Wanyun Shao, Ph.D
  • Home
  • News
  • Bio
  • Research
  • Publications
  • Public Writing
  • Blog
  • Teaching
  • Contact
  • Links
  • Home
  • News
  • Bio
  • Research
  • Publications
  • Public Writing
  • Blog
  • Teaching
  • Contact
  • Links
Search by typing & pressing enter

YOUR CART

5/30/2023 0 Comments

Our new paper was published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction

Our new paper identifying effective hurricane risk communication tools was published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. Below please find the abstract:

"Coastal regions such as the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf Coasts are highly vulnerable to extreme coastal hazards such as tropical cyclones and major hurricanes. The effects of these hazards pose a threat now and are expected to increase in the future, which highlights the need for coastal communities to receive and understand information regarding risks involved with these hazards. Through this study, we identify points of improvement in the tools used to communicate the short and long-term risk associated with hurricane hazards through three surveys in Mobile, AL, Savannah, GA, and Houston TX. These surveys identify public response to hurricane descriptions, Cone of Uncertainty graphics, and long-term trend graphics. Analysis of trends in responses to these communication tools identifies relationships between risk perceptions and existing factors in each study location. Further, public response to these tools is identified and analyzed using structural equation models for each location with a “response” latent variable containing information from endogenous variables in the survey. Response was measured as action intent, concern for the scenario, reported evacuation likelihood, and interpretation of long-term trends. We identify points of improvement for all three communication tools to aid in public comprehension of the information provided as well as to increase response to hurricane hazards by more effectively communicating risk information. These would help to improve comprehension and increase different responses to tropical storm and hurricane damage from high winds and storm surge with the intent to improve resident response to hazards along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf Coasts."

0 Comments

5/23/2023 0 Comments

A new paper published in Applied Geography

Our paper using participatory GIS to measure accessibility of people with movement disabilities has been published in Applied Geography. Below please find the abstract:

"Although evaluation of the accessibility of people with disability (PWDs) is necessary to design effective transportation policy measures to ensure better mobility for PWDs, little empirical research are available on this subject. This study thus aims to address this gap by developing a methodological framework and applying this framework to assessing the accessibility of earthquake evacuation routes for people with movement-related disabilities (PMDs), one type of PWDs, in the city of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Specifically, this comprehensive accessibility index is composed of four components including accessibility from home to shelter, perceived accessibility of evacuation route, accessibility of entrance of the shelter, perceived accessibility of internal circular space and entrance of the residential building. Participatory GIS approach is employed in the data collection 455 PMDs were surveyed from 13 wards of Dhaka. Accessibility of each considered parameter and the overall indicator are poor in most cases. 45.2% of the wards are found to have relatively poor conditions of overall accessibility during evacuation. Relations of various accessibility components with socio-economic factors and level of disability are examined as well. PMDs with higher levels of disabilities and older PMDs perceive lower accessibilities of evacuation routes, circulation space, and entrance gate of residence, while male and more educated PMDs perceive circular space and entrance gate of residence to be more accessible."
Picture
Fig. 1. Framework of data collection and calculation of accessibility index.
0 Comments

5/13/2023 0 Comments

A new paper published in Society & Natural Resources

Our new paper examining the influence of carbon dependency, social capital, and political orientation on American public response to climate change has been published in Society & Natural Resources. Below is the abstract:

"Climate change is one major challenge that has brought substantial costs to the United States. To implement mitigation measures and gain public support, it is critical to understand Americans’ attitudes toward this issue. Our study investigates how carbon dependency, social capital, and political orientation influence public response to climate change by perceiving its threat, changing behaviors, and supporting policies. We first build an integrative paradigm to explore the theoretical connections. Next, we employ data from different sources to measure these key concepts at individual and state levels and then estimate the relationships empirically. Multilevel regression results show that carbon dependency inhibits public response while social capital enhances such response. Democrats and liberals are motivated to respond and residents of Democratic Party controlled states are also more likely to believe in climate change and perceive the risk than their counterparts. These factors can be leveraged to mobilize public engagement in climate activism."
0 Comments

4/6/2023 0 Comments

A new paper published in npj Clean Water

Our paper analyzing how climate extremes along with COVID-19 impact residents' sentiments in water pollution complaints is published in npj Clean Water. Below please find the abstract:

"The COVID-19 pandemic and associated prevention policies can directly or indirectly alter the sentiment of individuals while registering water pollution complaints, but observational evidence remains limited. Here, we conducted a sentiment analysis on over 10,000 water pollution complaints from residents in Alabama, USA (2012–2021) to better understand how and to what extent COVID-19 has altered emotion (polarity score-based) and attitude (subjectivity) of water pollution complaints. We found that the 2017 state-wise drought significantly increased the percentage of negative water pollution complaints by +35%, with no significant alternation in attitude before the COVID-19 pandemic. Since COVID-19, the percentage of negative and subjective water pollution complaints significantly decreased and increased by −30 and +20%, respectively, and these sentiment alternations were maintained by 2021. This study provides a new direction for environmental governance and management, requiring a timely response to changes in the public’s emotions and attitudes during the next climate extremes and pandemics."
0 Comments

2/17/2023 0 Comments

A Ph.D student with assistantship

My research group Hazards, Vulnerability, and Risk Decision Making at the Department of Geography at the University of Alabama is accepting applications for a Ph.D student with assistantship who will start in Fall, 2023. The assistantship provides a stipend plus tuition remission. The successful applicant will work with me and will be involved in projects focused on the intersection of water hazards, community vulnerability, and risk decision making.
 
Qualified candidates should have a Master’s degree in Geography, Environmental Studies/Sciences, Planning or a related discipline. Candidates should have a strong interest in the intersection of social and physical dimensions of hazards and be eager to work in an interdisciplinary environment. Experience in geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, quantitative data analysis are desired. Strong oral and written communication skills are required.
 
For more information about this assistantship, please contact me at wshao1@ua.edu as soon as possible. Please include a copy of your CV, unofficial academic transcripts, and a brief personal statement that highlights skills relevant to the position.
 
For more information about the department, please see https://geography.ua.edu/. 
0 Comments

1/18/2023 0 Comments

Our new paper using social media data to detect public response to hurricanes and climate change was published in Climate Risk Management

Our new paper titled "Toward reduction of detrimental effects of hurricanes using a social media data analytic approach: How climate change is perceived?" has been published in Climate Risk Management. Below please find the abstract:

"​During natural disasters, there is a noticeably increased use of social media sites such as Twitter. Substantial research on social media data use during disasters has been conducted in the past decade since various social media platforms have emerged and gained popularity. This research highlights a thorough examination of the textual content of users’ posts shared on Twitter across the 48 contiguous U.S. states (CONUS) during hurricanes Harvey (2017) and Dorian (2019). We processed and analyzed 35 million tweets by classifying them into the main topics of concern discussed on Twitter over the CONUS. Sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and topic classification are a few of the Artificial Intelligence techniques from Natural Language Processing (NLP) that we employed in this work to analyze the Twitter data. Applying the NLP techniques on this large volume of data, made it possible to classify the tweet content into distinct categories in order to reveal valuable information on social response to hurricanes and assist crisis management agencies and disaster responders during and post disasters. Furthermore, this study offers helpful insights on the way climate change is discussed on Twitter before, during and after hurricane Harvey and Dorian. The outcome of this study uncovers detailed information on social response to hurricanes which benefits disaster managers and responders in reducing the detrimental effects of such extreme events and enhancing community readiness when these events occur."

Picture
Figure 2. Distribution of topics of concern along with tweets per one thousand population for (a) Hurricane Harvey (2017), and (b) Hurricane Dorian (2019) (source: Karimiziarani et al. in press)
Picture
Figure 6. Climate change Tweets per million people and sentiments for (a) Harvey (2017), and (b) Dorian (2019) (source: Karimiziarani et al. in press)
0 Comments

8/31/2022 2 Comments

Our new paper on the socio-geographic patterns of rescue requests during Hurricane Harvey has been published in Findings

   Our paper on the socio-geographic patterns of rescue requests during Hurricane Harvey has been published in Findings. Below is the abstract:

"We analyze a public dataset of rescue requests for the Houston Metropolitan Area during Hurricane Harvey (2017) from the Red Cross. This dataset contains information including the location, gender, and emergency description in each requester’s report. We reveal the spatial distribution of the rescue requests and its relationship with indicators of the social, physical, and built environment. We show that the rescue request rates are significantly higher in regions with higher percentages of children, male population, population in poverty, or people with limited English, in addition to regions with higher inundation rate or worse traffic condition during Hurricane Harvey. The rescue request rate is found to be statistically uncorrelated with the percentage of flood hazard zone designated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)."

Picture
Figure 1.Spatial Distribution of Event-related Variables in Each Zip Code. a). Percentage of people who sought rescues during Harvey, b). Traffic index during Harvey, c). Inundation index during Harvey.
2 Comments

8/2/2022 0 Comments

Open PhD Position – coastal community resilience, risk perceptions, community engagement, Nature Based Solution

     The Environmental Decision Making Lab at the Department of Geography of the University of Alabama seeks a geography PhD student to focus on coastal community resilience, risk perceptions, community engagement under the theme of Nature Based Solution (NBS). The broader research team is focused on developing actionable design guidance for NBS (i.e., wetland restoration) along the US Gulf Coast. Our highly interdisciplinary group includes social scientists, wetland ecologists, water resource engineers, and government agency partners. Our goal is to develop guidance for wetland restoration activities optimized to reduce flooding and increase coastal community resilience. To accomplish this goal, we will employ a combination of community engagement, wetland plant community characterization, and state-of-the-art hydrologic and hydraulic modeling.
​
     The successful candidate will be expected to start in spring, 2023. The candidate will work closely with social scientists, wetland ecologists, and water resource engineers, and our government partners to develop, assess, and communicate NBS design alternatives by engaging stakeholders in a knowledge co-production fashion. The candidate will be expected to work with the team to develop a plan for stakeholder engagement meetings, organize and facilitate stakeholder engagement activities, collect the data from the meetings, analyze the data, and report findings in peer-reviewed manuscripts. Through this work, the candidate will also be expected to develop hypothesis driven research based on their interests.
The ideal candidate will have MS degrees in a relevant field (i.e., geography, urban and regional planning, environmental sociology, ecology, environmental science, or closely related field). The candidate should be excited about working on an interdisciplinary team; interacting with community partners, and conducting both basic and applied research. Further, experience with statistical analysis and programs (e.g., R, Stata, SPSS) and geographic information systems (e.g., ArcGIS, QGIS) are required. Experience with textual analysis programs (e.g., NVivo) is preferred but not required. Additionally, experience with scripting languages (e.g., R, Python, or Matlab) are preferred but not required.
 
For more information, please contact Dr. Wanyun Shao (wshao1@ua.edu)
0 Comments

4/18/2022 3 Comments

Congratulations to Musfiq on winning the Outstanding Thesis Award!

Picture
       Congratulations to Musfiq Bhuiya on winning the University of Alabama Outstanding Thesis Award! Through strong determination and hard work, Musfiq completed a thesis on an exceedingly important topic: accessibility for people with disabilities to critical facilities during a disaster. 

       We have so far published one paper developed out of his thesis in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. 
3 Comments

3/31/2022 0 Comments

Our new paper has been published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction

     Our paper has been published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction (Impact factor: 4.32). Below please find the abstract:

"Climate change has posed serious risks to coastal cities around the world. Effective urban disaster management calls for the coordination between the local government and residents. We propose a comprehensive framework to study urban disaster resilience under climate change with New Orleans of Louisiana in the U.S. as the study area. Municipal hazard mitigation must be sufficient to mitigate these hazards. Residents’ risk perceptions are a vital component of social vulnerability and can shape public decisions to increase disaster resiliency. Because climate change is expected to intensify, it becomes important to ensure that residents’ risk perceptions are considered when developing municipal plans to maximize regional resiliency. This research aims to identify a gap in the hazard mitigation process that can be closed to better prepare the community to manage coastal hazards. To achieve this, an online survey is distributed in the New Orleans metropolitan area to determine residents’ risk perceptions and expectations of the local government’s action. Policy analysis is conducted to identify the priorities held by municipal planners in these issues. Although there is no gap in the perception of risk and municipal mitigation of current coastal hazards, there is a gap between the municipal approach to climate change mitigation and the concern and expectation of actions the residents hold regarding the future effects of climate change. The approach to climate change should be reconsidered on a municipal level and new small-scale personal incentives should be promoted to maximize resiliency toward coastal hazards in the future." 
Picture
Fig. 2 Framework of Convergent Research on Urban Disaster Resilience
0 Comments
<<Previous
    Picture


    Wanyun Shao, Ph.D

    I am a geographer who studies risk decision making within a geographic context.

    Subscribe to Newsletter

    Categories

    All Climate Change Coastal Issues Community Resilience COVID 19 COVID-19 Drought Earthquake Energy Environmental Policy Flooding Geography GIS Hurricanes Natural Disaster Other Paris Accord Public Health Reading Risk Analysis Science Sea Level Rise Weather And Climate

    Archives

    May 2023
    April 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    August 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    April 2021
    February 2021
    December 2020
    October 2020
    July 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    June 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016

    View my profile on LinkedIn

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly