Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Environmental Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 6 of 6

Full-Text Articles in Environmental Sciences

Magnitude And Rates Of Agriculturally-Induced Soil Erosion In The Midwestern United States, Evan Thaler Oct 2021

Magnitude And Rates Of Agriculturally-Induced Soil Erosion In The Midwestern United States, Evan Thaler

Doctoral Dissertations

Fertile, agricultural productive soils are essential for producing food for a growing global population. Soil erosion diminishes soil quality, threatens food security by decreasing crop productivity, and degrades ecosystem health through increased rates of sedimentation and runoff. Despite decades and thousands of soil erosion studies, robust scalable methods for estimating the magnitude and rates of soil erosion have been elusive. In this dissertation, we develop a remote sensing method for quantifying the areal extent of historical loss in an agricultural landscape and provide a method for estimating the total thickness of soil loss and rates of historical soil loss in …


Hydrologic Controls On Phosphorus Speciation And Mobilization In A Subalpine Watershed (East River, Colorado), Lucia Isobel Arthen-Long Oct 2021

Hydrologic Controls On Phosphorus Speciation And Mobilization In A Subalpine Watershed (East River, Colorado), Lucia Isobel Arthen-Long

Masters Theses

The cycling of phosphorus (P) through floodplain environments is critical to ecosystem productivity and has significant implications on both water quality and soil fertility. P export from soils in response to saturation has been well documented, but the relative vulnerability of specific P pools to mobilization remains poorly constrained, as do the mechanisms mediating its release. The prediction of P availability in and export from mountainous floodplain soils is of great importance as global climate change is projected to significantly alter precipitation regimes in alpine systems. This study combined a thorough characterization of P distribution across a hillslope to floodplain …


Algorithm Performance On The Estimation Of Cdom And Doc In The North Slopes Of Alaska, Monica Weisenbach Oct 2021

Algorithm Performance On The Estimation Of Cdom And Doc In The North Slopes Of Alaska, Monica Weisenbach

Masters Theses

Use of satellite imagery makes environmental monitoring easy and convenient with little of the logistics involved in planning sampling campaigns. Colored dissolved organic matter (CDOM) is an important component to track as a proxy for the large pool of dissolved organic carbon (DOC). In a world contending with the looming issue of global climate change, the ability to investigate the carbon cycle of inland to coastal environments allows for examination of the magnitude of carbon flowing through the system and potential changes over years. The Arctic region is a critical area for climate change impacts but is a difficult landscape …


Coastal Groundwater Catchments Of The Gulf Of Alaska, Aeon Russo Sep 2021

Coastal Groundwater Catchments Of The Gulf Of Alaska, Aeon Russo

Masters Theses

High latitude mountain environments are experiencing disproportionately adverse effects in a currently changing climate. The Gulf of Alaska (GoA) region is an exemplar of this. Dramatic shifts are occurring in the region’s freshwater reservoirs as glaciers retreat more with each passing year. Research in the region places much focus on observing and predicting climate driven shifts in glacier mass balance, surface discharge, and associated nutrient fluxes to the ocean. On the other hand, coastal groundwater discharge (CGD) is given very little attention. Global and near-global estimates of CGD indicate variable results spanning an order of magnitude. Focusing on regionally specific …


The Earth, William Clement Jan 2021

The Earth, William Clement

Sustainability Education Resources

The Earth is a 4-credit introduction to the Geosciences. This course is required for several majors in the College of Natural Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. These majors include Earth Systems, Environmental Science, and Geology. The course also fulfills a 4-credit Physical Science (PS) General Education requirement and may be an elective science course in a number of other majors. Our goal in Geology 101 is to provide a basic knowledge of how the Earth works, the role of the geologist in contemporary society, and the application of geologic knowledge in solving real world problems. These are broad …


Diversity, Globalization, And Sustainability: Introduction To Human Geography, Toby Applegate Jan 2021

Diversity, Globalization, And Sustainability: Introduction To Human Geography, Toby Applegate

Sustainability Education Resources

Diversity, Globalization, and Sustainability is a wide-ranging introduction to the ways people shape the world they live in. We will study the themes and concepts of human geography through the current issues and large questions that guide them. Lectures and reading will focus on the geographic aspects of cultural diversity, population issues, states vs. nations, the global economy, development, urbanization and the human transformation of the earth. We will cover major subdivisions of human geography including cultural geography, population geography, economic geography, social geography, political geography and environmental geography.