Plot extraction accuracy was quantified based on the percentage of the desired plot area that was extracted. It was found that using four GCPs minimized the horizontal RMSE and enabled a plot extraction accuracy of at least 70%, with a mean plot extraction accuracy of 92%. Future work will focus on enhancing the plot extraction accuracy through additional image processing techniques so that it becomes sufficiently accurate for all practical purposes in agricultural research and potentially other areas of research.

Environmental Practice 17: 178–187 (2015)

Collaborative environmental governance scholars have increasingly recognized the need to engage Indigenous peoples in environmental decision-making processes. Barriers to doing so effectively are well known. Recognizing these barriers, some scholars have discussed recommendations from practice in regions where Indigenous lands have been colonized and where there are complex environmental problems. This article explores assumptions regarding Indigenous engagement in the practice of collaborative environmental governance and contextualizes these assumptions relative to the perspectives of Indigenous peoples. Concrete advice for environmental practitioners is offered that builds on findings from a previously published systematic review and empirical multi-case study of governance for water in British Columbia, Canada. Recommendations for practice offered here include the following: approach or involve Indigenous peoples as self-determining nations rather than as one of many collaborative stakeholders or participants; identify and engage with existing or intended environmental governance processes and assertions of self-determination by Indigenous nations; create opportunities for relationship building between Indigenous peoples and policy or governance practitioners; choose venues and processes of decision making that reflect Indigenous rather than Eurocentric venues and processes; provide resources to Indigenous nations to level the playing field in terms of capacity for collaboration or for policy reform decision making; and find ways to support Indigenous nations in their own continued environmental decision making and self-determination.

Environmental Practice 00: 1–11 (2015)

Increasingly, Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) are changing the way that scientists and practitioners collect environmental data. Current UASs, however, are largely relegated to collecting data while flying remotely, far away in the air. This article examines two case studies where micro-UASs fly in immediate proximity to the environment, enabling them to collect physical samples and capture sensor data that cannot be obtained at a distance. The first case study presents an aerial water sampler that flies to remote locations and dips a pump into the water to collect samples for lab analysis. The second case study examines a UAS that flies within a meter of crops to accurately measure their height. Each requires different sensors and methods specifically tailored to operating and interacting near the environment. This article evaluates the performance of these systems and also presents preliminary validation that they collect datasets that are compatible with those gathered by existing approaches. Futhermore, it distills some common underlying design and operating principles shared by UASs aimed at working close to the environment. Finally, this article concludes that in spite of numerous pending challenges, UASs that directly interact with the environment will transform the way environmental data is collected.

Environmental Practice 17: 188–200 (2015)

Upon its enactment, the United States’s National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) established a national policy for promoting the protection and enhancement of the human environment. NEPA sets forth procedural requirements for federal agencies to prepare Environmental Impact Statements (EISs) for any major federal actions that may impact the environment. At the core of these environmental documents is the dominant Western worldview of scientific materialism. In many instances, NEPA’s sole reliance on a Western scientific materialist evaluation of environmental impacts fails to consider and incorporate Native American perspectives of, values about, and relationships with the environment. For example, many Native American Tribes perceive the environment through an animistic ontological lens that embodies a sense of stewardship, manifest through a spiritual, umbilical connectedness to the natural world. Thus, Native American perceptions of the environment often clash with the dominant Western culture’s scientific perspectives, especially as they relate to determining environmental impacts. This conflict of cultural worldviews intensifies when compliance with other federal laws is coupled with the NEPA process. This article examines the effects of employing solely a Western scientific perspective in assessing environmental impacts on indigenous communities through the NEPA process and how this can have the unintended consequence of promoting the perpetuation of colonialist attitudes toward Native peoples. It will also discuss how taking into consideration Native American worldviews can offer more affirmative and inclusive environmental practices associated with the NEPA process.

Environmental Practice 17: 36–45 (2015)

Creating and implementing effective tools for navigating the regulatory process is becoming increasingly important to the success of simple to complex projects, particularly those in urban settings. To guide a project through the planning and permitting processes, a skilled and coordinated team equipped with a practical and easily implementable toolkit is required. Tools must be integrated into the design development phase of a project and throughout the permitting phase to adequately meet complex regulatory requirements and begin the project’s construction in a timely and cost-effective manner. This article discusses the importance of defining a project, effective project communication, developing an Environmental Approvals Approach (EAA), and proper project scheduling to improve the environmental planning and permitting processes. The City of Seattle’s Elliott Bay Seawall Project is presented as a case study of these qualities.

Environmental Practice 17: 270–277 (2015)