Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment Commons^™

Swimming In Uncertainty: Filling Data Gaps And Providing An Educational Platform For Beach Water Quality At Tybee Island, Georgia, Lukas Roberson

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

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Swimming in beaches water contaminated with high levels of bacteria can make you sick. Current monitoring at the public beaches on Tybee Island consists of weekly monitoring and enumeration of fecal indicator bacteria that takes 24 hours for results. If the number of bacteria exceed regulatory limits, a public health advisory is issued, and affected waters are retested until …

Powering The Machine, Draining The Planet: Whether U.S. Environmental Law Is Equipped To Regulate The Energy And Water Demands Of Ai Data Centers, Michael Marcu

Journal of Earth and Life Science

Artificial intelligence (AI) data centers have become one of the United States' fastest-growing and least-regulated sources of environmental stress. In 2024 alone, U.S. data centers consumed 183 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity more than the entire nation of Pakistan and consumed an estimated 17 billion gallons of water (IEA, 2025; Berkeley Lab, 2024). By 2030, electricity demand from these facilities is projected to reach 426 TWh, a 133% increase in six years (Pew Research Center, 2025). This paper examines whether the existing U.S. environmental regulatory framework put by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Clean Water Act (CWA), and the …

Color-Blind Resilience: How Uniform Climate Standards Reproduce Environmental Inequality In The Rockaways, Aaryan M. Nair

Publications and Research

This paper examines how ostensibly uniform climate resilience standards can reproduce environmental inequality in socially uneven landscapes, using the Rockaway Peninsula in New York City as a critical case study. While flood-resistant building codes, zoning regulations, and insurance frameworks are designed to provide equal protection across flood-prone areas, this analysis argues that their “color-blind” application obscures and intensifies underlying disparities in financial capacity, housing conditions, and tenure. Drawing on environmental justice (EJ) theory, the paper identifies two key mechanisms through which inequality is reproduced. First, “code without capacity” demonstrates how uniform technical standards—such as elevation requirements under NYC Building Code …

Using Low-Cost Sensors For Source Attribution And Health Assessment: An Air Quality Study In Brownsville, Texas, Sai Deepak Pinakana, Kabir Bahadur Shah, Daniel Jaffe, Juan L. Gonzalez, Owen Temby, Gabriel Ibarra-Mejia, Amit U. Raysoni

School of Earth, Environmental, & Marine Sciences Faculty Publications

Air quality monitoring remains a challenge in areas lacking or having sparse federal monitoring infrastructure, posing significant barriers to public health research. This study demonstrates the usage of low-cost sensors in addressing gaps in air quality monitoring, source attribution, and health risk assessment in a Brownsville, TX neighborhood impacted by emissions from a barite and celestite mineral processing unit. PM2.5 concentrations were measured using PurpleAir sensors deployed across three residential locations, with the site nearest to the processing unit recording a 24-h averaged PM2.5 concentration of 25.12 μg/m3—approximately 2.79 times higher than the nearest Texas Commission of Environmental Quality (TCEQ) …

Preliminary Analysis Of The Spatial Distribution Of Microplastics Along The Cuyahoga River, Northeast, Ohio, Ella Pitz

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Plastics are nearly ubiquitous throughout modern society, and when left in the natural environment, they degrade into microplastics. Microplastics are particles that range in diameter from 5 millimeters down to nanometers, and microplastics pose many potential environmental and health risks due to their small size and ease of ingestion. While the study of microplastics in the environment has become more common over the past ten years, microplastic concentrations remain unexplored in many regions throughout the country. Here I present a method for separating microplastics from organic matter and clastic sediment as well as preliminary measurements of microplastic concentrations in sediment …

Examining The Spatial Variability Of Summer Heat In New York City Using Landsat Land Surface Temperature, Ryan Kabir

Dissertations and Theses

Extreme heat is the leading weather-related cause of death in the United States, and in New York City (NYC) approximately 370 heat-related deaths occur annually on average. The spatial distribution of surface heat exposure across NYC is highly uneven, low-income neighborhoods and communities of color consistently face higher temperatures, yet the intraurban spatial structure of land surface temperature (LST) during heatwave events has not been systematically characterized at high resolution. The New York City Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment (NPCC4) identifies this as an explicit research gap, noting that its own projections, based on global climate models downscaled to …

An Integrated Data-Driven Framework For Arctic Shipping: Analyzing Vessel Speed, Environmental And Ecological Factors Through Innovative Statistical Spatio-Temporal Methods, Inverse Optimization And Machine Learning, Mauli Pant

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation develops an integrated data-driven framework to analyze vessel navigation and ecological risk in the United States Arctic from 2010 to 2019. As environmental change and maritime activity increase in the region, understanding how vessels respond to dynamic conditions and how those responses interact with marine ecosystems has become increasingly important. A central theme of this dissertation is the treatment of vessel speed as both an observed outcome and a decision variable reflecting trade- offs among operational, environmental, and ecological factors. The first chapter develops a predictive framework for vessel speed over ground (SOG) using Gaussian Process Boosting (GPBoost), …

Final Annual Operations And Maintenance (O&M) Report: Butte Treatment Lagoon (Btl) System – 2023, Pioneer Technical Services, Inc.

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Macroinvertebrate Taxonomic And Functional Diversity In The Spokane River Watershed, Kaitlin L. Abell

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

Changes in land use, such as agricultural expansion, have impacted stream systems by modifying discharge, substrate diversity, channel morphology, and nutrient inputs. The Spokane River Watershed is heavily impacted by human activity, including urban and agricultural development. Rehabilitation efforts are being organized to reintroduce Salmonidae species in the Spokane River Watershed. The first step of this reintroduction is to perform habitat studies to inform allocation of restoration efforts. As part of this effort, I performed benthic macroinvertebrate surveys throughout the watershed.

The objective of my research was to use the macroinvertebrate community as a biological indicator to determine which habitat …

Relationships Between Benthic Macroinvertebrate Communities And Environmental Conditions In Headwater Tributaries Of The Pend Oreille Lake Watershed, Idaho, Devlin Mee

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

Benthic macroinvertebrates are widely used indicators of stream condition, and their communities respond to thermal and land-use conditions in headwater streams. This study characterized macroinvertebrate biomass, community composition, and diversity across forested headwater tributaries of the Pend Oreille lake watershed in northern Idaho, and examined their relationships with summer temperature, land development, and road proximity. Samples from thirteen streams collected in 2024 were identified to genus, measured, and converted to estimated biomass using published length–mass regressions; ten streams had recovered temperature loggers. Because environmental variables were characterized once per stream, all analyses were conducted at the stream level.

Estimated total …

Data-Driven Methodologies For Mapping Cultural Heritage: The Case Of The National Coal Heritage Area, West Virginia, Usa, Hossain Mohammad Nahyan

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The objective of this dissertation was to develop a comprehensive, data-driven spatial framework for characterizing the complex cultural landscape of the National Coal Heritage Area (NCHA) in West Virginia. By transitioning away from traditional, heuristic spatial mapping, this research integrates advanced spatial statistics, machine learning, and GIS-based methodologies to objectively quantify the physical, visual, and cultural dimensions of the post-mining environment. The research is structured around three interconnected empirical studies, each addressing a specific scale of the Landscape Character Assessment (LCA) framework to support heritage conservation and sustainable spatial planning. The first paper focused on landform classification, developing an automated …

2024 Annual Operations And Maintenance Report 2024 Bres Annual Summary Report For Work Completed In Quadrant 4, Butte-Silver Bow Department Of Reclamation And Environmental Services

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.