Digital Commons Network^™

Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana

Theses and Dissertations

Santana’s explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and performative gestures into installations to reflect on social constructs of history and gender. By observing water and its qualities of defying Western dichotomies, Skin Echoes focuses on the material interchanges across bodies and the wider material world.

Quantifying Aboveground Biomass In A Tropical Forest Using A Lidar Waveform Weighted Allometric Model, Alejandro Rojas

Theses and Dissertations

Our knowledge of the distribution and amount of terrestrial above ground biomass (AGB) has increased using lidar technology. Recent advancements in satellite lidar has enabled global mapping of forest biomass and structure. However, there are large biases in satellite lidar estimates which impacts our understanding of carbon dynamics, particularly in tropical forests.

Ni-Meister et al. (2022) developed a lidar full waveform weighted height-based allometric model which produced very good results in temperate deciduous/conifer forest in the continental US. The purpose of this study was to evaluate this biomass model in an African tropical forest using the Land Vegetation and Ice …

A Slippery Slope Of Resemblances, Lauren Clark

Theses and Dissertations

My studio has become an ecosystem. Plastics, linens and found objects are transformed with both “natural” and “artificial” dyes, pigments, and aggregates, until there is a co-corruption akin to an ecology. I am searching for an alternate relationship between phenomena, wonder and knowing.

From Green Pastures To Scorched Earth: German Environmentalism And Ecology, C. 1800s-1945, Santiago G. Lozada

Student Theses

Nature Conservation in Germany from The Second German Empire until Nazi Germany

Wildfires In The Uncanny Valley, Jenna Beasley

Theses and Dissertations

My work considers our affectual relationship to a rapidly changing environment through ideas about the philosophy and representation of nature, materiality, and the uncanny. In this text, I trace my artistic explorations of notions of apocalypse and catastrophe as they lead me to a deepened ecological viewpoint.

Dietary Development And Nutritional Ontogeny In Gorilla Beringei : A Multi-Layered, -Omics Approach, Emma C. Cancelliere

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In species who consume folivorous diets, immature individuals must contend with the challenges of extracting nutrients from fibrous foods before dietary adaptations and strategies are fully developed. Additionally, immatures have distinct nutritional needs to support their stage-specific metabolic and biophysiological requirements. To meet these stage-specific needs, while constrained by underdeveloped feeding strategies and digestive capacities, immatures may adopt distinct diets better suited to their specific developmental context. However, where dietary modification is constrained by low dietary diversity or landscape homogeneity, it is unclear how immature individuals compensate through alternative strategies. In turn, little is known about the nutritional and life …

The Picturesque And Its Decay: The Travel Writing And Journals Of Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, And Mary Shelley, Gabrielle Kappes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project puts forth the argument that when the late eighteenth century’s taste for nature and picturesque tourism had peaked, writers following in the picturesque tradition grappled with the limitations and confines of these aesthetic categories. In the chapters that follow, I present three authors, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley, who are all dissatisfied with the conventions of the picturesque. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Alfoxden Journal (1798) demonstrates the nuances of the picturesque instability where distinctions between nature and the cultural production of nature have become muddied. I then examine three tour narratives in order to draw attention to how …

Enclosures And Dichotomies: Coexistence Vs. Distance In The Poems Of John Clare, Jordan P. Finn

Theses and Dissertations

John Clare’s poetry emphasizes an affinity with environment by suspending the distinction between the inside (subject) and the outside (object). Clare’s identification with objects and perception rather than subjects and aesthetics renders his work as a prescient and radical example of ecological poetry in the Romantic period. Raymond Williams’ “green language” and Timothy Morton’s ambient poetics both cite Clare as an ideal figure for their above theories and evoke Clare as a writer who positions the environment as governing thought rather than thought governing the environment. This thesis especially relates Clare to Morton’s Ecology without Nature, a study of …

Hrísheimar: Fish Consumption Patterns, Wendi K. Coleman

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I examine the fish remain patterns at Hrísheimar, which have provided archaeologists with further evidence that inland sites such as those in the Mývatnssveit Region utilized both local freshwater and marine fish from the coastal regions as a part of their subsistence pattern.

Toward A Posthuman Ecology: Evolutionary Aesthetics In Transatlantic Romanticism, Kaitlin Mondello

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation traces the vibrant interchange between Romantic literature and science in the nineteenth century that necessitated new forms of aesthetics. I argue that Romantic writers and scientists co-created a new way of understanding nature that moved away from hierarchical anthropocentrism toward what I call “posthuman ecology.” This work explores shared scientific, literary, and philosophical sources for Erasmus and Charles Darwin, Mary and Percy Shelley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Emily Dickinson. I connect aesthetic innovation to ethics to ask more broadly how literature can provide an affective and effective space to represent and engage scientific discourse. I conclude that understanding …

Making Sounds, Patrick Costello

Theses and Dissertations

Using collaboration and performance as tools, I situate my personal story, my body, and my skills and interests within a contemporary landscape that is intersectional, full of partialities, and rooted in evolving ecologies.

Persistence Of Cultural Heritage In A Multicultural Context: Examining Factors That Shaped Voting Preferences In The 2016 Election, Anna M. Schwartz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The prevailing discourse about the myth of the “melting pot” of American culture implies that heritage cultures are eliminated in favor of a homogenous “American” norm. However, this myth belies the persistence of our cultural heritage in forming our attitudes, morals, and habitual patterns of thought, each of which shape how we participate in our democracy through voting. By contextualizing voting predictors such as authoritarianism, social dominance, and sexism in developmental and ecological theories, this dissertation shows how they are shaped by culture and transmitted through consumption of media and interaction with members of one’s community and family. In an …

Wood Trait Preferences Of Neotropical Xylophagous Beetles (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae), Christina Torres

Dissertations and Theses

Tree life history strategies are correlated with functional plant traits, such as wood density (WD), moisture content (MC), bark thickness (BT), and nitrogen content (N); these traits affect the nutrients available to xylophagous insects. Cerambycid beetles feed on substrates that vary in these traits, but little is known about how they affect community composition. The goal of this project is to document the abundance of two cerambycid subfamilies (Cerambycinae and Lamiinae) and the WD, MC, BT, and N content in the wood they eat. In a salvage project conducted adjacent to the Panama Canal, trees were felled and exposed to …

Evolving The Genre Of Empire: Gender And Place In Women's Natural Histories Of The Americas, 1688-1808, Diana Epelbaum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the eighteenth century, “natural history” was a capacious genre designation that alluded to conventions as diverse in their cultural and political resonances as they were in their applications within the New Science. My project is a genre study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural history text and art produced by women scientists, explorers, colonists, and early Americans writing the New World; it destabilizes rigid notions of genre that exclude women, suggesting that genre is by nature fluid, inclusionary as well as exclusionary. To this end, I return into conversation understudied naturalists Maria Sybilla Merian, Jane Colden, and Eliza Pinckney, who …

Connectivity: An Ecological Paradigm For The Study Of Bronze Age, Slobodan Mitrović

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Connectivity: an ecological paradigm for the study of Bronze Age” addresses the relationship between historic and prehistoric people, and the landscapes they inhabited, moved about, and continue to inhabit. It suggests alternative methodological approaches that have broader ramifications for the discipline of (Bronze Age) archaeology. By engaging the code and innovations stemming from ecology and digital technology, the research questions concern the interface – referred to as connectivity – between the archaeological sites, resources, networks of communication, and the conditions of archaeological knowledge acquisition. Drawing on published and new data, the aim of the project is to put forward a …

Living With Coyotes, Owen H. Agnew

Capstones

Coyotes have been slowly moving into New York State from Canada since the 1930s. They reached Westchester County and the Bronx decades ago, and their numbers have been slowly rising. Sighting in Manhattan reached an all-time high last spring, and pet attacks in Westchester County have increased slightly in the last several years. But the slight increase in sightings and pet attacks in recent years has been amplified on social media in towns like Chappaqua, New York, where anxiety and fear about coyotes has pitted neighbors against neighbors.

Main character Frank Vincenti is a Long Island barber and a self-proclaimed …

Ecology Of Terrorism: Cross-National Comparison Of Terrorist Attacks, Katharine A. Boyd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The term terrorism is used to describe a large range of behaviors conducted by a wide variety of groups. Terrorist groups differ in ideology, size, financial support, group longevity, and the number of alliances with other terrorist groups. Relatedly, terrorist groups conduct different number of attacks with varying intents to cause fatalities using diverse forms of violence. This study uses ecological theory to contextualize terrorist violence as a product of terrorist group traits in relation to the environmental context. It is hypothesized that terrorist violence is associated with group traits in relation to the varying political, social, and religious contexts …

Methodological Advancements For Improving Performance And Generating Ensemble Ecological Niche Models, Robert Boria

Dissertations and Theses

This study employs spatial filtering of occurrence data with the aim of reducing overfitting to sampling bias in ecological niche models (ENMs). Sampling bias in geographic space leads to localities that may also be biased in environmental space. If so, the model can overfit to those biases. As a preliminary test addressing this issue, we used Maxent, bioclimatic variables, and occurrence localities of a broadly distributed Malagasy tenrec, Microgale cowani (Family Tenrecidae: Subfamily Oryzorictinae). We modeled the abiotically suitable area of this species using three distinct datasets: unfiltered, spatially filtered, and rarefied unfiltered localities. To quantify overfitting and model performance, …