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ABSTRACTOn March 11, 2011, Japan experienced the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in that country. A coastal port and fishing city in Miyagi Prefecture, Kesennuma was one of the hardest hit population centers, the waves having destroyed much of the city’s commercial core and nearly all of its low coastal neighborhoods. The wave’s destruction highlighted certain elements of the city’s sense of place and forever changed others. I explore how the Kesennuma Shark Museum reflects ways in which the 3/11 disaster has simultaneously maintained and altered Kesennuma as a place. I analyze the spatiality of the museum and how its narrative evokes a sense of place in the broader community. The case of the Shark Museum is one example of how scholars can use museums to examine sense of place and how it has been impacted by natural disasters. This work represents a unique contribution to cultural geography inquiry into the spatiality of museums, museum experiences, and how such spaces reflect an interaction between people and place.

This auto-geographical, sense of place essay represents one approach to understanding a personal attachment to a location that has been disrupted by time and a destructive wildfire. It is written in the context of increased frequency of natural and human-caused disasters and a growing literature engaging the impact of disasters on place. It is an attempt to illustrate how a personal essay can be an important venue through which geographers can explore longstanding disciplinary themes of human interaction with place and the physical environment.

In recent years, steps have been taken to implement a new crop insurance program for rangeland and pasture. Unlike traditionally insured row and cereal crops, which have directly measurable yields, there is no such simple, ideal yield standard for rangeland and pasture because of uncertainties regarding how to generally and objectively quantify annual production. With remotely sensed imagery acquired by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer transformed to the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), we derived a proxy relative yield measurement for rangeland and pasture vegetation. This proxy measurement could potentially solve a critical component of the yield quantification problem facing implementation of a rangeland insurance program. In order to evaluate this proxy measurement and how ranchers might accept it, we surveyed a group of Kansas and Oklahoma ranchers to determine how their perception of rangeland productivity compared to NDVI-based proxy measurements of rangeland productivity in the surveyed rancher's county for the growing seasons of 1999–2003. At the scale of the ranch, correlation analysis showed that perception was not highly correlated with the satellite indices. Higher correlations were observed when perception data were aggregated and compared to rangeland indices at the county and study area levels, with performance comparable to using precipitation information. The year with the strongest correlation was the worst drought year of the 5, a desirable outcome in the context of an insurance program. Results from this case study provide some support for using remote sensing data in a national rangeland and pasture insurance program. Such a program would be an important new risk mitigation tool for ranchers.