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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Western Washington University

Conference

2019

Articles 1 - 8 of 8

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Two Decades Of Western Spruce Budworm Outbreaks In The Pacific Northwest, Nathan Roueche May 2019

Two Decades Of Western Spruce Budworm Outbreaks In The Pacific Northwest, Nathan Roueche

Scholars Week

Insect outbreaks are one of the important natural disturbance processes in forested ecosystems due to their tendency to periodically restructure stand composition and provide dynamic fluctuation via trophic interactions. Multiple agencies across various jurisdictions collect annual forest health inventory data via aerial detection survey (ADS) mapping, allowing trends in forest disease and pest prevalence to be explored across both space and time. While these data sets are a powerful tool for research and management, the data is often recorded and stored in regionally differing formats and is not easily accessible to researchers or the public. The lack of cohesive broad-scale …

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Dependence Of Hydrological Modeling On Spatial Resolution In Lake Whatcom Watershed, Emily Mcginty May 2019

Dependence Of Hydrological Modeling On Spatial Resolution In Lake Whatcom Watershed, Emily Mcginty

Scholars Week

Remotely sensed digital elevation data can be utilized through geographic information science (GIS) techniques to model watershed and stream delineations. These techniques allow analysts to easily produce results that would otherwise require hours of intense field work, if possible at all. The accuracy of these watershed and stream models can be dependent on the resolution of the elevation data, and choosing an inappropriate resolution can result in further analyses producing inaccurate and/or misleading results. The purpose of my research is to quantify the differences between hydrological models developed from elevation data at varying resolutions. I chose the Lake Whatcom watershed …

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Nike In Politics: How Political Consumerism Impacts Corporate Social Responsibility, Samantha Frost May 2019

Nike In Politics: How Political Consumerism Impacts Corporate Social Responsibility, Samantha Frost

Scholars Week

How does Nike's campaign supporting Colin Kaepernick and the Black Lives Matter movement reflect the alignment of large corporations with political movements as a Corporate Social Responsibility strategy and how does political consumerism impact this decision? The purpose of this project is to examine how Nike used the ‘Dream Crazy’ campaign to piggyback off the Black Lives Matter movement as a public relations and marketing strategy as well as how political consumerism is shaping corporate social responsibility. How do political movements impact the corporate world and how do corporations impact political movements? Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign titled ‘Chasing Crazy’ was …

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Representation Of Addiction In The Media, Lauren Gallup May 2019

Representation Of Addiction In The Media, Lauren Gallup

Scholars Week

Presenting the story of addiction in news and entertainment media presents an ethical dilemma for those doing the storytelling. This dilemma faces the ethical paradigm of Right vs. Wrong. In this research project, I focused on how addiction is presented in the media. Media representation of addiction shapes how people think about this disease and can affect legislation to support assistance for recovering addicts. This led me to determine that media has an important place in shaping how we think about addiction. In this paper, I identified how media can do a public good by accurately and ethically covering stories …

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The Education Beat In A Declining Industry, Jon Foster May 2019

The Education Beat In A Declining Industry, Jon Foster

Scholars Week

The collapse of the newspaper industry and the disappearance of the education beat on many local and national newspapers can have profound impacts on journalism, civic engagement and our democracy. In this paper, I look at the the current state of education reporting in America and examine the ethical dilemmas local and national news agencies face as well as the hopeful future it has in a transforming news industry.

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Bees And Trees: The Ecological Ramifications Of Our "Honey-Nut" Agriculture, Becci Larreau May 2019

Bees And Trees: The Ecological Ramifications Of Our "Honey-Nut" Agriculture, Becci Larreau

Scholars Week

People love almonds and honey bees. The honey bee is the only agriculturally-reliable pollinator of almond trees. California produces the entire domestic supply of almonds, and ~80% of the international supply. In early spring, nearly all of the commercially-managed beehives in the nation travel by truck to California to pollinate the almond orchards. They remain for a mere few weeks and then move on to other areas to service other crops or to seek honey forage. Migratory beekeepers are the linchpin that keeps the wheels of this particular agricultural system in motion. Without the migratory beekeeping industry, California's multi-billion dollar …

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Creating A Canadian-American Wildfire Atlas For Late 19th-21st Centuries, Kate Welch May 2019

Creating A Canadian-American Wildfire Atlas For Late 19th-21st Centuries, Kate Welch

Scholars Week

Wildfires are increasingly on the minds of people living in Western North America as climate change and long periods of anthropogenic fire exclusion shift the dominant fire regimes toward possibly higher severity, larger fires than we remember. We are still piecing together the history of wildfires and how they have changed since Europeans settled in North America and moved West, and we know very little about the fire history of the areas where a large portion of our population currently lives. Using available government resources and data, I synthesized and created a fire Atlas of wildland fires in the Western …

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Finding Climatologically Teleconnected Sites With A Network Of Tree Ring Chronologies, Hannah Lagassey May 2019

Finding Climatologically Teleconnected Sites With A Network Of Tree Ring Chronologies, Hannah Lagassey

Scholars Week

We need information about the past to understand what is happening in the present and to predict what may happen in the future. Trees record climate conditions in their annual growth rings throughout their lives, providing us with centuries of valuable paleoclimate data. In addition to reconstructing climate records, dendrochronologists use tree rings to reconstruct the records of climate-driven phenomena, such as hydrological variables, prior to the start of instrumental records. Reconstruction models are improved with the inclusion of multiple tree species and multiple sites, which act as predictors of climatological and hydrological variables. I identified tree ring chronologies within …

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