Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How Do Designers Of The Built Environment Attempt To Make Ecological Sustainability Sensory Legible?, Carly L. Bartow

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper attempts to provide a theoretical framework for making ecosystem function and ecologically sustainable design more perceptible or sensible to people through architecture and the built environment. Design features of the Bertschi School Science Wing and the Bullitt Center in Seattle, Washington are incorporated to illustrate the sensory legibility of ecological sustainability criteria.The criteria are available to designers to help educate a building's occupants on environmentally sustainable design and motivate more sustainable behavior.

A Gis Approach To Modeling Groundwater Levels In The Mississippi River Valley Alluvial Aquifer, Josef Orion Lilly

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Groundwater depletion, a subject of growing concern for a significant portion of Arkansas, may lead to future economic challenges for the Arkansas Delta region. The Mississippi River Valley Alluvial Aquifer is the uppermost aquifer and features the largest groundwater capacity in the Mississippi Embayment Aquifer System. The Mississippi River Valley Alluvial Aquifer, commonly referred to as the “alluvial aquifer”, spans 53,000〖 km〗^2 underlying portions of Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, and Tennessee. As the alluvial aquifer trends southward for approximately 250 miles alongside the Mississippi River, its geographical extent ranges from 50 to 125 miles wide. There is a …

Analysis Of Managerial Decision-Making Within Florida’S Total Maximum Daily Load Program, Justin Barthle

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Water quality has evolved legislatively from protection of navigation routes and quantity of sources to more emphasis on impairments on water quality for surface and groundwater sources. Nonpoint or diffuse sources of impairments represents a major challenge for management due to the complexity of its sources and difficulty in tracking.

The most cited sections on public policy analysis focuses on the overall process agencies employ to understand the results the program yields. Often overlooked are finer details and mechanisms, such as decision-making and priority setting, which have a great impact on the overall process. To investigate these factors, we need …

Uncertainty Analysis Of The Performance Of A System Of Best Management Practices For Achieving Phosphorus Load Reduction To Surface Waters, Jason D.M. Igras

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The repeated occurrence of Lake Erie’s harmful algal blooms suggests an inadequate phosphorus management system that results in excessive loads to the lake. In response, Canadian and United States’ governments have issued a new management objective, a 40% reduction in total and dissolved reactive phosphorus loads relative to 2008. To provide scientific evidence to guide managers toward achieving their management objective, we used the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) 31010 Bowtie Risk Analysis Tool to analyze the performance of the phosphorus management system. The effectiveness of agricultural best management practices (BMPs) and their adoption were combined into a Bayesian belief …

Use Of Water Indices Derived From Landsat Oli Imagery And Gis To Estimate The Hydrologic Connectivity Of Wetlands In The Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge, Debra Sue Blackmore

Dissertations and Theses

This study compared two remote sensing water indices: the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) and the Modified NDWI (MNDWI). Both indices were calculated using publically-available data from the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI). The research goal was to determine whether the indices are effective in locating open water and measuring surface soil moisture. To demonstrate the application of water indices, analysis was conducted for freshwater wetlands in the Tualatin River Basin in northwestern Oregon to estimate hydrologic connectivity and hydrological permanence between these wetlands and nearby water bodies. Remote sensing techniques have been used to study wetlands in recent …

Use Of Distance Weighted Metrics To Investigate Landscape-Stream Temperature Relationships Across Different Temporal Scales, Eric Craig Watson

Dissertations and Theses

Stream ecosystems have experienced significant negative impacts from land use, resource exploitation, and urban development. Statistical models allow researchers to explore the relationships between these landscape variables and stream conditions. Weighting the relevant landscape variables based on hydrologically defined distances offers a potential method of increasing the predictive capacity of statistical models. Using observations from three grouped watersheds in the Portland Metro Area (n=66), I have explored the use of three different weighting schemes against the standard method of taking an areal average. These four different model groups were applied to four stream temperature metrics: mean seven-day moving average maximum …

Household Water Filter Use Characterization In Rural Rwanda: Signal Interpretation, Development And Validation, Sarita Lucia Tellez Sanchez

Dissertations and Theses

Access to safe drinking water is an important health factor in many developing countries. Studies have shown that unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation practices leads to diarrheal disease, which is one of the leading causes of death of children under five in developing countries. Provision and proper use of household water filters have been shown to effectively improve health.

This thesis is focused on the refinement and validation of algorithms for data collected from pressure transducer sensors that are used in household water filters (the Vestergaard Frandsen LifeStraw Family 2.0) deployed in Rwanda by the social enterprise DelAgua Health. …

Assessment Of A Mycorrhizal Fungi Application To Treat Stormwater In An Urban Bioswale, Alaina Diane Melville

Dissertations and Theses

This study assessed the effect of an application of mycorrhizal fungi to stormwater filter media on urban bioswale soil and stormwater in an infiltration-based bioswale aged 20 years with established vegetation. The study tested the use of commercially available general purpose biotic soil blend PermaMatrix^® BSP Foundation as a treatment to enhance Earthlite^™ stormwater filter media amelioration of zinc, copper, and phosphorus in an ecologically engineered structure designed to collect and infiltrate urban stormwater runoff before it entered the nearby Willamette River.

These results show that the application of PermaMatrix^® BSP Foundation biotic soil amendment to Earthlite …

Wave And Tidal Energy In New York: Sustainable Hydroelectricity For The Grid, Lucas Basil Romanowsky

Student Theses 2015-Present

As humanity continues to exceed the ecological carrying capacity of the earth in its use of nonrenewable energy sources, it is imperative to find and shift to alternative renewable energy sources that can sustain human civilization. The ocean based phenomenon of tides, current, and waves are a way in which that source of energy can be obtained and broadened for human consumption. Oceanic energy can serve not only as a means to provide cleaner energy, but also improve the economy and the land based environment. The natural sciences and social sciences are examined within the quantitative data present. The natural …

Impacts Of Environmental Quality On The Demographics Of Three Nations, Emily Hummel

Honors Projects

This study will examine how the correlation between air and water quality and the population demographics of India, South Africa, and the United States. India is a country with a growing population, increasing income inequality, and gender roles that reflect its status as a developing nation. South Africa is much smaller in area and the population is beginning to level off, but South Africa’s income inequality is growing much faster than India’s and gender inequality is less of an issue in South Africa. The population of the United States is decreasing and gender roles are fairly equal, despite income inequality …