Oil spill modeling is fundamental for planning and preparing for, as well as responding to and mitigating, actual spill events. As a result, significant research effort has been directed toward developing analytical approaches for deepening our understanding of spill risk, community vulnerability, oil behavior, spill outcomes, and impacts. The purpose of this paper is to provide a synthesis of the oil spill risk assessment and impact modeling literature, with a focus on the vulnerability of local environmental, ecological, and community systems, as well as the geographic processes associated with modeling spills and transforming these data into a robust and meaningful impact assessments. The results of this progress report reveal a number of methodological and substantive commonalities across the scientific literature. Moreover, the synthesis of this literature should provide researchers with a strong foundation for pursuing future work in this domain.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly popular, both for hobbyists and within the commercial, industrial, and military sectors. Approximately one million new UAVs have been registered in the United States, with the majority being recreational UAVs. This growth of UAV activity and their increasingly common public presence engenders a wide variety of opinions, perceptions, and concerns among individuals about UAVs, particularly concerning personal privacy. Drawing from the privacy and emerging technology literature, the purpose of this paper is to identify how individuals’ perceptions of privacy explain their attitudes on the use of UAVs and whether this aligns with what we would expect from an emerging technology. Utilizing Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) for survey delivery to 2,108 respondents we conducted a descriptive statistical analysis of response frequency and t-tests of group mean differences. The results suggest that individuals who use UAVs, maintain a familiarity with the capabilities of UAVs, and have a basic understanding of UAV regulations, are somewhat less concerned about the growing presence of UAVs as it relates to privacy than individuals who are generally unfamiliar with UAVs, their capabilities, and UAV regulations. Policy implications of these results are discussed.

Scholars studying sense of place have introduced several separate yet related terms which are often used interchangeably including phrases like place attachment, place meaning, place identity, and place dependence. Given the lack of a coherent understanding for sense of place in the literature, it is challenging to study and operationalize the concept in a consistent way. In this study, we use publication data and citation data to clarify how sense of place has been defined and applied. Our findings show that sense of place has evolved over time, although it is in the last decade that scholarship has grown considerably. We also find that the dimensions used to define and measure the concept have changed with time and discipline. These results imply that scholars need to study sense of place in careful consideration of the dimensions that they want to investigate and the disciplinary context each study is embedded in.