Steven F. Firtko / Library & Technology Services

Bank failures, business closings, and high unemployment marked the Great Depression of the early 1930s. In their search for economic security, many Americans found the United States Postal Savings System, with its government assurance of deposits, a safe haven for savings.

This project concentrates on Pennsylvania’s annual participation levels in the Postal Savings System from 1925 to 1935. It uses Geographic Information System (GIS) software to display visually, and explore possible reasons for, geographic and temporal differences in county participation rates.

Download PowerPoint presentation 468KB.

Josh Galster / Earth & Environmental Sciences

Measuring the impact of watershed urbanization on channel widths using historic aerial photographs and modern surveys

A watershed’s land use exerts a strong influence on the characteristics of its trunk channel. One watershed variable, land use change, acts on time scales short enough to measure its effects directly using the aerial photograph record. Aerial photographs from 1946/1947 and 1999 were digitized and georeferenced into a Geographic Information System (GIS) to compare stream channel widths. A majority of the measured widths (67 of 85) of Little Lehigh Creek were statistically wider in 1999 than in 1947. The measured widths from Sacony Creek are more evenly distributed among those that widened (18), narrowed (28), and those that were statistically unchanged (6) from 1946 to 1999. From 1946 to 1999 the only section of Sacony with consistently wider channels in 1999 corresponds exactly with the only sizable urban area in the watershed. The current land use in Sacony Creek watershed resembles that of 1946, while the Little Lehigh Creek watershed has more than tripled its urban area. It is proposed that the increase in urban areas that subsequently increases peak discharges is the mechanism behind the widening that occurred in the Little Lehigh Creek. These wider channels can affect water quality, aquatic habitat, suspended sediment loads, and river aesthetics.

Download PowerPoint presentation 34MB.

Zane Kratzer / Sociology & Anthropology

Zane Kratzer's thesis work at Lehigh will focus on indicators of gentrification in South Bethlehem. The research involves a resident survey of Southside residents to determine how changes in market pressure are affecting individual homeowners and renters. GIS technologies will be used in this research in order to create a random sample of households within the South Bethlehem geographic area to be surveyed. Survey results will be entered into a database and linked to a spatial analysis of the neighborhood. Some sections of the surveys will be scored according to the level of financial pressure particular households are facing, which will then be used to determine which sections of the neighborhood are most at-risk to the forces of gentrification. GIS is helpful in this research because it provides an important tool for all sampling procedures and will ultimately provide spatial clues about potential indicators of gentrification in specific housing clusters in South Bethlehem.

Download PowerPoint presentation 7.1MB.

Steven F. Firtko is the Government Documents Coordinator at the Fairchild-Martindale Library, Lehigh University. He holds a B.A. in History from the University of Pennsylvania (1982), as well as a B.S. in Education (1986) and M.A. in History (1991) from East Stroudsburg University. His thesis was The History of Middle Valley, New Jersey, which was published as a book in 1995.

Josh Galster graduated most recently from Lehigh in spring 2006 with a Ph.D. from the Earth & Environmental Sciences Dept. working under Dr. Frank Pazzaglia. His research focused on the interactions between rivers and their watersheds, and used a combination of field work, aerial photographs, and GIS to determine the effects of land use change on rivers. He is now employed as a post-doctoral research scientist in the EES Dept. using GIS to analyze glaciers in Peru to determine the effects of climate change in the tropical Andes.