Digital Commons Network^™

Contamination In The Upper Columbia: Smelting And Its Impact To The Environment And Human Health, Brenden Murphy

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

The objectives of this project include discussing the historical context of the smelting that occurred in Washington and Canada over the past century and how political events shaped the geographies of the region(s). Another objective will be to assess the level of environmental impact to the Upper Columbia region and the potential health effects to organisms and humans from the pollution released from the smelters. We will also explore the interaction of different agencies and stakeholders and the political processes of environmental cleanup to which parties are held responsible. Explaining the different advocacy and conservation groups already involved in the …

Creating A Comprehensive Western American/Canadian Fire Dataset, 1880-2018, Katherine Welch

WWU Graduate School Collection

The currently available fire-history data of Western North America (US/Canada) available for geographic and other analyses is largely piecemeal and difficult to find. Data from before the 1980s is scattered among many sources and held by a plethora of different agencies. The aim of this project was to change that daunting reality and provide a single dataset that would fill that data gap and make doing research on and mapping of fires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries more accessible.

This data encompasses 138 years (1880 - 2018), 12 US states, three Canadian provinces and two Canadian territories. …

3d Tool Evaluation And Workflow For An Ecological Approach To Visualizing Ancient Socio-Environmental Landscapes: A Case Study From Copan, Honduras, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Shona Sanford-Long, Jack Kerby-Miller

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Architectural reconstructions are the centerpieces of ancient landscape visualization. When present, vegetation is relegated to the background, resulting in underutilized plant data—an integral data source for archaeological interpretation—thus limiting the capacity to take advantage of 3D visualization for studying ancient socio-environmental dynamics. Our long-term objective is to develop methods of 3D landscape visualization that have value for examining changes in land use and settlement patterns. To begin to work toward this objective, we have (1) identified 3D tools and techniques for vegetation modeling and landscape visualization, (2) evaluated the pros and cons of these tools, (3) investigated biological and ecological …

Ten Suggestions To Strengthen The Science Of Ecology, Gary E. Belovsky, Daniel B. Botkin, Todd A. Crowl, Kenneth W. Cummins, Jerry F. Franklin, Malcolm L. Hunter, Anthony Joern, David B. Lindenmayer, James A. Macmahon, Chris R. Margules, J. Michael Scott

Papers in Ecology

There are few well-documented, general ecological principles that can be applied to pressing environmental issues. When they discuss them at all, ecologists often disagree about the relative importance of different aspects of the science’s original and still important issues. It may be that the sum of ecological science is not open to universal statements because of the wide range of organizational, spatial, and temporal phenomena, as well as the sheer number of possible interactions.We believe, however, that the search for general principles has been inadequate to establish the extent to which generalities are possible.We suggest that ecologists may need to …