Failaka Island, located in the far east of Kuwait Bay about 20 km from the State of Kuwait’s coast, represents a focal point for regional geography and history, including natural wonders and archaeological sites dating to the Bronze, Iron, Hellenistic, Christian and Islamic periods. According to environmental data and in coordination with local authorities to develop an urban plan, the island is set to become the first tourist destination for the State of Kuwait. To achieve the Vision of Kuwait 2035, one of the planning objectives centers on Urban Planning for the Establishment of Environmental Cities that Achieve (UPEECA) environmental sustainability criteria. The article then, aims to propose the environmental urban plan for Failaka Island. Based around Environmental Analytical Hierarchical Processes (EAHP) and using the Field Calculator and ModelBuilder functions in ArcGIS, this research centers on the feasibility of carrying out an urban plan using suitability modeling that incorporates 4 factors and 13 criteria covering the island’s ecological and human composition. This study utilizes both remote sensing (Unmanned aerial vehicles UAVs for 3D imaging) and field study (ground truthing) to identify changes in land use and land cover—such as using sample analysis of the historical sites and soils for tracing evidence and creating/updating a soil map—and create the first geographic information systems (GIS) database for the island that can lead capable of generating a suitability model.
The rock weathering literature contains the hypothesis that case hardening exemplifies equifinality, where the same end state can be reached by many potential processes in an open system. We present analytical data from six different sites in the western USA to assess the hypothesis of equifinality. Case hardening can be produced on: (1) sandstone in Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona, from the addition of silica glaze, rock varnish and heavy-metal skins; (2) sandstone in Whoopup Canyon, Wyoming, from silica glaze that formed originally inside subsurface joints combined with externally applied iron film, silica glaze, and rock varnish; (3) welded tuff in Death Valley, California, from the accumulation of rock varnish and heavy metal skins of Mn and Fe; (4) sandstone in Sedona, Arizona, from the protective effects of rock varnish accretion and heavy metal skins of Mn and Fe; (5) basalt on the Big Island, Hawai'i, from the accumulation of silica glaze inside vesicles; and (6) sandstone at Point Reyes, California, from a lithobiont mat of fungi and lichen. Each developed the general form of a case-hardened shell, protecting the surface from erosion. In accordance with the hypothesis of equifinality, the processes that led to similar appearance differ.
Focusing primarily on the actor -human or nonhuman, individual or group, conscious or unconscious -Actor-Network Theory (ANT) explores the interconnectedness of all things. ANT recognises that all objects and things exhibit consciousness, and through a consciousness, interact heterogeneously in space; the location of the interaction(s), where they are performed homogeneously, is the landscape. If, as ANT promotes, all objects and things exhibit consciousness, then the closer in space they are to one another, the more essential they are to each other. These notions have specific ties to the on-going critique in landscape studies of focusing on rural and local scales, and the continuing debate in human (and physical) geography regarding the necessity of scale itself. Using ANT as a framework, and punctuated with true-life anecdotes, this article wraps the landscape-created-by-nature and the landscape-created-by-human debates into a non-dialectic whole, demonstrating, perhaps provocatively and controversially, that any landscape should be distinctly anti-dialectic and removed from scalar constraints. While ANT remains an often-overlooked and misunderstood technique for studying the landscape, this article's crux rests in nothing less than attempting to lay the groundwork for using ANT as a practical technique when studying any landscape in any location at any time (and in any related disciplinary field). If indeed, as argued in this paper and as ANT suggests, everything is networked, then scale, specifically when applied to any landscape, becomes irrelevant. Brierley G J, Fryirs K and Jain V 2006 Landscape connectivity: the geographic basis of geomorphic applications Area 38 165-74 Bruun H and Langlais R 2003 On the embodied nature of action Acta Sociologica 46 31-49 Burrough P A 1983 Multiscale sources of spatial variation in soil. I. The application of fractal concepts to nested levels of soil variation Journal of Soil Science 34 577-97 Butler J 1990 Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory in Chase S ed Performing feminisms: feminist critical theory and theatre Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD 26-35 Butler J 1993 Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of 'sex' Routledge, London Castree N 2000 Nature in Johnston R J, Gregory D, Pratt G and Watts M eds The dictionary of human geography 4th edn Blackwell, Oxford 537-40
Cavernous rock decay processes represent a global phenomenon, ubiquitous to all environments, with the viewable-in-landscape form usually being the final descriptor (e.g. ''alveoli''), sometimes alluding to the specific decay process (e.g. ''pitting''), other times not (e.g. ''honeycombing''). Yet, definitive terminology remains inconsistent, usually owing to variability in dimension, morphometry, distribution, and/or academic lineage. This lack of an established lexicon limits scientific collaboration and can generate scientific bias. With no official consensus on appropriate distinctions, researchers and scientists must either be familiar with all the possible terminology, or know the apparent distinction between ''forms''-which can seem arbitrary and, even more frustrating, often differs from researcher to researcher, scientist to scientist. This article reviews the historical and contemporary progression of scientific inquiry into this decay-and, arguably, erosionalfeature to identify lexical inconsistencies and promote a singular unifying term for future scholars. Ultimately, the authors support using ''tafoni'' (singular: ''tafone'') as the non-scalar universal term-the form created by numerous processes involved in cavernous decay features-and strongly suggest researchers adopt the same vernacular in order to promote collaboration.
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