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PhD's
| Dr. Wim Kellens | ||
| Title: | Analysis, Perception and Communication of Coastal Flood Risks - Examining objective and subjective risk assessment. |
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| Short description: |
Recent hazards have demonstrated the catastrophic potential of coastal floods worldwide. Expectations regarding climate change (sea level rise)
and economic development (coastal urbanization) further underline the need to study these risks. While flood risks have been predominantly approached from a technical, objective perspective, recent years have witnessed a growing concern to consider subjective aspects of these risks as well. This dissertation examines both approaches through literature reviews and analyses. In addition, insights are acquired to improve flood risk communication. Area of study is the Belgian coast, which is on the verge of improving its defence structures to assure protection against future storm surges. |
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| Promotor(s): | Philippe De Maeyer (UGent) | |
| Date: | 26 August 2011 | |
| Order: | wim.kellens@ugent.be | |
| Dr. Matthias Delafontaine | ||
| Title: | Modelling and analysing moving objects and travelling subjects - bridging theory and practice. |
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| Short description: | Moving through space over time is fundamental to our everyday behaviour and to that of many entities we interact with. This dissertation aims to bridge gaps between theoretical and applied research on modelling and analysing moving objects and travelling subjects. It compiles the original contributions of ten international peer-reviewed publications in geographical information science, covering themes ranging from qualitative reasoning over sequence alignment to accessibility analysis. | |
| Promotor(s): | Nico Van de Weghe (UGent), Tijs Neutens (UGent) | |
| Date: | 5 April 2011 | |
| Order: | matthias.delafontaine@ugent.be | |
| Dr. Leonard Mubalama Kakira | ||
| Title: | Monitoring Law Enforcement Effort and Illegal Activity in Selected Protected Areas: Implications for Management and Conservation, Democratic Republic of Congo |
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| Short description: |
Poaching remains a sensitive and controversial issue, especially amidst a diversity of combined political upheaval and
economic turmoil when biodiversity is being lost at an accelerated rate resulting in some of charismatic species becoming
plummeted amidst the wave of illegal offtake caused by a number of factors acting in concert. Overall, defaunation and habitat
encroachment viewed largely as a function of human action were the two major factors that caused contraction of large herbivores
in both the Kahuzi-Biega and Virunga National Parks. These two show pieces of conservation areas are still grappling with ever-growing
population growth in a region where conflict over ownership and control of land and its natural resources poses daunting
impediments to community-based development making it more difficult to secure sustainable solutions. This research work seeks to shed light on illegal activity patterns and trends as well as law enforcementeffort implications using a wide range of GIS analysis applications with a focus on the hotspot analysis. Analysis carried out here typically answers four fairly key questions, (i) what is the illegal resource use? (ii) Where is the best illegal activity location? (iii) Who extracts resources illegally? and (iv) Why does illegal resource use occur on recurrent basis? The thesis highlights practical issues which must be addressed to improve the effectiveness of conservation strategies. |
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| Promotor(s): | Philippe De Maeyer (UGent) | |
| Date: | 2010 | |
| Order: | info@we12.ugent.be | |
| Dr. Tijs Neutens | ||
| Title: | Space, time and accessibility - Analyzing human activities and travel possibilities from a time-geographic perspective. |
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| Short description: | How do spatial and temporal constraints affect the opportunities to travel and participate in activities? To what extent does accessibility of urban services vary in time and across individuals? Does the spatiotemporal organization of service facilities favor particular population segments above others? And how can we measure social equity of accessibility? These and related research questions are dealt with in this dissertation. Drawing on concepts of time geography, the aim of this dissertation is to shed new light on the analysis of potential travel behavior in space and time. | |
| Promotor(s): | Philippe De Maeyer (UGent), Frank Witlox (UGent), Tim Schwanen (University of Oxford) | |
| Date: | January, 21, 2010 | |
| Order: | tijs.neutens@ugent.be | |
| Dr. Peter Bogaert | ||
| Title: | A qualitative Calculus for moving Point Objects Constrained by Networks. |
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| Short description: |
Easily said, one can differentiate between two kinds of moving objects: objects that have a completely free trajectory, only constrained by the dynamics of the object itself (e.g. a bird flying through the sky) and objects that have a constrained trajectory (e.g. a train on a railway track). Clearly, a large number of human movements are tied to a network. For that reason, in this thesis the focus is on extending QTC, a qualitative calculus describing the movement of objects in an unconstrained environment, to a calculus for moving point objects constrained by networks, i.e. the Qualitative Trajectory Calculus on networks (QTCN): a calculus for representing and reasoning about qualitative relations between two disjoint objects moving along a network. In addition, in this thesis the first steps towards the cognitive and linguistic semantics of QTC are set. If qualitative calculi are to be used in terms of Naive Geography (e.g. as a means to overcome information overload or in the domain of Human Computer Interaction), empirical evidence is mandatory in order to express usefulness or strength of a qualitative calculus in these domains. The focus is on QTCB, since this calculus is (intuitively) assumed to describe the prepositions ?towards? and ?away from?. The empirical tests are limited movements defined in QTCB12 describing objects which have a constrained linear trajectory. |
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| Promotor(s): | Philippe De Maeyer (UGent) | |
| Date: | March, 17, 2008 | |
| Order: | peter.bogaert@ugent.be | |
| Dr. Ruvimbo Gamanya | ||
| Title: | Development of a Standardized Object Oriented Automatic Classification (SOOAC) Method and Application in Land Use and Land Cover Change Detection Using Remote Sensing in Central Zimbabwe. |
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| Short description: | The work presented in this thesis is a result of a radical paradigm shift currently underway in the analysis of remotely sensed data. Interest in the last 5 years has become focused on analysis of an 'object' rather than a 'pixel' as the smallest unit of landscape abstraction. This has been attributed to the commercial success of eCognition, an object-oriented image classification software. Though the object concept is not new, it is the first time a robust approach incorporating GIS and remote sensing has been developed in land use and land cover analysis. The object-oriented approach has proven to be very efficient as it provides multiple tools and features to address textural, contextual and hierarchical properties of image structures. Specifically, this study contributes to the application of this object-oriented concept within Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) classification and change detection. | |
| Promotor(s): | Philippe De Maeyer (UGent) | |
| Date: | July, 3, 2006 | |
| Order: | info@we12.ugent.be | |
| Prof. Dr. Nico Van de Weghe | ||
| Title: | Representing and Reasoning about Moving Objects: A Qualitative Approach. |
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| Short description: | It is clear that continuously moving objects are prevalent in many domains. There have been attempts to combine both spatial and temporal relationships from reasoning, database as well as from a logical perspective. However, the question remains how to describe motion adequately within a qualitative calculus. In the widely used Region Connection Calculus (RCC), topological relationships between regions are defined. Apart from some limiting cases, such as a car accident and a lion catching a zebra, mobile objects are represented by the use of the RCC relation 'disconnected from' (DC). However, this approach ignores some important aspects of reasoning about continuously moving physical objects. For example, given two trains on a railroad, it is of the utmost importance to know their movement with respect to each other in order to detect whether or not they could crash in the near future. So the problem with RCC is that it puts all DC-relations into one undifferentiated set. Therefore, a challenging question remains unanswered: "how do we handle changes between moving objects, if there is no change in the topological relationship?" In this thesis, we present the Qualitative Trajectory Calculus (QTC), which is a theory for representing and reasoning about movements of objects in a qualitative framework, differentiating groups of disconnected objects. | |
| Promotor(s): | Philippe De Maeyer (UGent) | |
| Date: | October, 8, 2004 | |
| Order: | nico.vandeweghe@ugent.be | |