Digital Commons Network^™

Utilizing Remote Sensing Technology To Relocate Lubra Village And Visualize Flood Damages, Ronan Wallace

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Honors Projects

As weather patterns change worldwide, isolated communities impacted by climate change go unnoticed and we need community and habitat-conscious solutions. In Himalayan Mustang, Nepal, indigenous Lubra village faces threats of increasing flash flooding. After every flood, residual concrete-like sediment hardens across the riverbed, causing the riverbed elevation to rise. As elevation increases, sediment encroaches on Lubra’s agricultural fields and homes, magnifying flood vulnerability. In the last monsoon season alone, the village witnessed floods swallowing several fields and damaging two homes. One solution considers relocating the village to a new location entirely. However, relocation poses a challenging task, as eight centuries …

Scientists And Activists Work To Save The Planet, Myriam G. Vidal Valero

Capstones

Climate change and human intervention in nature are affecting people, ecosystems and ways of living all over the world. This portfolio of environmental pieces showcases the dire consequences of not addressing these issues, how solutions can be reached and the challenges facing those who try to change things.

Practicing Re-Enlightenment : Technology Revisited In The Age Of Climate Change, Gyuri Kang

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In the age of climate change, the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh asks whether humanity is prepared for the unthinkable nature of climate events. The Earth’s climate is changing faster than humans can expect and adapt. Ghosh warns that modern people are too deranged to imagine in what forms of changes are approaching. His term, derangement, suggests that humans are no longer able to imagine the future world shaped by climate change. The signals of the unexpectable realities of climate change, however, may be hidden in existing knowledge. Here, technology can help us access this hidden knowledge through its ability to …

Atlantic Surfclam (Spisula Solidissima) Population Demographics And Distribution Along The Middle Atlantic Bight, Mauricio González Díaz

OES Theses and Dissertations

The Atlantic surfclam (Spisula solidissima) is a long-lived benthic biomass dominant organism that occurs on the Middle Atlantic Bight (MAB) continental shelf between 10 m and 50 m. Trends in Atlantic surfclam population specific growth and mortality rates were analyzed using four decades of age and length observations obtained from NOAA stock surveys from the 1980s to 2010s in six regions distributed along the MAB. Atlantic surfclam specific growth rates and asymptotic lengths were estimated from the age and length observations using the von Bertalanffy growth model. The analysis showed that the Atlantic surfclam median asymptotic length in …

Estimation Of Economic Risk From Coastal Natural Hazards In Louisiana, Rubayet Bin Mostafiz

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Louisiana, U.S.A., is among the most vulnerable areas globally to coastal natural hazards, with risk vulnerability likely increasing. The risks associated with non-tropical-cyclone hazards in Louisiana’s coastal zone have been understudied. This research enhances present and future (i.e., 2050) Louisiana risk assessment using locally-weighted, model-based hazard frequency/intensity and population projections.

Results suggest that property risks associated with extreme cold temperature and tornado are and will remain costlier than those for hail and lightning. Property risks of extreme cold temperature and hail are projected to decrease with the expected warming temperatures, with those of all four of these hazards peaking in …

Bison Movements Change With Weather: Implications For Their Continued Conservation In The Anthropocene, Nicholas A. Mcmillan, Samuel D. Fuhlendorf, Barney Luttbeg, Laura E. Goodman, Craig A. Davis, Brady W. Allred, Robert G. Hamilton

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Faculty Publications

Animal movement patterns are affected by complex interactions between biotic and abiotic landscape conditions, and these patterns are being altered by weather variability associated with a changing climate. Some animals, like the American plains bison (Bison bison L.; hereafter, plains bison), are considered keystone species, thus their response to weather variability may alter ecosystem structure and biodiversity patterns. Many movement studies of plains bison and other ungulates have focused on point-pattern analyses (e.g., resource-selection) that have provided information about where these animals move, but information about when or why these animals move is limited. For example, information surrounding the …

Air Quality In The Mountain West, 2018-2020, Zachary Billot, Zachary Walusek, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Environment

This fact sheet examines the state of air quality, including ozone levels and particle pollution, throughout the Mountain West from 2018 to 2020. Data from the American Lung Association “State of the Air” report is used to determine the quality of air in the Mountain West states of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah.

Dr. Kim Scipes: Building A Network Of Compassion In A World Waiting To Be United, Kayla Vasilko

Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement

In his career, Dr. Kim Scipes has been globally active in the labor movement for almost 40 years and has published over 240 articles and book reviews. Additionally, Dr. Scipes has authored four books, three of which were completed while Dr. Scipes taught at PNW (the first two while he was teaching four courses a semester); his publication list is accessible via: https://www.pnw.edu/faculty/kim-scipes-ph-d/publications/, a listing that strongly illustrates his impressive range of work and dedication to advancing knowledge not just for the university, but for the world. Dr. Scipes’ Sociology 404 course (Environment and Social Justice) gives students a …

Costs Of Forest Carbon Sequestration In The Presence Of Climate Change Impacts, Alla Golub, Brent Sohngen, Yongyang Cai, John Kim, Thomas Hertel

Department of Agricultural Economics Faculty Publications

Forests play a critical role in mitigating climate change, and, at the same time, are predicted to experience large-scale impacts of climate change that will affect the efficiency of forests in mitigation efforts. Projections of future carbon sequestration potential typically do not account for the changing economic costs of timber and agricultural production and land use change. We integrated a dynamic forward-looking economic optimization model of global land use with results from a dynamic global vegetation model and meta-analysis of climate impacts on crop yields to project future carbon sequestration in forests. We find that the direct impacts of climate …

The Domestic Impact Of International Shaming: Evidence From Climate Change And Human Rights, Faradj Koliev, Douglas D. Page, Jonas Tallberg

Political Science Faculty Publications

Do international shaming efforts affect citizens’ support for government policies? While it is a frequent claim in the literature that shaming works through domestic politics, we know little about how and when international criticism affects domestic public opinion. We address this question through an originally designed survey experiment in Sweden, which (i) compares the effects of international shaming in two issue areas—human rights and climate change, and (ii) tests whether government responses to criticism moderate the impact of shaming. Our main findings are fourfold. First, we find substantial effects of international shaming on domestic public opinion. These effects hold across …

Latitudinal Variance In The Drivers And Pacing Of Warmth During Mid-Pleistocene Mis 31 In The Antarctic Zone Of The Southern Ocean, Jonathan P. Warnock, Brendan T. Reilly, Maureen E. Raymo, Michael E. Weber, Victoria Peck, Trevor Williams, Linda Armbrecht, Ian Bailey, Stefanie Brachfeld, Zhiheng Du, Gerson Fauth, Marga M. García, Anna Glüder, Michelle Guitard, Marcus Gutjahr, Sidney Hemming, Iván Hernández-Almeida, Freida S. Hoem, Ji Hwan Hwang, Mutsumi Iizuka, Yuji Kato, Bridget Lee, Yasmina M. Martos, Suzanne O’Connell, Lara F. Pérez, Thomas A. Ronge, Osamu Seki, Lisa Tauxe, Shubham Tripathi, Xufeng Zheng, Joseph Stoner, Reed P. Scherer

Department of Earth and Environmental Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Early Pleistocene Marine Isotope Stage (MIS)-31 (1.081–1.062 Ma) is a unique interval of extreme global warming, including evidence of a West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) collapse. Here we present a new 1,000-year resolution, spanning 1.110–1.030 Ma, diatom-based reconstruction of primary productivity, relative sea surface temperature changes, sea-ice proximity/open ocean conditions and diatom species absolute abundances during MIS-31, from the Scotia Sea (59°S) using deep-sea sediments collected during International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 382. The lower Jaramillo magnetic reversal (base of C1r.1n, 1.071 Ma) provides a robust and independent time-stratigraphic marker to correlate records from other drill cores in the …

Wildfire Risk In Mountain West States, 2017-2021, Olivia K. Cheche, Corryn Richardson, Zachary Billot, Miguel Soriano Ralston, Vanessa Booth, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Environment

This fact sheet examines data on wildfire destruction in the Mountain West states of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. The original report from the Insurance Information Institute presents findings on percent of properties at risk of wildfire destruction, the number of wildfires by state, and numbers of acres burned per state.

Guest Editorial: Environmental Degradation And Genocide, Emily Sample, Henry Theriault

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Full Issue 16.1

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Wooster Magazine: Summer 2022, Caitlin Paynich Stanowick

Wooster Magazine: 2021-2030

The summer 2022 issue of Wooster magazine celebrates the return of the Senior Research Symposium, highlighting seniors whose Independent Study research propelled them toward their next steps in their careers and graduate work. It also features research in climate anxiety by Susan Clayton, professor of psychology, that is drawing international attention. More than 30 years of students participated in a physics experiment with a pile of beads that has real-world applications in to avalanches, landslides, and even traffic patterns. The feature details how it works, alumni who participated, and how students and Professor Susan Lehman plan to uncover new data. …

Effects Of Forest Restoration On The Recovery Of Dead Wood, Associated Arthropods, And Insect-Mediated Wood Decomposition, Estefania Fernandez Barrancos

Dissertations

Dead wood represents 8% of terrestrial carbon stocks and is an important source of habitat and food for decomposer and non-decomposer arthropods. However, anthropogenic disturbance reduces the amount of dead wood, putting at risk the presence of a habitat that is essential for many arthropods and other organisms that rely on it for food and shelter. Forest restoration aims to assist the recovery of ecosystems that have been damaged or destroyed and could be a means to recover both dead wood and its associated arthropod communities. This doctoral dissertation lies at the intersection of climate change, biodiversity loss and ecological …

The Great Delusion, Beth Johnston

Masters Theses

The climate crisis is a wicked problem that poses many obstacles for action and understanding. This thesis is a non-linear accumulation of academic essays, interpolated with lists, anecdotal observations, data, and artwork that together explore the entanglements and complications of the climate crisis and my journey in making artwork as a response to those complications. The thesis surveys six bodies of artwork created over the course of graduate school, which use photography, sculptural installation, performance, and video to illustrate various topics and methodologies. Grounded in research on environmental justice, this essay explores temporal disjunctures, climate data encounters, the decolonization of …

Designing Narrative-Based Interfaces For Collective Action: A Case Study Using Amazon, Climate Change, And Consumer Behavior, Catherine Parnell

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Climate change is the most pressing issue facing future generations. Amongst expanses of the population there is a lack of collective action on environmental issues, as there is a large gap between awareness and behavior change. This study suggests persuasive design that utilizes a narrative framing as a solution to reduce barriers to engaging in issues of collective action. Through extensive need-finding studies to understand target users, this thesis uses online-shopping via Amazon as a context for arguing that narrative can support actionable change in behavior. The technical artifact resulting from this research is a developed chrome extension and web …

Narrating Agricultural Resilience After Hurricane María: How Smallholder Farmers In Puerto Rico Leverage Self-Sufficiency And Collaborative Agency In A Climate-Vulnerable Food System, Abrania Marrero, Andrea Lόpez-Cepero, Ramón Borges-Méndez, Josiemer Mattei

Sustainability and Social Justice

Climate change is a threat to food system stability, with small islands particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events. In Puerto Rico, a diminished agricultural sector and resulting food import dependence have been implicated in reduced diet quality, rural impoverishment, and periodic food insecurity during natural disasters. In contrast, smallholder farmers in Puerto Rico serve as cultural emblems of self-sufficient food production, providing fresh foods to local communities in an informal economy and leveraging traditional knowledge systems to manage varying ecological and climatic constraints. The current mixed methods study sought to document this expertise and employed a questionnaire and narrative interviewing …

Cooperation Or Competition With China: Interest Groups And Us Policy On Climate Change, Lucia G. Green-Weiskel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the existence of two constellations of political forces, emphasizing their relationship to each other and the link between their interests related to China and climate change. It argues that two China-related alignments on climate issues are driven by their opposing approaches to US China relations in general in such a way that the latter predicts the former. These broad but opposing coalitions of political forces—one favoring and one opposing cooperation with China—are made up of think tanks, NGOs and industry groups, which have demonstrated a convergence in policy preferences over the course of two presidential administrations, democrat …

A Woman’S Place Is In The Resistance: An Ecofeminist Response To Climate Change, Olivia Johnson

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper addresses the unique impacts of climate change on women and gender diverse people throughout the world, and seeks to move beyond identifying them solely as victims by instead focusing on their dynamic role in environmental activism while addressing the need for a gendered approach to climate policy. The inclusion of gender is often absent in much of environmental literature, which leaves women’s experience of climate change unseen and unaddressed. Beginning with a case study of the Indigenous women of Standing Rock and their battle against the Dakota Access Pipeline, this paper seeks to understand the critical involvement of …

Surviving Future Pandemics: The Economic, Social, And Political Battle Against Climate Change And Infectious Diseases, Dayana Gonzalez

Student Theses 2015-Present

COVID-19 has been a rude wake-up call as it showed us how unprepared we are to fight off infectious diseases. This paper analyzes our political, social, and economic decisions to develop a plan against the future development of infectious diseases. Before the analysis, it is essential to understand that it is natural for infectious diseases to develop and spread; however, climate change has and will continue to exacerbate the number of diseases developed and spread. Chapter 1 provides data on how climate change has destroyed habitats and displaced millions of animals, forcing them to live under cramped conditions that have …

Sustainable Urban Planning: Turning The Concrete Jungle Into Green Buildings, Danielle Richardson

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper addresses the issue of greenhouse gas emissions – particularly those from buildings – within New York City and discusses ways to construct new sustainable buildings and retrofit existing buildings to both minimize greenhouse gas emissions as well as act as carbon sinks to absorb some of the emissions. Reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions is critical to NYC meeting its climate target goals, as detailed in the mayoral administrations’ PlaNYC and OneNYCenvironmental plans. This paper analyzes sustainable architecture and construction and presents various options and policies as to how to turn the city into a green city through …

Remedying Renewable Energy Research: Implementation Of Green Chemistry In Laboratories, Julia Mayes

Student Theses 2015-Present

One of the pillars of environmental studies is the analysis of the natural world and the research being done to rectify harmful human activity on it. Laboratory components in the fields of chemistry, biology, ecology, among others, are powerful tools for learning about the way our environment works and assessing how human activities harm it. More advanced laboratories conduct research in the pursuit of new technologies to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. Concurrently, this work yields large quantities of waste. While laboratories are inherently valuable to the field of environmental science, the waste created by them raises a question of net …

One Step At A Time: Duquesne University's Ninth Greenhouse Gas Inventory, Gabriella Zuccolotto, Brianna Marks

Duquesne University Greenhouse Gas Inventories

The ninth greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inventory was conducted for fiscal year 2021 (FY21), which began on July 1, 2020 and ended on June 30, 2021. Assembled by graduate assistants Gabriella Zuccolotto and Brianna Marks at the Center for Environmental Research and Education (CERE), these findings were compared with those derived from the previous inventories to assess trends in Duquesne University’s GHG emissions. Furthermore, this inventory discusses options for reducing Duquesne’s carbon footprint in future years.

Duquesne University’s total GHG emissions were 41,562.40 MT eCO2 for FY21. After calculating the full-time student equivalent and the full-time faculty/staff equivalents, SIMAP was …

Intersectional Approaches To Climate Action: A Comparative Study Of Women's Equality And Indigenous Voices In Iceland And New Zealand, Sixtine Foucaut

International Studies (MA) Theses

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges our world faces today and will be facing for generations to come, as nature and its ecosystems increasingly experience extreme weather patterns and irreversible environmental damage. Marginalized populations such as women and indigenous peoples have been disproportionately impacted by climate change and offer unique and valuable perspectives and lived experiences of climate change. This paper adopts an intersectional approach. Its comparative case study of Iceland and New Zealand explores how women and indigenous peoples have informally and formally contributed to climate action policies. This research analyzes the relationship between the Global Gender …

The Effects Of Increasing Ocean Temperatures On The Survivorship Of A Subtropical Population Of The Sea Urchin Arbacia Punctulata, Rhianna Clemons

Undergraduate Theses

Most sea urchin species have critical ecological roles in their ecosystems, such as keystone grazers. There is an increasing need to understand the impacts of rising temperatures on species that are vital to the health of their environments. Studies have shown that increasing temperatures may significantly negatively affect several important biological processes including reproduction, development, and excretion in many species including sea urchins. However, very little is known about the sea urchin species Arbacia punctulata. In this study, individuals were exposed to 21˚C (control, n = 12) and 27˚C (experimental, n = 12) for seven days, and survivorship was …

Climate Change And Racial Violence, Aidan Connors

Bryant University Undergraduate Journal

Climate change poses the greatest threat mankind has ever seen, not since WW2 is the damage potential so great for humanity. Humanity’s understanding of the dangers that climate change presents isn’t something new, newspaper archives show articles warning about the dangers of carbon output into the atmosphere as early as 1912 (Roney and Otamatea). Despite our knowledge of the dangers, the actions necessary to fight climate change aren’t being taken because of the risk to profits it presents for companies.

Downscaling Of Physical Risks For Climate Scenario Design, Enrico Biffis, Shuai Wang

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

Southeast Asia is arguably one of the areas most vulnerable to natural disasters due to its dense population, coastal urbanization, and rainfall variability driven by the local monsoon systems. In this report, we focus on the impact of global warming in the region along four climate dimensions: temperature, precipitation, wind speed and coastal surge. The latter represents the surge of water from the ocean in excess of astronomical tides. Our objective is to downscale the outputs of global climate models to temporal and spatial resolutions of interest to market participants wishing to quantify climate risk vulnerability via climate stress testing …

Examining The Impacts Of Flooding On Public Health, Lauren Gibson

Honors Theses

Over the past 10 years, South Carolina has experienced over five major weather events that have led to extreme flooding along the coast. These types of repeated major events have the potential to significantly impact people’s lives and livelihoods. When looking at the issue from a public health perspective, it is known that natural disasters such as flooding can negatively affect community health. However, little research has been done to analyze the impacts on individual health from flooding. This issue inspired a more in-depth research analysis to examine those health impacts from local Horry County residents. This research aims to …