http://theses.ncl.ac.uk/jspui/handle/10443/73 2026-07-28T13:05:24Z 2026-07-28T13:05:24Z Durrant, Eleanor Sarah http://theses.ncl.ac.uk/jspui/handle/10443/6842 2026-07-10T14:32:03Z 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Assessing benefits and opportunities from tree planting in the southern agricultural growth corridor of Tanzania Authors: Durrant, Eleanor Sarah Abstract: Ecosystem restoration is seen as essential for conserving forests, preserving biodiversity, and addressing climate change. However, achieving e ective and equitable restoration requires integrating social considerations to better understand and manage trade-o s that arise from these interventions. This thesis addresses the need for a more inclusive approach to tree-cover restoration by examining methods that incorporate local perspectives and preferences into restoration planning. Firstly, I map the global evidence on participatory scenarios in ecological restoration to understand their role in assessing trade-o s across restoration outcomes. The findings suggest that participatory scenarios enable the integration of diverse knowledge types and methods, yet their impact on restoration planning remains unclear. Then, through participatory scenarios with smallholder farmers and a sentiment analysis, I explored farmers' preferences and attitudes toward tree-cover restoration in Tanzania’s Kilombero Valley. Farmers' desired outcomes diverge from current restoration policies and plans that emphasise exclusionary protected areas, underscoring the importance of participatory planning approaches that align with local aspirations. Lastly, I investigate how homegarden agroforestry and sugarcane contract farming contribute to household resilience to climate change. Both farming strategies can positively and negatively a ect livelihood resilience as smallholders grapple with trade-o s from limited land, costs of planting and maintaining, and risks to livelihood outcomes. Farmers have cleared trees from their plots for sugarcane, leading to a concentration of farmers' trees within homegardens, suggesting that homegardens may be important for ensuring the direct benefits of trees for smallholders and conserving aboveground carbon stocks. Overall, this thesis argues that agroforestry o ers a promising strategy to enhance livelihood diversity and resilience. However, achieving equitable restoration requires recognising and addressing the trade-o s and preferences of all stakeholders. I advocate for a broader methodological approach that combines diverse data types and participatory methods to ensure that tree-cover restoration e orts align more closely with the needs and values of local communities. Description: PhD Thesis

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z Burke, Richard Francis http://theses.ncl.ac.uk/jspui/handle/10443/6841 2026-07-10T13:31:35Z 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: A geospatial modelling framework to simulate future scenarios of urban form : a case study in Phnom Penh, Cambodia Authors: Burke, Richard Francis Abstract: Urbanisation is proliferating globally, with the majority of the world’s population now living in urban areas. This rapid urban growth places significant pressure on cities to expand, often leading to physical expansion rates that outpace population growth. This growth is particularly pronounced in developing regions, where it poses numerous challenges. Urban growth modelling offers decision-makers a valuable tool to under stand the complexities of urban dynamics, anticipate future transformations, and design sustainable and liveable cities. However, existing modelling approaches have largely focussed on large-scale, rasterised, and gridded projections of urban expansion that lack relevance and specificity to the regions being modelled. Furthermore, the models lack a systematic assessment procedure and there has been insufficient attention to generating detailed urban form layouts. To address these gaps, it is essential to use vector data at finer spatial scales to enhance contextual relevance and apply robust assessment methodologies that improve model credibility. Additionally, generating fu ture urban form layouts in developing regions is critical for informed urban planning. Therefore, this PhD thesis aims to develop a geospatial modelling framework to simu late, explore and characterise future urban form scenarios. Phnom Penh, Cambodia, was selected as a case study due to its rapid urban expan sion, data-scarce environment, and the relatively small proportion of built-up area. The framework employs two state-of-the-art techniques: agent-based modelling (ABM) and generative adversarial networks (GAN). The ABM replicates the urban development process basedonacademic literature and governmentreports, representingkeyactors, such as urban planners, property developers, and landowners, involved in this process as agents to simulate future urban growth. This ABM undergoes a thorough and sys tematic evaluation process, including stabilisation analysis, calibration and validation, and sensitivity analysis, to ensure its robustness. Dasymetric mapping is performed to convert the ABM’s development probability outputs into a raster of future develop ment demand density. The GAN then uses this future development density to perform image-to-image translation, converting a density raster into future road network layouts and subsequent building footprints based on the previously generated road network. The generated urban form outputs are then assessed against ground truth urban form using a range of pixel and vector-based accuracy metrics to identify the best-performing GAN experiment for future urban form generation. iii The ABM simulated five urban growth scenarios in Phnom Penh by 2040 which range from low to high growth under regulated and unregulated conditions. These scenarios are based on likely socioeconomic forecasts from grey literature and are variations of the baseline simulation. The evaluation protocol’s stabilisation analysis revealed that the ABM’s stochastic behaviour was effectively captured after 240 model runs. The ABM achieved good performance in calibration, achieving area-weighted fuzzy kappa simulation values of 0.241 in calibration and 0.509 in validation showing sufficient per formance for future simulation. The sensitivity analysis explored 8 model variables and determined their importance, interactions, and polarity with the fuzzy kappa simulation output, ensuring model credibility. The best performing GAN for road network gener ation in the study area achieved a mean absolute error of 40.96%. Whilst the best performing GANs for building footprint generation in the study area achieved mean absolute errors of 54.29% and 29.48%. The baseline or business as usual future sim ulation from the ABM projects 18.04 km2 of new urban area by 2040 in the study area. For urban form, this results in 227.68 km of new roads and 26,521 new building foot prints, this represents a 71.52% increase in road networks and 106.63% in building footprints from the 2023 urban form. These projections indicate large increases in new urban area and urban form over the following decades. The ABM scenarios achieve varied and distinct patterns of growth, with differing loca tions and probabilities of growth, demonstrating the ABM is responsive to variations in the input variables. The evaluation protocol highlighted issues with separating the cal ibration and validation period in equal temporal periods and weaknesses of the fuzzy kappa simulation as a result of this. The protocol could be developed further by employ ing explicit spatiotemporal sensitivity analyses to enhance model understanding in the study area. GANsaredemonstrated to be afeasible and practical technique in creating realistic and convincing future urban form that integrate seamlessly with existing lay outs. However, GAN training performance was sensitive to input image resolution and content and they do generally underestimate urban form features. Overall, this PhD thesis advances urban growth modelling approaches by presenting a novel geospatial modelling framework as a new standard in the field, which can be easily re-applied in other data-scarce areas experiencing rapid growth. It has strong implications for aca demic researchers, policy makers, and practitioners. It offers an innovative approach to generating future urban form with multidisciplinary applications in natural disaster preparedness, urban planning, and transportation modelling Description: PhD Thesis

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z Hu, Mingzhe http://theses.ncl.ac.uk/jspui/handle/10443/6836 2026-07-03T10:43:47Z 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: The research and optimisation of efficient, low cost, ultra high speed PM machines Authors: Hu, Mingzhe Abstract: Manufacturers of electric motors for industrial products are often able to lead the market by placing a focus on high speed, compact, low weight and low cost designs which maintain a high motor efficiency. The current generation of battery powered electric drives for domestic products consists of a power-dense high-speed permanent magnet brushless DC motor which is controlled by a high efficiency digital drive to spin the rotor at over 100,000rpm. The purpose of this project is to pursue a new type of mains powered high-speed (150,000rpm) highly efficient (>85%) motor, from development of fundamental theory and modelling to a carefully designed prototype, matched to a given requirement, and practically validated as a fully built prototype tested in excess of the designed speed. The targeted motor input power is 750W. A thorough literature review is conducted to view all possible motor types. A permanent magnet brushless DC motor is preferred due to its advantages of high power density, compact size and reliable high speed operation. A hybrid simulation approach which combines the advantages of both analytical simulation and finite element simulation is utilised. Precise loss estimation is investigated to support the creation of an analytical simulation model. The accuracy of the constructed analytical simulation model is validated by 3-dimensional finite element modelling. This project puts particular focus on motor per unit material cost with design for mass production in mind. The elimination of high performance but costly motor raw materials, such as high residual flux density rare-earth permanent magnets, low loss density amorphous steels and stranded wires, while still keeping the same level of motor performance in ultra-high speed applications, becomes the biggest challenge in this project. Description: Ph. D. Thesis.

2018-01-01T00:00:00Z Benthem De Grave, Remco Martijn http://theses.ncl.ac.uk/jspui/handle/10443/6815 2026-06-12T14:13:27Z 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Designing digital technology to empower climate-sensitive food purchases Authors: Benthem De Grave, Remco Martijn Abstract: A shift towards climate-sustainable diets is essential to achieve climate targets and mitigate disaster risks. Despite many people valuing climate-sensitive behaviours, a lack of knowledge and skill undermines action. Digital technology can aid this transition but faces ethical concerns with persuasive methods that may undermine autonomy. Also, prevalent design decisions may not always align well with actual usage patterns, which may undermine the potential of designs. This thesis examines how to design digital technology that supports climate-sustainable diets while addressing these considerations. The study includes: • A systematic literature review on opportunities and challenges of food purchase choice applications. • Three empirical design chapters detailing participatory input and theory-driven proce dures culminating in ’MyFoodprint’, an app prototype tested in real-world settings. • Atheoretical debate on protecting individual autonomy with behaviour change design. Key insights reveal: • Digital tools should focus on educating users about ’foodprint’ tailored to their purchasing behaviour. • To preserve autonomy, attempts to motivate behaviours directly are best avoided. • Design should not rely on consistent or long-term use. • Positive support for the potential of MyFoodprint to empower sustainable choices. • The use of word clouds visualizing product contributions to one’s overall foodprint ap peared particularly effective alongside support for finding alternative products. • Indirect benefits included sparking discussions around foodprint. iii Contributions include: • Design implications from various study designs, including field observations. • Insights into the practical and ethical feasibility of different design options. • Theory-backed design artifacts available as resources for researchers. • Categorization of intervention techniques based on their alignment with autonomy. This work enhances understanding of how digital technology can empower individuals towards sustainable behaviours without compromising personal autonomy. Description: PhD Thesis

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z