Digital Commons Network^™

Invasive Earthworms In The Crown Of The Continent System And Implications For Land Management, Meghan Elizabeth Scott

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The United States contains invasive earthworms originating from Europe and Asia; the majority are European lumbricids. Direct introduction occurs primarily through human activity and, once established, earthworm populations are difficult to address. When exotic earthworms engage in bioturbation, they negatively alter subterranean food webs and nutrient cycling by disrupting soil layering systems. The most prominent form of physical alteration is the change and removal of the topmost organic layer. This disruption is associated with altered nitrogen and carbon cycling, as well as altered forest floor plant communities.

The Crown of the Continent ecosystem is located in southwestern Alberta, southeastern British …

Managing Mining Pollution: The Case Of Water Quality Governance In The Transboundary Kootenai/Y, Ashley Juric

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis addresses current water quality management challenges in the transboundary Kootenai/y River Basin, and how these challenges are shaped by historical, economic, political, and social factors. The water quality of this basin, both in the United State and Canada, has been severely affected by coal mining that has occurred in British Columbia over the last hundred years and continues to be threatened by several proposed mining expansion projects. The goals of this research are to uncover the forces shaping water management and to determine the potential for interested and affected parties to participate in crafting water quality protection measures. …

Close Call With Nonexistence: A Memoir, Jeff Gailus

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Fred Eduard Gailus was born on April 26, 1944, in Memelland, a place that no longer exists. It was a tiny sliver of Germandom on the far eastern edge of Hitler’s outsized German Reich. When the Soviet Red Army swept through on their way to Berlin, to end World War Two and the reign of terror perpetrated by the German people, the homeland of my father’s ancestors was wiped off the map forever. Thanks to the courage and tenacity of his mother, Fred survived the largest forced migration in human history to marry young and raise a family of four …

Crossing The Line: Navigating A Polluted Transboundary Watershed, Celia T. Tobin

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Montana’s Lake Koocanusa sits at the end of a river system that drains Canada’s most productive coal country. Today, the waters of the massive lake contain a mineral called selenium, a poorly understood byproduct of mine waste. This summer, the U.S. federal government will be in a position to declare that the selenium in the lake puts Canada in violation of its international treaty with the U.S. The Montana government, however, is preparing to argue otherwise through its own water analysis. The disagreement has U.S. ecologists frustrated with the state’s position, saying they won’t practice science that is slave to …

Dogs Are Expensive: Cost-Benefit Perspectives On Canid Ownership At Housepit 54, Bridge River, British Columbia, Ben B. Chiewphasa

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The presence of dogs in the Housepit 54 (HP 54) faunal assemblage of the Bridge River site (EeRl4) raises questions regarding their roles within Canadian Plateau prehistory, specifically their contributions to networked household economies. Ethnohistoric sources often cite dogs as “jacks of all trades,” household entities that can act as beasts of burden, hunters, prized companions, or as a husbanded food resource. The 2012-2014 field seasons yielded variation in dog frequencies throughout 10 superimposed floors (IIj-IIa); these fluctuations occurred alongside changing densities of ungulates and salmon remains. The thesis incorporates multivariate analyses to determine how dogs could have allowed HP …

Opening Up The Box: Exploring The Scaling Out Of The Good Food Box Across Canada, Stephanie Lentz Laporte Potts

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Good Food Box (GFB) program holds a great deal of promise to expand our understanding of Community Food Security (CFS). CFS represents a vision for solving hunger and other problems with the food system through an integrated approach that improves access to good and appropriate food for all while at the same time building community, strengthening local agricultural economies, and maximizing social justice. The GFB, one type of CFS program, is a community-based initiative found across Canada that provides a box of healthy food to customers at near wholesale prices; it has the potential to increase access to healthy …

Taming The Wild: On Womanhood, Nation And Nature In Ann-Marie Macdonald's Fall On Your Knees And The Way The Crow Flies, Yvonne Michelle Hammond

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This project evaluates the work of Canadian author and playwright Ann-Marie Macdonald in the context of links between ecocritical, feminist and post-colonial perspectives; it seeks to understand how broader definitions for gender provide an alternative to the patriarchal binaries that limit both individual and national identities. Part of the Canadian conscious is an anxiety that questions not only the way difference impacts their culture, but also how these differences speak to a lack of a homogenized national identity. This study focuses on Macdonald�s novels Fall on Your Knees (1996) and The Way the Crow Flies (2003) , in order to …