Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Edible Seaweeds Of The Salish Sea: Contaminant Levels And Comparison With Common Foods, Jennifer Hahn

WWU Graduate School Collection

To increase our seafood safety knowledge with respect to seaweed, this study compares contaminant concentrations in three species of edible seaweeds (Fucus distichus, F. spiralis, and Nereocystis luetkeana) harvested from 43 locations within the Salish Sea from June to September 2015. Fucus spp. were analyzed for 162 chemicals: 17 metals, 94 persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and 51 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Nereocystis luetkeana was analyzed for metal content. Two health-based screening levels were calculated, one on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) Reference Dose (RfD) and the other on the USEPA Cancer Slope Factor (CSF) when these data …

Assessing Energy Justice: The Case Of Xwe’Chi’Exen, Cherry Point, Andrea Gemme

WWU Graduate School Collection

Energy justice, based within the roots and philosophy of environmental justice, is a relatively new framework of assessing justice throughout our energy systems from production to consumption (Jenkins et al., 2020). Environmental justice emerged in the 1980s in response to the disproportionate burden that low income and communities of color experience from environmental harms and their negative externalities (Bullard & Johnson, 2000). Energy justice applies these concepts to our energy systems in a variety of ways. This research operationalizes one popular definition of energy justice to assess the presence of justice within the siting proposal of an energy infrastructure project. …

Vamos Outdoors Project’S Innovative Schools Based Programs During Covid-19: Program Assessment, Andrew Basabe

WWU Graduate School Collection

This Masters of Arts Project describes the evolution of a pilot program to a scale model that served youth in the Bellingham School District who were identified as “10% furthest from opportunity” and/or Latinx, Migrant, and English Language Learner (ELL) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Vamos Outdoors Project delivered the pilot project in partnership with the Bellingham School District, serving students in-person and on-site to improve educational and socio-emotional outcomes during online learning and quarantine. The scale model, Connections, was delivered as a multi-organizational community partnership with the same goals. As the literature describes, Latinx, ELL, and Migrant youth experience inequitable …

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. …

Public Lands And Climate Change: An Evaluation Of The North Cascadia Adaptation Partnership, Kristen Doering

WWU Graduate School Collection

Public lands in the United States serve critical roles for ecosystems and humans alike, but they have become increasingly vulnerable to climate change. Many agencies have attempted to reduce negative effects of climate change through adaptation planning. This research evaluates the implementation of the North Cascadia Adaptation Partnership (NCAP), which was developed in 2010 to provide science-based guidance to land managers in the North Cascades Ecosystem (Raymond, Peterson & Rochefort, 2013). The NCAP consists of four federal land units: North Cascades National Park, Mt. Baker- Snoqualmie National Forest, Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, and Mt. Rainier National Park. Relying on survey and …