Geography - Journal Articles
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item The lost city: Recovering the Cork City Architect, Eamon O'Byrne(Irish Georgian Society, 2020-04) Linehan, DenisIn this essay I will reclaim from both field-work and the archives, Eamon O'Byrne's impacts on Cork City and to explore his contribution to public architecture between 1948 and 1973. I will consider ways in which O'Byrne developed agency within a dense context that circumscribed his creative input but also offered opportunities to develop distinctive architecture. What I hope to find is an architecture of becoming - one showing distinctive innovation and development, influenced by some international trends, shaped within the political context and labour movement in the city, attentive to neighbourhoods, and debates in Ireland about modernization. In taking this approach, I will pay particular attention to the conditionality of the city architect - whose autonomy required constant negotiations in a vexed system, crossing between tenants, labour unions, builders and politicians. In the opening section, I will explore some of the key contexts shaping the development of municipal housing after World War II in Cork, and in the sections that follows consider different aspects of O'Byrne’s planning and house design during his work in the 1950s and 1960s.Item Surplus food redistribution and healthy, sustainable diets: Exploring the contradictions of charitable food provisioning(Research Committee on Sociology of Agriculture and Food (RC-40) of the International Sociological Association (ISA), 2021-06-27) Kenny, Tara; Sage, Colin; Irish Research CouncilA substantial body of literature points to the necessity of a ‘Great Food Transformation’ requiring an urgent shift towards sustainable food systems across multiple levels. A key part of this transition is the need to reduce food waste and food loss by 50 percent and where charitable surplus food redistribution is regarded as making an important contribution to this target. Surplus driven charitable food provisioning is now part of the food environment in many countries and is influencing the diets of a significant number of people. Its proponents argue that such work contributes to a more sustainable food system by reducing food waste and food insecurity. However, few studies have examined the factors influencing the governance of food within the charitable food system. This paper seeks to fill this gap in the literature through an examination of recent developments in charitable food provisioning in the Republic of Ireland. Using Cork city as a case study we explore Ireland’s charitable food system by examining the motivations, ideas, and practices of key organisations. The paper highlights the growing role of surplus-driven charitable food systems and argues that the redistribution of surplus products for the purpose of reducing food waste and improving economic efficiency requires re-evaluation within a wider appreciation of sustainable diets, and, ultimately, with regard to strengthening the right to food for all.Item Incorporating movement in species distribution models: how do simulations of dispersal affect the accuracy and uncertainty of projections?(Taylor & Francis Group, 2016-03-21) Holloway, Paul; Miller, Jennifer A.; Gillings, Simon; National Science FoundationSpecies distribution models (SDMs) are one of the most important GIScience research areas in biogeography and are the primary means by which the potential effects of climate change on species' distributions and ranges are investigated. Dispersal is an important ecological process for species responding to changing climates, however, SDMs and their subsequent spatial products rarely reflect accessibility to any future suitable environment. Dispersal-related movement can be confounded by factors that vary across landscapes and climates, as well as within and among species, and it has therefore remained difficult to parametrise in SDMs. Here we compared 20 models that have previously been used (or have the potential to be used) to represent dispersal processes in SDM to predict future range shifts in response to climate change. We assessed the different dispersal models in terms of their accuracy at predicting future distributions, as well as the uncertainty associated with their predictions. Atlas data for 50 bird species from 1988 to 1991 in Great Britain were treated as base distributions (t1), with the species' environment relationships extrapolated (using three commonly used statistical methods) to 2008â 2011 (t2). Dispersal (in the form of the 20 different models) was simulated from the base distribution (t1) to 2008-2011 (t2). The results were then combined and used to identify locations that were both abiotically suitable (obtained from the statistical methods) and accessible (obtained from the dispersal models). The accuracy of these coupled projections was assessed with the 2008-2011 atlas data (the observed t2 distribution). There was substantial variation in the accuracy of the different dispersal models, and in general, the more restrictive dispersal models (e.g. fixed rate dispersal) resulted in lower accuracy for the metrics which reward correct prediction of presences. Ensemble models of the dispersal methods (generated by combining multiple projection outcomes) were created for each species, and a new Ensemble Agreement Index (EAI), which ranges from 0 (no agreement among models) to 1 (full agreement among models) was developed to quantify uncertainty among the projections. EAI values ranged from 0.634 (some areas of disagreement and therefore medium uncertainty among dispersal models) to 0.999 (large areas of agreement and low uncertainty among dispersal models). The results of this research highlight the importance of incorporating dispersal and also illustrate that the method with which dispersal is simulated greatly impacts the projected future distribution. This has important implications for studies aimed at predicting the effects of changing environmental conditions on species' distributions.Item Incorporating host-parasite biotic factors in species distribution models: Modelling the distribution of the Castor Bean tick, Ixodes ricinus(Geographical Society of Ireland, 2020-11-01) McDonough, Sinead; Holloway, PaulUnderstanding where ticks are found, and the drivers of their geographic distributions is imperative for successful epidemiological precautions. Predictive models of tick distributions are often projected using solely abiotic (e.g., climate) variables, despite the strong biotic interaction that host species undoubtedly have with parasitic species. We used species distribution modelling to project the distribution of Ixodes ricinus in Ireland and the United Kingdom using different combinations of abiotic, biotic, and abiotic-biotic variables. We found that models parameterised solely on abiotic variables generally reported lower accuracy and ecological realism than models that incorporated biotic factors alongside climate. We also investigated representation of host distribution in models, testing four different methods (habitat suitability of individual hosts, presence-absence of individual hosts, ensembled habitat suitability, and ensembled presence-absence). Biotic representations of ensembled host distributions alongside abiotic variables reported the highest accuracy, with the variable representing host diversity (e.g., number of host species) the most important variable when measured using a jackknife test. Moreover, our results suggested how host distributions are represented (i.e., presence-absence, habitat suitability) greatly impacted results, with differences reported among habitat specialists and generalists. Results suggest that it is now imperative for projections of parasitic species to include a representation of biotic factors with host species. This research has improved our understanding of the drivers of tick distributions in a national context, and the investigation of biotic representation should foster discussion among researchers working in species distribution modelling and the wider biogeography discipline.Item A review of the methods for studying biotic interactions in phenological analyses(Wiley, 2020-10-30) de la Torre Cerro, Rubén; Holloway, Paul; Environmental Protection Agency, Ireland; Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications, IrelandPhenological events play a key role modulating ecosystem services; however, the complex and interlinked nature of ecosystems indicates that interactions among different taxa during phenological events can have consequences for the entire ecosystem. Currently, there is a lack of a unified criteria on the methodologies studying phenology and biotic interactions. We performed an extensive integrative review of works evaluating phenology and biotic interactions. We identified four broad categories of studies that have explored biotic interactions within phenology research: (a) spatial and temporal asynchronies, (b) biotic factors as covariates, (c) simulation studies and (d) interaction indices. We found that spring phenology has received much more attention than any other season, while mutualistic and obligated interactions, as well as trophic interactions and networks have been explored more routinely than facilitation or competition. Authors tend to interpret coexistence among species as biotic interactions without any direct measurement, particularly in spatial and temporal asynchrony studies, but this also occurs to a certain extent in all categories. We also found a lack of formal examination in most studies exploring phenological mismatches in response to climate change. We propose a conceptual framework for the inclusion of phenology in the study of biotic interactions that apportions research into the conceptualisation and modelling of biotic interactions. Conceptualisation explores phenological data, types of interactions and the spatiotemporal dimensions, which all determine the representation for biotic interactions within the modelling framework, and the type of models that are applicable. Finally, we identify emerging opportunities to investigate biotic interactions in phenology research, including spatially and temporally explicit species distribution models as proxies for phenological events and the combination of novel technologies (e.g. acoustic recorders, telemetry data) to quantify interactions.