Much of my research work has been focused on understanding the roles and history of California's sandy beach vegetation, following the work of Michael Barbour.  I have employed traditional phytosociology methods as well as modern GIS and remote sensing. My hope is that this work leads to restoration of beaches to include areas of limited foot traffic.

Related Publications

Tobias, M.M. and A.I. Mandel. 2021. Literature Mapper: A QGIS Plugin for Georeferencing Citations in Zotero. Air, Soil and Water Research 14:1-8. Open Access.  (Maps CA beach vegetation publications as the use case.)

Tobias, M.M.  2015.  California Foredune Plant Biogeomorphology.  Physical Geography. 36(1): 19-33.

Tobias, M.M. 2013.  Effects of Trampling on Ambrosia chamissonis and Cakile maritima Cover on California's beaches.  Madroño, 60(1):4-10.

Tobias, M.M. 2008. Monitoring Shorebird Habitat Using Softcopy Photogrammetry: the Case of the Western Snowy Plover at Coal Oil Point Reserve, Santa Barbara, CA. Physical Geography, 29(3): 275-288.

Explore historical distributions of sandy beach plant species living on the west coast of North America.  Distributions

The distribution of species can change over time. This map shows the locations of common beach plant species described in studies published in the academic literature at three different points in time: 1936 (Purer, Cooper), 1974 (Barbour), and 2012 (Tobias). The support (point or aerial representation) is based on the description by the original author. 

http://micheletobias.github.io/maps/DistributionsMap.html 

While this map may look like your ordinary run-of-the-mill web map programmed in Leaflet, it is actually a demonstration of something rather unique. The data for the locations of the markers and the pop-ups are both coming from the Zotero Online API. The data for this map was developed with the Literature Mapper Plugin for QGIS.

http://micheletobias.github.io/maps/LiteratureMap.html 

Geocoded Zotero Bibliography  for California Beach vegetation developed with the Literature Mapper Plugin for QGIS.

Literature Mapper is a plugin for QGIS 3.x that inserts geoJSON geometry strings into an online Zotero database to facilitate the mapping of study site locations. 

Literature Mapper Plugin for QGIS & Zotero

Related Publications

Tobias, M.M. and A.I. Mandel. 2021. Literature Mapper: A QGIS Plugin for Georeferencing Citations in Zotero. Air, Soil and Water Research 14:1-8. Open Access.

The American Viticultural Areas Digitizing Project is a long-running, crowd-sourced, data creation project that I lead at UC Davis DataLab and the UC Davis Library to build and maintain polygons of the official American Viticultural Areas as defined by the US TTB.  This dataset is unique in that it follows the verbal boundary descriptions as closely as possible and is well documented, making it more suitable for use in research than the dataset produced by the TTB itself. This project uses QGIS and GitHub.

The goal of this project was to interrogate the notion that American Viticultural Areas (AVAs) boundaries are truly based on environmental conditions. AVA boundaries were classified based on their elevation, precipitation, temperature, and soil characteristics using hierarchical clusterin in R. The related code is available on GitHub.

Related Publications

Tobias, M.M. 2022. Classifying American Viticultural Areas Based on Environmental Data. ISPRS Proceedings of the Free and Open Source for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Conference.

This book chapter explores the creation of the AVAs of California's Sierra Nevada Foothills - how and why - and the values of the people involved as they relate to wine. This work is a true collaboration of human and physical geographers to explain the natural and built environment and how they relate to people.

Related Publications

Tobias, M.M. & C.C. Myles. 2022. "Wine, culture, and environment: A study of the Sierra (Nevada) Foothills American Viticultural Area" in Handbook of Wine and Culture, Tim Unwin, ed. Routledge.

People don't typically think of Arizona when they think of places to grow and market wine. This book chapter explores how this came to be, and also the different geographies of where wine grows and where it is sold. This project is another example of human and physical geographers working together to produce unique and well-rounded research.

Related Publications

Myles, C., M.M. Tobias, & I. McKinnon.  2020. “‘A big fish in a small pond’: How Arizona wine country was made” in Agritourism, Wine Tourism, Craft Beer Tourism: Local Responses to peripherality through tourism niches.  M. Giulia Pezzi, A. Faggian, N. Reid, eds.  Routledge.

There are many factors contributing to a persons' cognition over their lifetime, but one that is not well understood is how the location where you live and who you live near impacts your congnitive trajectory over time. On this research team, I contribute geospatial data conversion, analysis, and data visualizations skills.

Related Publications

Meyer, Oanh L., Lilah Besser, Michele Tobias, Kristen M. George, Brandon Gavett, Sarah Tomaszewski Farias, Nishi Bhagat, My Le Pham, Stephanie Chrisphonte, and Rachel A. Whitmer. 2023. Neighborhood socioeconomic status and segregation linked to cognitive decline. Alzheimer's & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring.

Meyer, Oanh L., Lilah M Besser, Michaela Booker, Elaine Luu, Diana Mitsova, Michele Tobias, Rachel A Whitmer, Sarah Tomaszewski Farias, Charles S DeCarli, Dan M Mungas. 2021. Neighborhood racial/ethnic segregation and cognition in older adults. Alzheimer's & Dementia 17.

Meyer, Oanh L., Lilah Besser, Diana Mitsova, Michaela Booker, Elaine Luu, MicheleTobias, Sarah Tomaszewski Farias, Dan Mungas, Charles DeCarli, Rachel A.Whitmer. 2021. Neighborhood racial/ethnic segregation and cognitive decline in older adults. Journal of Social Science & Medicine. 

How far are you willing to travel to meet with a doctor? At some point, does travel time and distance become a barrier? On this research team, I developed the workflows, code, and data visualization for the team to understand how many people live inside and outside various travel distances from different health care specialty offices.

Related Publications

Alterio, Maeve M., Michele Tobias, Arthur Koehl, Alexis L. Woods, Kiyomi Sun, Michael J. Campbell, Claire E. Graves. 2023. Who Serves Where: A Geospatial Analysis of Access to Endocrine Surgeons in the United States and Puerto Rico. Surgery.

Alterio, M., R Von Davies, M Tobias, A Koehl, JH Tang, D Kopp. 2023. A Geospatial Analysis of Abortion Access in the United States after the Reversal of Roe v Wade. Obstetrics & Gynecology, 10.1097 (Includes cover art.) 

Working as a co-investigator on the NIH grant "Do Atmospheric Ultrafine Particles Lodge in the Brain and Cause Cognitive Decline Leading to Alzheimer's Disease Related Dementias?", I provide the data conversion, analysis, and data visualizations for spatial data.

Funded by NIH #1R56AG079510

ARISE is an interdisciplinary research project aimed at studying the effects of discrimination on cognitive performance and Alzheimer's Disease (AD) biomarkers within the Chinese American, Korean American, and Vietnamese American populations aged 65 years old and older. My role in this collaboration is to analyze spatial data to understand the spatial patterns in discrimination and cognitive decline. Learn more at the project's website.

Funded by NIH/NIA #1R56AG079510-01A1

For probably the first time since their creation, we've been able to understand how four sets of historical maps help explain how and why the Central Pacific Railroad was build where it was.  Using scanned original maps, I worked with this team to georeference and digitize the proposed and built railroad routes, and to overlay them with topographic data. This project combines extensive archives research with modern geospatial data analysis.

Related Publications

Tobias, M.M., D.J. Bostic, & S.S. Sibbett. 2021. Route Logic of the Central Pacific Railroad, 1861–1869. California History 98(2): 74-99.

100 years ago, the City of Berkeley was devastated by a wildfire that swept through the area north of the UC Berkeley campus. While many personal account so of the fire exist, no one has assembled a complete story of the events of the day.  Subsequent political decisions to ban and then reverse the ban on flammable building materials supported by industry pressure led to further devastation in wildfires that came later.  For my part in this investigation, I pulled together data from historical maps and eyewitness accounts of the fire as well as voting data to create maps that help illustrate how location and space played a role in the fire's progression and political outcomes.

Related Publications

Two papers are accepted and forthcoming in California History.