Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Urban Forest Dynamics: Untangling Ecosystem Patterns At Harbison State Forest, Derek Matchette

Theses and Dissertations

As expansion continues to push the wildland-urban interface farther into the suburbs and the landscape which surrounds cities, it will become more important to understand the factors that influence species composition in remaining green spaces. Harbison State Forest, an ~890-hectare urban forest provides a convenient setting to analyze species composition patterns within a multipurpose urban green space.

The factors that can create these patterns include environmental (topography, soil nutrient content, light, temperature, and precipitation), naturally occurring disturbances that alter these factors (e.g., fire, windthrow), and anthropogenic disturbances such as logging and prescribed burning.

I measured basal area by species on …

African Seminole Settlement Ecologies Of Early Nineteenth Century Florida, Jordan E. Davis

Theses and Dissertations

For over three centuries prior to the outbreak of the Second Seminole War [1835-1842], peoples of African and Native American descent independently and collectively formed multiple communities throughout what is now Florida. During the early 1990s, several ancestral African Seminole (otherwise known as “Black Seminole”) settlements were identified across Central Peninsular Florida, many of which were founded by self-emancipated Africans commonly referred to as maroons. Previous archaeological research at the African Seminole settlement of Pilaklikaha, or Abraham’s Old Town, has greatly stimulated both scholarly and public interest in tracing the historical trajectories of individual African-Native American communities while remaining attentive …

Modeling Early Archaic Mobility And Subsistence: Evaluating Resource Risk Across The South Carolina Landscape, Joseph E. Wilkinson

Theses and Dissertations

Previous models predicting Early Archaic mobility and subsistence strategies in South Carolina have evaluated behavioral negotiations of specific resource distributions. A new model is presented using empirical datasets that quantify and evaluate the quality and geographic distributions of lithic raw materials and drainage systems in the state. By utilizing datasets from private collections and landscape elevation data, this model is generated using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software in order to produce a "Risk Landscape" from which predictions of site density, artifact density, lithic raw material diversity, and the condition of lithic toolkit assemblages can be generated based on landscape location. …