Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Earth & Environmental Sciences

Advisor

Elia Machado

Committee Members

Jamon Van Den Hoek

Nerve Macaspac

Charles Vorosmarty

Subject Categories

Data Science | Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment | Geophysics and Seismology | Hydrology | Other Earth Sciences

Keywords

Synthetic aperture radar, interferometry, geostatistics, geodesy, Israel, Palestine

Abstract

The devastating impacts of war and conflict extend to the physical and human-built features of the Earth’s surface. Cities face wholesale destruction from aerial bombardment, while simmering water conflict exacerbates hazard vulnerabilities in transboundary river basins. Landscape changes in war and conflict settings are difficult to characterize both in space and time. High-intensity aerial bombardment occurs over large spatial extents, long durations, variable landcover types, weather and climatic conditions. Low-intensity changes to the landscape, characteristic of protracted water conflict, may only be expressed subtly over many years. As a result, landscape changes associated with modern wars and water conflict, including those in Ukraine, Gaza, and the Jordan River Valley (JRV), are not well characterized. The spatiotemporal distribution of damage to built-up areas from wars in Ukraine and Gaza is not well understood. Protracted conflict over water resources in the JRV lacks a spatial component characterizing subsidence exposure across geopolitical groups managing agricultural lands. This dissertation addresses these knowledge gaps by measuring Earth-observable landscape changes using interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) time series analysis. Two case studies investigate the geographic distribution of wartime building damage in Gaza and Ukraine using novel pre- and post-processing approaches for long-duration, large-extent mapping of damage to built-up areas with multitemporal coherent change detection (CCD). A third case study spatializes asymmetric exposure to subsidence hazards in the southern JRV using InSAR time series analysis of surface deformation. In Ukraine and Gaza, CCD characterizes damage to built-up areas across the first 18 months of the 2022- Russian invasion of Ukraine and the first year of the 2023- Israel-Hamas war in Gaza with a previously unrealized temporal fidelity. In the JRV, InSAR surface displacement analysis reveals that two geopolitical groups managing agricultural lands are exposed to subsidence hazards while a third group known to monopolize water in the shared catchment is not. Together, these case studies characterize conflict-induced landscape changes using InSAR data, enabling a host of follow-on applications for the broader study of war and conflict geographies. This work brings InSAR-based change detection methodologies into the interdisciplinary study of war and conflict environmental outcomes and contributes to an emergent applied science of war and conflict Earth observation.

Download

This work is embargoed and will be available for download on Thursday, June 10, 2027

Share

COinS