Over the past three decades, North American professional sports leagues and their teams have undertaken extensive arena and stadium development, raising important questions about where new venues are located and how they reshape neighborhoods. This study examines the location of arenas and stadiums associated with the National Football League, Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League, and Major League Soccer between 1998 and 2025 to assess whether the late-twentieth-century trend toward recentralization has persisted. Findings indicate that recentralization endures but within a transformed urban context as downtowns are generally stronger economically and demographically compared to the late twentieth century, and new venues are increasingly embedded within sports-anchored mixed-use districts, reflecting the growing role that team ownership groups play in real estate development.
Over the past several decades, non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF) have become the dominant instructional workforce in U.S. higher education, yet professional support structures have not kept pace. In a discipline where teaching and applied work are central, NTTF play significant roles while remaining structurally and institutionally marginalized. This article examines how professional associations shape NTTF participation, belonging, and career sustainability in U.S. geography. Drawing on online focus-group interviews with forty-two non-tenure-track geographers across institution types, we analyze patterns of association membership, perceived benefits and barriers, and faculty perspectives on how organizations might better support their work. Findings show that participants value associations for disciplinary identity, intellectual exchange, mentoring, and community, particularly when such connections are limited at their home institutions. High costs, heavy teaching loads, limited institutional support, and conference-centered engagement constrain participation, however, and reinforce tenure-track hierarchies. Participants expressed interest in alternatives to annual meetings, including online programming, mentoring networks, pedagogical resources, and clearer pathways into service and leadership. We recommend that professional associations adopt a more explicit advocacy role and expand participation beyond conference-centered models toward more accessible and inclusive forms of engagement. Together, these shifts could strengthen faculty well-being and the long-term vitality of the discipline.
Precariously balanced rocks (PBRs), a subset of fragile geologic features, preserve constraints on paleoseismic activity through their susceptibility to sliding and toppling under strong ground motion. This study analyzed six PBRs on Mt. Su-am and Mt. Yongbong, located near major metropolitan areas in central South Korea. Using three-dimensional geometries constructed through structure from motion, we estimated the minimum peak ground acceleration thresholds required to destabilize each PBR (i.e., fragility). Fragility ages, representing the maximum timing of paleoearthquakes, were determined based on in situ cosmogenic radionuclide (Be-10) concentrations measured along vertical sections. Sliding fragility ranged between 2 percent and 91 percent g, and the toppling fragility ranged between 25 percent and 273 percent g, with best-fit fragility ages spanning 0.85 to 69.73 ka. Additionally, modeling of Be-10 depth profiles reveals that high pre-exhumation concentrations support two-stage or intermediate models of tor formation. This result also highlights the influence of local geomorphic settings, such as elevation and location of PBRs, on exposure histories. Our findings enhance the understanding of tor formation, which contributes to the use of PBRs in seismic hazard assessments. Moreover, sliding fragility, previously unexplored, effectively detects moderate-magnitude paleoearthquakes. These results expand the utility of PBRs in studying lower magnitude paleoseismic events and into urbanized areas where other paleoseismic methods might not be applicable due to widespread ground disturbance.
Driver education and behind-the-wheel (BTW) training are required for junior licensure in thirty-one U.S. states, including Ohio, to support the acquisition of safe driving skills. Yet spatial and structural barriers can delay licensure for youth in disadvantaged communities. In Ohio, high poverty rates and long travel times to licensed driving schools create driver training deserts (DTDs), limiting access to graduated driver licensing programs. This study develops and evaluates a statewide mapping tool to identify DTDs and support more equitable resource allocation. The tool integrates U.S. Census data with travel-time estimates to the nearest BTW provider, creating tract-level indicators of socioeconomic disadvantage and service accessibility. The framework identifies concentrations of DTDs in rural southeastern counties and high-poverty urban neighborhoods. The interactive platform allows users to compare alternative threshold scenarios and visualize areas of compounded need. Practitioner feedback highlighted the tool's value in supporting expanded services, while also underscoring challenges such as the need for updated service provider data. Findings demonstrate how iterative, participatory design and applied geographic analysis can translate spatial inequities into operational decision-making. This tool offers a scalable spatial decision-support framework for targeting investments in underserved areas and can be extended to incorporate additional data and policy contexts.
