Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Sampling Bias Overestimates Climate Change Impacts On Forest Growth In The Southwestern United States, Stefan Klesse, R. Justin Derose, Christopher H. Guiterman, Ann M. Lynch, Christopher D. O’Connor, John D. Shaw, Margaret E.K. Evans

Wildland Resources Faculty Publications

Climate−tree growth relationships recorded in annual growth rings have recently been the basis for projecting climate change impacts on forests. However, most trees and sample sites represented in the International Tree-Ring Data Bank (ITRDB) were chosen to maximize climate signal and are characterized by marginal growing conditions not representative of the larger forest ecosystem. We evaluate the magnitude of this potential bias using a spatially unbiased tree-ring network collected by the USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program. We show that U.S. Southwest ITRDB samples overestimate regional forest climate sensitivity by 41–59%, because ITRDB trees were sampled at warmer and …

Keynote: Motivating Private Climate Governance: The Role Of The Efficiency Gap, Michael P. Vandenbergh

Arkansas Law Review

The topic of this symposium, “Environmental Sustainability and Private Governance,” is important and timely. In response to the shrinking federal role in environmental protection, many policy advocates have focused on the role of states and cities, but this symposium focuses on another important source of sustainability initiatives: the private sector, including corporations, households, civic and cultural organizations, religious organizations, private hospitals, colleges and universities, and other organizations. States, cities, and other subnational government responses are increasingly important, but the limited geographic reach of subnational governments constrains their ability to address many environmental problems. For instance, although twenty states have set …

Assessment Of The Effects Of Climate Change On Evapotranspiration With An Improved Elasticity Method In A Nonhumid Area, Lei Tian, Jiming Jin, Pute Wu, Guo-Yue Niu

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

Climatic elasticity is a crucial metric to assess the hydrological influence of climate change. Based on the Budyko equation, this study performed an analytical derivation of the climatic elasticity of evapotranspiration (ET). With this derived elasticity, it is possible to quantitatively separate the impacts of precipitation, air temperature, net radiation, relative humidity, and wind speed on ET in a watershed. This method was applied in the Wuding River Watershed (WRW), located in the center of the Yellow River Watershed of China. The estimated rate of change in ET caused by climatic variables is −10.69 mm/decade, which is close to the …

Quantifying The Impact Of Climate Change And Human Activities On Streamflow In A Semi-Arid Watershed With The Budyko Equation Incorporating Dynamic Vegetation Information, Lei Tian, Jiming Jin, Pute Wu, Guo-Yue Niu

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

Understanding hydrological responses to climate change and land use and land cover change (LULCC) is important for water resource planning and management, especially for water-limited areas. The annual streamflow of the Wuding River Watershed (WRW), the largest sediment source of the Yellow River in China, has decreased significantly over the past 50 years at a rate of 5.2 mm/decade. Using the Budyko equation, this study investigated this decrease with the contributions from climate change and LULCC caused by human activities, which have intensified since 1999 due to China’s Grain for Green Project (GFGP). The Budyko parameter that represents watershed characteristics …

Predicting Combined Effects Of Land Use And Climate Change On River And Stream Salinity, John Olson

John Olson

Can Farmers Adapt To Higher Temperatures? Evidence From India, Vis Taraz

Economics: Faculty Publications

Projections suggest that the damages from climate change will be substantial for developing countries. Understanding the ability of households in these countries to adapt to climate change is critical in order to determine the magnitude of the potential damages. In this paper, I investigate the ability of farmers in India to adapt to higher temperatures. I use a methodology that exploits short-term weather fluctuations as well as spatial variation in long-run climate. Specifically, I estimate how damaging high temperatures are for districts that experience high temperatures more or less frequently. I find that the losses from high temperatures are lower …

Climate Change Perceptions And Adaptation Among Small-Scale Farmers In Uganda: A Community-Based Participatory Approach, Thomas Derr

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Climate change in the East African country of Uganda is causing severe variations in the once predictable seasonal weather patterns that farmers had come to depend on. This, in combination with social and economic challenges, has significantly increased the vulnerability of farmers who make up the majority of Uganda’s population. Previous knowledge and observations suggest that Ugandan farmers may be reluctant or slow to change their practices in response to the changing climate. Strategies are therefore needed to identify challenges and sustainable solutions. This research used qualitative data collection methods known as participatory rural appraisal (PRA) and participatory action research …

Climate Change Implications For Irrigation And Groundwater In The Republican River Basin, Usa, Gengxin Ou, Francisco Munoz-Arriola, Daniel R. Uden, Derrel Martin, Craig R. Allen, Nancy Shank

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

This study investigates the influence of climate change on groundwater availability, and thereby, irrigation across political boundaries within the US High Plains aquifer. A regression model is developed to predict changes in irrigation according to predicted changes in precipitation and temperature from a downscaled dataset of 32 general circulation models (GCMs). Precipitation recharge changes are calculated with precipitation recharge curves developed for prognostic representations of precipitation across the Nebraska-Colorado-Kansas area and within the Republican River Basin focal landscape. Irrigation-recharge changes are scaled with changes in irrigation. The groundwater responses to climate forcings are then simulated under new pumping and recharge …

Impacts Of Climate Change And Bioenergy Markets On The Profitability Of Slash Pine Pulpwood Production In The Southeastern United States, Andres Susaeta, Pankaj Lal

Department of Earth and Environmental Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In this study, we assessed the impacts of climate change on the production of pulpwood and biomass for bioenergy, and the profitability of slash pine stands in the Southeastern United States. We employed the 3-PG (Physiological Processes Predicting Growth) model to determine the effects of future climates on forest growth and integrated it with a stand-level economic model to determine their impacts on optimal forestmanagement. We found that the average production of pulpwood increased for all sites by 7.5 m 3 ha -1 for all climatic scenarios and productivity conditions. In the case of forest biomass for bioenergy, the average …

Modern And Paleoecological Perspectives On A Terrestrial-Marine Linkage In The Falkland Islands, Dulcinea V. Groff

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Falkland Islands are a biodiversity hotspot in the South Atlantic Ocean, with some of the world’s most important populations of seabirds and seals. The impact of climate change on these marine populations and their coastal breeding habitat in the Falklands is unknown. Coastal grasslands of Poa flabellata (tussac grass) form critical breeding habitat for wildlife, but have been heavily degraded by the introduction of livestock in the 17^th century. This dissertation investigates the impacts of global change (climate change, grazing) on P. flabellata and its sensitivity to the fecal nutrient subsidies provided by marine wildlife. Chapter 1 provides …

Big Oil And Climate Change Denial, David Schelhaas

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"One of the Alliance’s most basic commitments is to free market economic development fueled by coal and oil that will, as they see it, lift the poor out of poverty."

Posting about the philosophy of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/big-oil-and-climate-change-denial/

Not Masters But Stewards Of The Earth, David Schelhaas

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"We are not servants of the earth but of the creator and Master of the earth, God."

Posting about the beliefs of the ­­­­­­­­Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/not-masters-but-stewards-of-the-earth/

Seared And Bleared, Smudged And Smelly, David Schelhaas

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"Most evangelicals oppose the very idea of climate change and are trying to inoculate their children so that they do not catch the 'climate concern' disease."

Posting about ­­­­­­­­why some Christians are climate change deniers from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/seared-and-bleared-smudged-and-smelly/

Book Review: Teaching Climate Change To Adolescents: Reading, Writing, And Making A Difference, Antonio Lopez

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents: Reading, Writing, and Making a Difference, is a book for English language arts and media literacy teachers that provides abundant resources for educators wanting to incorporate climate change instruction into their classrooms. This review explores the usefulness of the book and discusses more broadly the barriers and opportunities for incorporating environmental issues into media literacy education.

Unh Energy Task Force: 2017 Annual Report, Unh Energy Task Force

The Sustainability Institute Publications

The Energy Task Force (ETF) at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) was established in 2005 and is comprised of staff, faculty, and students. The ETF serves in an advisory capacity to the UNH President and makes recommendations on the full range of issues related to climate change and energy.

The fiscal year 2017 was a watershed year for the UNH and our commitment to renewable energy. Our greenhouse gas footprint is down 51% from the 2001 baseline and our electricity is now 100% powered by renewables. The University’s greenhouse gas emissions based on the number of students and gross …

Sea Squad, Liam Geary Baulch

The Goose

The Sea Squad is a band of cheerleaders against climate change. Taking action as a team in formation, they gather momentum, inviting all people to cheer with them, mimicking the infinitely expandable nature of the seas' molecular structure. The work was developed and performed as a bilingual project at Est-Nord-Est in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Quebec, Canada, and has since been performed and exhibited internationally. The following poems are some of the chants that Sea Squad use to get a crowd cheering together against climate change.

Does Environment Filtering Or Seed Limitation Determine Post-Fire Forest Recovery Patterns In Boreal Larch Forests?, Wen H. Cai, Zhihua Liu, Yuan Z. Yang, Jian Yang

Forestry and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Wildfire is a primary natural disturbance in boreal forests, and post-fire vegetation recovery rate influences carbon, water, and energy exchange between the land and atmosphere in the region. Seed availability and environmental filtering are two important determinants in regulating post-fire vegetation recovery in boreal forests. Quantifying how these determinants change over time is helpful for understanding post-fire forest successional trajectory. Time series of remote sensing data offer considerable potential in monitoring the trajectory of post-fire vegetation recovery dynamics beyond current field surveys about structural attributes, which generally lack a temporal perspective across large burned areas. We used a time series …

Waterfall Formation At A Desert River-Reservoir Delta Isolates Endangered Fishes, Charles N. Cathcart, Casey A. Pennock, Christopher A. Cheek, Mark C. Mckinstry, Peter D. Mackinnon, Mary M. Conner, Keith B. Gido

Wildland Resources Faculty Publications

Unforeseen interactions of dams and declining water availability have formed new obstacles to recovering endemic and endangered big-river fishes. During a recent trend of drying climate and declining reservoir water levels in the southwestern United States, a large waterfall has formed on two separate occasions (1989-1995 & 2001-present) in the transition zone between the San Juan River and Lake Powell reservoir because of deposited sediments. Because recovery plans for two large-bodied endangered fish species, razorback sucker (Xyrauchen texanus) and Colorado pikeminnow (Ptychocheilus lucius), include annual stockings in the San Juan River, this waterfall potentially blocks upstream …

Governance For A Changing Climate: Adapting Boston’S Built Environment For Increased Flooding, Stephanie Kruel, Rebecca Herst, David Cash

School for the Environment Publications

Climate Change is impacting everything in our society and in our world. The changes we are already experiencing are starting to multiply and accelerate. Determining how to respond to this new reality wisely within the governance and governmental structures that we have built is a complex challenge. Some might argue it is humankind’s greatest test. Given the monumental size of this task, it is difficult to simultaneously address all of the related issues both broadly and deeply. This is the third and final in a series of reports from the Sustainable Solutions Lab that were sponsored by the Boston Green …

High Net Loss Of Intertidal Wetland Coverage In A Maine Estuary By Year 2100, Jack R. Mclachlan

Biology and Ecology Faculty Scholarship

Rising sea levels and coastal land use are predicted to synergistically impact coastal wetlands by reducing their extent and ecosystem functioning through a process known as “coastal squeeze”. Impervious surfaces associated with coastal development prevent the natural process of wetland migration, whereby intertidal wetland area is lost at its seaward edge to rising low water lines, but is replaced by eroding uplands and accumulating new wetland at its landward edge. As these constructed surfaces prevent the replacement of lost wetland, intertidal wetlands are “squeezed” by rising sea levels until they disappear. This study uses geographic information system (GIS) to predict …

Review Of Curbing Catastrophe: Natural Hazards And Risk Reduction In The Modern World, Kira H. Hamman

Numeracy

Timothy H. Dixon. 2017. Curbing Catastrophe: Natural Hazards and Risk Reduction in the Modern World. (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press) 300 pp. ISBN 978-1108113663.

In Curbing Catastrophe, Timothy H. Dixon explores commonalities among natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and the meltdown at Fukushima. He identifies communication failure between scientists and policy makers as a major culprit in the devastation that results from such events and offers strategies for improving that communication. He includes optional in-depth scientific and quantitative examinations of the events and the resulting devastation, making the book appropriate for use …

The Melting ‘Crown Of The Continent’: Visual History Of Glacier National Park, Dori L. Gorczyca, Salma Monani, Sarah M. Principato

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

Glacier National Park (GNP), located in northwest Montana, US, was signed into existence on 11 May 1910 by then President William Howard Taft. Conservationist George Bird Grinnell was instrumental in lobbying for the park’s creation and negotiated the sale with the Blackfeet Indians. As an editor of the outdoor magazine Field and Stream, Grinnell learned about the region from writer James Willard Schultz and made his first visit there in 1885. Enticed and amazed by the glaciers of the area, the high Rocky Mountain alpine terrain, and the flora and fauna that thrived here, Grinnell advocated for the creation …

How Does Climate Change Affect Endophytic Fungi?, Amber Toussaint, Natalie Christian, Katy Heath

PRECS student projects

Plant-associated microorganisms can have major effects on plant health, but climate change can affect plant microbiomes. While it is unknown how climate change will affect aboveground plant-associated microorganisms, such as foliar endophytic fungi, we hypothesize that increased CO₂ concentrations will increase species richness and diversity in endophytic fungal communities, because increased plant photosynthesis under elevated CO₂ will increase the resources available to the fungi.

"Waste Is Not Just Waste Anymore": Deconstructing The Relationship Between Sustainable Waste Prevention And Individual Socio-Demographic Characteristics (The Juxtaposition Of Ushongo Mtoni Village And Moshi Urban, Tanzania), Mahalia Smith

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

I am going to tell you a story about humans — their lives, livelihoods, environments, and their individual relationships to sustainable waste prevention. As developing countries, such as Tanzania experience economic growth, waste overflow and proper waste disposal become even more arduous challenges. Thus, it is becoming increasingly important to explore sustainable solutions such as waste prevention. Through conducting semi-structured interviews in two distinctly unique locations, Moshi Urban of the Kilimanjaro Region and Ushongo Village on the coast of Tanga Region, Tanzania, I explored how levels of awareness and involvement in sustainable waste prevention practices, specifically reducing, reusing, and recycling, …

Climate And Plant Controls On Soil Organic Matter In Coastal Wetlands, Michael J. Osland, Christopher A. Gabler, James B. Grace, Richard H. Day, Meagan L. Mccoy, Jennie L. Mcleod, Andrew S. From, Nicholas M. Enwright, Laura C. Feher, Camille L. Stagg

School of Earth, Environmental, and Marine Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

Coastal wetlands are among the most productive and carbon‐rich ecosystems on Earth. Long‐term carbon storage in coastal wetlands occurs primarily belowground as soil organic matter (SOM). In addition to serving as a carbon sink, SOM influences wetland ecosystem structure, function, and stability. To anticipate and mitigate the effects of climate change, there is a need to advance understanding of environmental controls on wetland SOM. Here, we investigated the influence of four soil formation factors: climate, biota, parent materials, and topography. Along the northern Gulf of Mexico, we collected wetland plant and soil data across elevation and zonation gradients within 10 …

Farm Service Agency Employee Intentions To Use Weather And Climate Data In Professional Services, Rachel E. Schattman, Gabrielle Roesch-Mcnally, Sarah Wiener, Meredith T. Niles, David Y. Hollinger

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

This is a work of the U.S. Government and is not subject to copyright protection in the United States. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.. Agricultural service providers often work closely with producers, and are well positioned to include weather and climate change information in the services they provide. By doing so, they can help producers reduce risks due to climate variability and change. A national survey of United States Department of …

The Effect Of Warmer Winters On The Demography Of An Outbreak Insect Is Hidden By Intraspecific Competition, Devin W. Goodsman, Guenchik Grosklos, Brian H. Aukema, Caroline Whitehouse, Katherine P. Bleiker, Nate G. Mcdowell, Richard S. Middleton, Chonggang Xu

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications

Warmer climates are predicted to increase bark beetle outbreak frequency, severity, and range. Even in favorable climates, however, outbreaks can decelerate due to resource limitation, which necessitates the inclusion of competition for limited resources in analyses of climatic effects on populations. We evaluated several hypotheses of how climate impacts mountain pine beetle reproduction using an extensive 9‐year dataset, in which nearly 10,000 trees were sampled across a region of approximately 90,000 km², that was recently invaded by the mountain pine beetle in Alberta, Canada. Our analysis supports the hypothesis of a positive effect of warmer winter temperatures on …

A Quantitative Analysis Of The Effects Of Urbanization, Mesophication And Prescribed Burns On Oak Woodlands In The Chicago Metropolitan Area, Chad Populorum

Celebration of Learning

Urban expansion has had devastating impacts on forest ecosystems, especially within the past century. Human attempts to dominate nature have diminished natural disturbance regimes, which have maintained the biodiversity and historic composition of these ecosystems. Fires have been a prominent force in maintaining the structure of oak, hickory and other heliophytic (sun loving and fire-adapted) forest systems. Human induced fire suppression has led to mesophication across North America. Mesophication is the transition from drier conditions with open canopies to wetter conditions with closed canopies. These new conditions decrease the survival rates of these important species and begin to favor mesophytic …

Science, Advocacy, Policy, Planning: Tools For Advancing Transportation Equity, Garrett S. Mcallister

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

The theme of this portfolio is how different tools and approaches can be used for advancing transportation equity. Broadly defined, transportation equity is about fairness in transportation. There are a number of ways this fairness can be assessed. The most common way to assess transportation equity is by looking at the fairness of outcomes, distributed geographically, socially, or even by mode of transportation. Equity can also be defined by the fairness of processes. The first half of the portfolio illustrates some of the problems with the current transportation system and how it is unhealthy (Piece 1) and unjust (Piece 2). …

Is The Paris Agreement Already Poised For Failure? - Discerning How Impactful The Clean Power Plan's Fate Is On The Latest Global Climate Initiative, Shawn Eric Mckenzie

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.