Digital Commons Network^™

Exploring The Relationship Between Nature Connectedness And Belonging With Pro-Environmental Behavior In Brazilian National Parks, Sonia Maria Sfair Kinker

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Park managers in Brazil have recently understood the power of recreational experiences to stimulate a relationship with nature and commitment to its conservation. In their discourse, the central supposition is that those connected to nature and feeling a sense of belonging to nature tend to be more mindful of the environment and more supportive of nature conservation. However, providing visitation opportunities that effectively facilitate visitor experiences in nature has been a managers' lonely endeavor dependent on their skills and beliefs about visitation and no clear visitation policy. Therefore, this study aimed at providing a theoretical base and empirically tested frameworks …

Transboundary Marine Management In The Sulu-Sulawesi Seascape, Lindsey G. Ellett

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Transboundary conservation aims to facilitate environmental conservation and management at the ecosystem level by operating across political boundaries, through the cooperation of two or more countries. Though there is increased interest and advocation for transboundary conservation initiatives around the world, there remains a limited understanding of how they function on-the-ground. Within this study, I address these gaps in knowledge through two phases of research, both focusing on the Sulu-Sulawesi Seascape as a case study site. Phase I involved a policy analysis of Indonesian, Malaysia, and Philippine policies related to fisheries, coastal zones and protected areas, and environmental quality. Through this …

Modeling Stromatolite Formation With Diffusion-Limited Aggregation, Laura E. Stevens

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Stromatolites, microbialites, and other microbially induced sedimentary structures exist in the rock record as far back as 3.6 billion years ago and continue to form in the present day. Better characterizing these structures and better understanding how they form is crucial in distinguishing these biosignatures from similar, abiotic structures, which can help us to understand the conditions of early Earth and early Mars. To that end, I have modified DLA 3D EXT, an open-source stromatolite modeling program, to more closely reflect the process of microbial trapping-and-binding by filamentous microbes in a calcite-precipitating hot spring system. This modified program includes a …

Summer Vacation In The Wild: An Historical And Archaeological Study Of Timber Land Fraud In The Tobacco Plains, Montana, Tyler Jay Rounds

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

During the 19th and early 20th century, Congress passed several laws intended to allow average Americans the chance to acquire portions of the public domain for their own benefit. However, contemporary observers and historians alike have noted that several of these laws—especially the Homestead Act and the Timber and Stone Act—were instead used by speculators and lumber companies to amass large landholdings by orchestrating and purchasing fraudulent entries. Local historical tradition suggests that Eureka Lumber Company, Bonners Ferry Lumber Company, and J. Neils Lumber Company employed this tactic within the Kootenai National Forest (KNF), though the veracity of such claims …

Nitrogen Dynamics And Transport Along Flowpaths In A Rural Wetland-Stream Complex, Colton Kyro

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Human activities have doubled the rate of nitrogen inputs onto the landscape resulting in elevated nitrogen concentrations in our streams. Anthropogenically applied nitrogen is largely transported to stream networks via groundwater movement. Groundwater discharge occurs in distinct points along a stream but whose influences can often persist far beyond that area due to insufficient biogeochemical removal of imported nitrogen potentially causing alterations in community structure and precipitating large algae blooms. To understand the factors governing nitrogen abundance in a historical polluted stream, I used a mass-balance approach to quantify groundwater-surface water interaction and the magnitude of groundwater nitrogen input and …

Social Influences And Social Desirability On Recollections Of Childhood Bullying, Jaynee L. Bohart

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Parents and peers play important roles in shaping attitudes toward a variety of matters during adolescence. However, little research has investigated parental and peer influence on developing attitudes toward bullying. Further, few studies have looked at whether socially desirable responding (SDR) impacts self-reports in bullying research. To address these gaps in literature, the current study recruited college students from a mid-sized public university in the Rocky Mountain region of the United States to complete a survey. The survey assessed the participants’ past attitudes toward bullying, perceptions of their parents’ and peers’ influence on their attitudes, and bullying participant roles during …

School Leadership Under Apartheid South Africa As Portrayed In The Apartheid Archive Projectand Interpreted Through Freirean Education, Kevin Bruce Deitle

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This qualitative study employed a phenomenological approach to examine how teachers, school leaders, and students rationalize their roles in the educational process when their institution is bounded by an educational system that openly strives against them. For a context, this study examined apartheid-era South Africa, from 1948 to 1994, which established social and administrative policies that deliberately curtailed the education of Indigenous and other South Africans, as a means of oppressing non-European ethnic groups.

In lieu of face-to-face interviews, stories and interviews submitted to The Apartheid Archive Project, curated by the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa, portrayed …

Integrated Primary Care Is Associated With Greater Job Satisfaction And Less Burnout Among Montana’S Medical And Behavioral Health Care Providers, C. Ivie English

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Most research to date on integrated behavioral health (IBH) or integrated primary care (IPC) practices has examined primary care settings nested within academic medical centers or clinics within the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. This leaves clinics in rural and/or underserved communities without much representation in the literature. Likewise, provider job satisfaction and burnout have rarely been linked to the IPC model. Through an online cross-sectional survey of medical and behavioral health care providers in various primary care-based health care settings throughout Montana, this cross-sectional study demonstrates that degree of behavioral health integration significantly predicts greater job satisfaction and lower …

"Its Own Little City": Service Work In Truck Stops, Michelle Elizabeth Williams

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Montana truck stops act as a meeting place for long-haul truckers, vacationers, local commuters, and the workers simply trying to earn a living. The employees at such truck stops must navigate working-class customer service norms while interacting with a unique and diverse set of customers. The ethnographic and interview data that I collected during the 2020 offers a unique view of how customer service employees fared during political unrest, global health concerns, and financial struggle. Additionally, this study highlights the power dynamics that exist in the service industry by examining how such dynamics manifest in the interactions surrounding face masks, …

Leadership: Supporting Students With Asd And The School Wide Community, Chelsae Joy Larson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Leaders work collaboratively with all stakeholders to help understand what systems and supports need to be put into place to meet individual needs. School leaders must create continuous learning opportunities and reinforcement systems for educators in the areas of evidence-based practices, individualized teaching strategies, and student transition plans. Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) require consistent and structured programming starting in preschool and carrying through to post-secondary education. It is imperative that school leaders provide the appropriate training and supports to educators and specialists in relation to executive functioning skills and evidence-based practices to best support students with ASD. This …

Reading The Bones: A Taphonomic Investigation Of Archaeofaunal Remains Recovered From Site 48pa551, Northwest Wyoming, Morgan H. Thurman

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This is a preliminary taphonomy study of archaeofaunal remains found at site 48PA551, more commonly known as the Dead Indian Creek Site. 48PA551 is a well-known and commonly cited example of a McKean Complex occupation dating to between 3,800 and 4,800 B.P. The University of Montana held a field school at the site conducting small test excavations under the supervision of Dr. Anna Marie Prentiss in 2018. In the course of this testing a highly fragmentary bone bed consisting mostly of mammalian bone, cervids largely, was discovered eroding into the nearby creek. Ten 50 x 50 cm quadrants were excavated …

A Hand-Held Structure From Motion Photogrammetric Approach To Riparian And Stream Asseessment And Monitoring, Joseph M. Dehnert, Joseph Dehnert

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Two of the biggest weaknesses in stream restoration and monitoring are: 1) subjective estimation and subsequent comparison of changes in channel form, vegetative cover, and in-stream habitat; and 2) the high costs in terms of financing, human resources, and time necessary to make these estimates. Remote sensing can be used to remedy these weaknesses and save organizations focused on restoration both money and time. However, implementing traditional remote sensing approaches via autonomous aerial systems or light detection and ranging systems is either prohibitively expensive or impossible along small streams with dense vegetation. Hand-held Structure from Motion Multi-view Stereo (SfM-MVS) photogrammetric …

Aquatic Locomotion In Birds – Biomechanics, Morphometrics, And Evolution, Anthony Barrett Lapansky

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The entire diversity of life on earth exists in air or water. Whether an organism lives in air or water provides the most fundamental description of its physical world and establishes an organism’s ecological niche on the most essential level. Because these two fluids are vastly different from one another, they also dictate, via the process of natural selection, the morphology and physiology of the organisms which call them home. By studying how organisms interact with these fluids – to locomote or obtain food, for example – we have the ability to not only link organism form and function, but …

Activating Hope: How Functional Support Can Improve Hope In Unemployed Individuals, Rylee P. Walter

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Hope is an adaptive mindset that enables one to work toward their goals and thwart obstacles they encounter in doing so. However, the stress associated with some situations, such as unemployment, can block hopeful thinking, causing one to become stuck in unmotivated and inflexible thinking patterns and therefore potentially trapped in the distressing situation. Through an online survey, this study explored whether functional support would predict reportedly low hope states in unemployed individuals (N = 235). More specifically, we predicted that functional support would encourage reappraisal of (and thus buffer against) distressing unemployment-related emotions, with that reappraisal altering the …

The Influence Of Wildland Urban Interface Areas On Resource Assignments To Large Wildland Fires, Kurt Swimley

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

We examine the relationship between U.S. wildfire resource assignments and fire proximity to inhabited areas. Climate change and previous vegetation buildup have enabled more severe fire seasons, while more structures are being developed near vegetated, wildland areas. These changes have contributed to a steep increase in the overall cost of wildfire management, the annual costs of which regularly rise into the billions (NIFC, 2021). Still, the extent to which each driver of suppression costs contributes to the increase in spending is not entirely understood. Previous studies have shown that more suppression resources are allocated to fires near inhabited areas, …

A Moral Influenza: An Historical Archaeological Investigation Of The Prohibition Era In The United States 1920-1933, Kelli Michele Casias

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The following exploration of National Alcohol Prohibition in the United States employs an interdisciplinary approach to understand the impetus of the large-scale defiance of liquor laws and to identify the physical manifestations of the social process of mass resistance in the archaeological record. Historical documentation, newspaper publications, oral histories, landscape analysis of road development in Montana, and an archaeological survey of a mountain homestead site where manufacturer of illicit alcohol took place are used to contextualize the Prohibition Era from the perspective of the offender. The research goals of this work are varied and include documentation of the archaeological footprint …

Biobehavioral Predictors Of Executive Function Decline In Mid- And Late Life Adults, Cali Anne Caughie

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Using data from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) Longitudinal Study of Health and Well-Being, this study examined high frequency heart rate variability as a longitudinal predictor of cognitive change in key executive function domains: inhibition, shifting, and updating. This study further explored the interactions between HF HRV and important health factors (inflammation, stress, sleep, and mood and anxiety) in predicting executive function decline.

The results of this investigation demonstrated that while high frequency heart rate variability and inhibition decline were correlated, HF HRV was not a significant predictor of decline in any executive function. However, results did show …

Linking Seismicity And Time-Variant Loading Of The Solid Earth, Mason Perry

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Earth’s surface is constantly being stressed and deformed by countless dynamic processes that operate across a vast number of time and spatial scales. In this dissertation, I use geodetic observations in combination with time series analysis, basic numerical modeling, and a number of statistical tools to investigate the sources loading and observable deformation of earth’s surface and their relation to seismic activity.

In Central Asia, compressive stresses resulting from the collision of the Indian subcontinent and Eurasia have created a tectonically complex region that includes the best present-day example of ongoing subduction of continental lithosphere. Here, continental Eurasia is actively …

Theories On The Pedagogy Of Asla (Accelerated Second Language Acquisition): A Piikuni Student Approach, Robert Patrick Hall

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis is an exploration in the pedagogy of ASLA to understand how and why it is successful at being a methodology that enables an instructor to teach endangered languages effectively. The paper explores the current deficits within language revitalization programs and argues that ASLA can improve endangered language programs

The Effects Of Heavy Metal Contamination In Soil On Dna Degradation After Decomposition, Samantha Hofland

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The application of DNA is an ever-expanding field of research with many implications in the field of forensic investigation. Research into DNA obtained from soil is ongoing and suggests a new avenue in forensic investigation. This research seeks to understand the effects of heavy metal on the preservation of DNA within soil after decomposition of remains. Using pigs as a proxy for human remains, the effects of heavy metal contamination on the microbial environment and endogenous pig DNA was observed. This gave broad insight into the effect of surface burial and Western Montana; summer climate has on DNA degradation.

Lightman, Cynthia Ann Marbut

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

My thesis is a work of fiction wherein I imagine some of the potential transformations climate change will bring to the planet. Lightman is set in the near future with a touch of science fiction. The novel explores the power of community and the importance of multiple perspectives and knowledge systems. The plot revolves around the struggles of a group of characters living in a post-apocalyptic moment created by climate change. In this time, all modern infrastructure collapses, leaving my characters to learn how to survive without benefit of technology while traveling through a wilderness. They will encounter risks to …

Beside| |Between, Brooke J. Armstrong

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Beauty and the grotesque both induce physical sensations in the body. Pleasure and displeasure are two points on the same line. They are not mutually exclusive. Like the body and the vessel, like the self and the other all things exist in reciprocity. The capability of holding brings agency, breaking down perceptions of of subject-object relationships. The works presented in this paper represent a merging and a transformation of perceived separate entities. Craft history and processes inform the work present in the thesis exhibition, Beside| |Between.

Development Of A Novel In-Situ Chemical Sampler For Aquatic Systems, Alec W. Johnson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

There has been a long-standing need to study Dissolved Organic Carbon (DOC) within aquatic systems. DOC is an important water quality parameter that provides insights into ecological and carbon cycle processes in aquatic systems. DOC is not easily studied due to traditional, labor-intensive sampling methods. Often, optical (e.g. fluorescence) proxy estimations for DOC are used instead of directly sampling for DOC. Using either low frequency measurements or proxy estimations for DOC can lead to inadequate understanding of the natural processes that control DOC in aquatic systems.

This thesis outlines a in-situ sampler that will be capable of collecting, preserving, and …

Petrogenesis And Tectonic Implications Of Cordierite-Orthoamphibole Gneisses (Cog) In The Nw Wyoming Province, Brianna K. Crenshaw Ms

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Studying cordierite orthoamphibole gneisses (COG) from five different mountain ranges across the Montana Metasedimentary Terrane (MMT) of the Wyoming Province offers a unique opportunity to elucidate the enigmatic origins and petrogenesis of the lithology in addition to gaining a further understanding of Precambrian crustal assembly processes. Geochemical analyses suggest that COG originates from a basalt that underwent metasomatic alteration, likely via seawater, prior to metamorphism. Moreover, COG is considered to represent oceanic crust that was part of the epicontinental sea adjacent to the Wyoming Province before collision with the Medicine Hat Block. Field observations of associated lithologies such as marbles, …

The Ecology Of Puha: Identity, Orientation, And Shifting Perceptions Reflected Through Material Culture And Socioreligious Practice, Aaron Robert Atencio

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This dissertation explores the assertions that changes in form, function, practice, and perceptions of puha primarily arose from the dispossession of landscapes and oppression of specific religious practices due to Euro-American contact, resource depletion, and reservation confinement. The reservation era placed the indigenous populace into a state of purgatory where treaties and peace relations were consistently repositioned and reneged. The perceptions of the indigenous inhabitants pre and post Euro-American contact detail critical moments that assisted in shaping the dynamic relationship between socioreligious perceptions and the Eastern Shoshone’s identity. What is displayed is a unique set of circumstances that assisted in …

No Answering Riot, Jacob Z. Bienvenue

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

I left this morning for Portland, Oregon—could be for good. Told my dear mother I was taking a day trip then hopped in her dinged up black Audi and felt the thing hum alive beneath me. Her speakers were still good, so I threw on a playlist with Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie and all of the ragged traintrack prophets and went roaring out of those gilded hills for hopefully ever. There was no traffic getting to Sacramento; it took me just twenty minutes to hit the I-5 North juncture and after that I went peeling up the central flatlands …

The Worm In Heaven, Daniela Rae Garvue

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Buffalo In The Mountains: Mapping Evidence Of Historical Bison Prescence And Bison Hunting In Glacier National Park, Kyle Langley

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This study explores 10,000+ years of bison presence and bison hunting within Glacier National Park. Despite significant faunal evidence of bison presence in the area, few people today associate bison with Glacier National Park. Previous archaeological studies have found bison faunal remains and evidence of bison hunting throughout the eastern half of the park going back thousands of years. Furthermore, local tribes such as the Kootenai and Blackfeet maintain oral traditions that detail ancestral hunting strategies and practice in the region. This project reviews all of these sources to contextualize the archaeological signatures of bison and tell the story of …

Teacher’S Use Of Reflective Thinking, Kathleen M. Hill

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This qualitative case study examined how teachers use reflective thinking. Teachers participating in a professional development course designed to increase knowledge and understanding of reflective thinking were investigated. Two of those teachers were looked at in depth. Data was collected and organized on four teacher practices: planning, implementation, questioning, and professional reflection. Based on the findings, teachers use reflective thinking for lesson planning, interacting with students, and for personal and professional growth. Lasting impacts on professional reflection were evident for one participant after ten months. This study tells the story of two teacher’s understanding and use of reflective thinking.

Prepare To Pivot: Shifting From The Projection Surface To The Zoom Screen Necessitated By Global Pandemic, David E. Mills-Low

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Design for theatre is an endeavor in which the physical, the corporeal, the defined, is applied to an ephemeral artform, one meant to happen only in the moment and then fade away. As such, building the world of the theatrical space, whether physical or digital, is similar to shooting at a moving target. While one angle of approach may be perfect for a moment, being ready and flexible enough to pivot, whether to reimagine due to limitation or to adjust an entire project due to calamity, like the shift from in person to online streaming. This paper investigates the joy …