Geography Commons^™

Testing Methods To Mitigate Caribbean Yellow-Band Disease On Orbicella Faveolata, Carly J. Randall, Elizabeth M. Whitcher, Tessa Code, Clayton Pollock, Ian Lundgren, Zandy Hillis-Starr, Erinn M. Muller

United States National Park Service: Publications

Outbreaks of coral diseases continue to reduce global coral populations. In the Caribbean, yellow band is a severe and wide-spread disease that commonly affects corals of the Orbicella spp. complex, significantly impeding coral reproduction, and hindering the natural recovery of Orbicella spp. populations. Caribbean yellow-band disease (CYBD) lesions may be severe, and often result in the complete loss of coral tissue. The slow spread of CYBD, however, provides an opportunity to test methods to mitigate the disease. Here we report the results of in situ experiments, conducted within Buck Island Reef National Monument in St. Croix, USVI, to test the …

Creating Web Maps Of Forest Restoration Plots At Iracambi Atlantic Rainforest Research Center, Minas Gerais, Brazil, Daniel Lassila

Sustainability and Social Justice

The purpose of this report is to provide a detailed account, discussion, and analysis of my internship at Iracambi Atlantic Rainforest Research Center in Minas Gerais, Brazil during the summer of 2017, where I worked under the direction of GIS Supervisor Mr. Cliff Jones. The central focus of my work dealt with consolidating existing GIS data on the organization’s rainforest restoration effort into a single normalized database - based on the Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact, creating a structure for future forest restoration volunteers including enabling offline field collection using Collector for ArcGIS, then creating an ArcGIS Online web map based …

Ecological Sustainability Within California's Improved Forest Management Carbon Offsets Program, Cory Hertog

Sustainability and Social Justice

Forest Carbon offsets are being used as a climate change mitigation strategy in multiple programs around the world. But, are programs setup in a way that are ecologically sustainable? This paper reviews concepts pertinent to ecologically sustainable forest management and then examines if Improved Forest Management Carbon offset policies and projects within the California emissions trading scheme are setup in an ecologically sustainable manner. After a review of the Improved Forest Management Protocol and 31 project documents, it is apparent that policies and projects promote aspects of ecologically sustainable management. However, there is room for improvement when managing for natural …

Mapping Energy Access In Rural Tanzania: 2017 Summer Internship With The World Resources Institute, Naramena Mccray

Sustainability and Social Justice

This report details my 2017 summer internship experience; both the report and the internship being requirements of the GIS for Development and Environment Graduate Degree at Clark University. My internship was hosted by the World Resources Institute, an international non-profit organization in Washington D.C. As implied by my position title, “Energy Access-GIS Intern”, I spent the duration of my internship (14 weeks) applying my geospatial expertise to address the topic of energy access which is an issue effecting rural areas of many developing countries. I was given the responsibility of creating an interactive map application of Tanzania accessible by energy …

Degrowth Lessons From Cuba, Claire S. Bayler

Sustainability and Social Justice

Cuba is the global leader in practicing agroecology, but agroecology is just one component of a larger climate-ready socio-economic system. Degrowth economics address the need to constrain our total global metabolism to within biophysical limits, while allowing opportunity and resources for "underdeveloped" countries to rebuild themselves under new terms. Degrowth recognizes the role of overdeveloped countries in surpassing the ecological limits of our planet at the cost of wellbeing for billions of dispossessed people within and between countries. Cuba's circumstances during and following the Special Period exemplify both sides of the degrowth scenario, as well as demonstrating policy and grassroots …

Winter Bat Activity In A Landscape Without Traditional Hibernacula, Amy M. Hammesfahr, Rene E. Ohms

United States National Park Service: Publications

Abstract

Prior to 2014, bat research at Devils Tower National Monument (DETO) focused on bats present during the summer months. Biologists at DETO assumed local bats were strictly summer residents due to the presumed lack of typical habitat features associated with bat hibernation, such as caves and mines. This lack of traditional hibernacula features at DETO discouraged staff and research cooperators from studying winter bat populations. Despite the earlier assumption that bats were unlikely to hibernate on the monument, DETO documented significant winter bat activity through passive winter acoustic monitoring. This study is the first study at DETO that documents …

Plant Community Composition And Structure Monitoring At Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, 2017 Data Summary Report, Stephanie L. Rockwood

United States National Park Service: Publications

Abstract

This report presents the results of vegetation monitoring efforts in 2017 at Agate Fossil Beds National Monument (AGFO) by the Northern Great Plains Inventory and Monitoring Network (NGPN) and the Northern Great Plains Fire Effects Program (NGPFire). This was the seventh year of field work conducted by NGPN at AGFO.

In 2017, crew members from NGPN visited six long-term plant community monitoring (PCM) plots and NGPFire visited eight additional PCM and fire plant community monitoring (FPCM) plots to collect data on the plant communities at AGFO. This collaborative effort is part of a long-term monitoring program established to better …

Merging Subsistence Perspective And Buen Vivir: An Alternative To Damming The Mekong, Aaron B. Eisenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper will examine the planned development on the Mekong by looking at the historical, political, and economic reasons why largescale hydroelectric dams are now being pushed upon the river. It will then critique the international state sovereignty system focusing directly on the Mekong River Commission and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) for their inabilities to mitigate environmental impact while pursuing development. I analyze how the “global city” discourse cannot rationally be applied to Southeast Asia and how the urban-rural divide in Southeast Asia creates only greater problems as dam production on the Mekong accelerates. I propose an alternative …

U.S. Fish And Wildlife Service Summer Fellowship: Gis Study Of Threatened And Endangered Species In Colorado, Jeanie Lai

Sustainability and Social Justice

This report provides a detailed account of my fellowship experience with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) Region 6 Office in Lakewood, CO during the summer of 2017 made possible by the Student Conservation Association (SCA) sponsored by Directorate Fellows Program. The internship was completed in the Region 6’s Branch of Decision Support in Ecological Services under the direction of Spatial Ecologist John Guinotte. I was a GIS Technician tasked with work responsibilities involving listed threatened and endangered species relevant to the region. Those work responsibilities included refining spatial Area of Influence (AOI) ranges, updating databases, and creating a …

An Assessment Of Atmospheric And Meteorological Factors Regulating Red Sea Phytoplankton Growth, Wenzhao Li, Hesham El-Askary, Mohamed A. Qurban, Emmanouil Proestakis, Michael J. Garay, Olga V. Kalishnikova, Vassilis Amiridis, Antonis Gkikas, Eleni Marinou, Thomas Piechota, K. P. Manikandan

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

This study considers the various factors that regulate nutrients supply in the Red Sea. Multi-sensor observation and reanalysis datasets are used to examine the relationships among dust deposition, sea surface temperature (SST), and wind speed, as they may contribute to anomalous phytoplankton blooms, through time-series and correlation analyses. A positive correlation was found at 0–3 months lag between chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) anomalies and dust anomalies over the Red Sea regions. Dust deposition process was further examined with dust aerosols’ vertical distribution using satellite lidar data. Conversely, a negative correlation was found at 0–3 months lag between SST anomalies …

Three Essays On Understanding Municipal Water Demand In The Western United States, Michael J. O'Donnell

Economics ETDs

Scarce water resources in the Western United States, in concert with population growth and climate change, constitute a need to better understand factors that impact water demand. In this dissertation, Chapter 1 provides cultural and historical context for water use in the West and argues that understanding water demand is important, especially when managing scarcity is a goal. Chapter 2 uses aggregate city-level data from four municipalities in New Mexico to investigate seasonal trends and breakpoints. Although per premises and aggregate demand tend to decline in all geographies investigated, existence and timing of breakpoints varies by geography. Additionally, drivers of …

The Beholder, Allan Lake

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

A poem on the effect of landscape on the emotions.

The Legendary Topography Of The Viking Settlement Of Iceland, Verena Höfig

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

From the time of their earliest texts in the vernacular, Icelanders were interested in the semioticization of their landscape, the mapping of nature into culture by inscribing it with memories from the settlement of the island during the Viking Age. Such a de-scription and in-scription of landscape with meaning occurs most prominently in The Book of Settlements or Landnámabók, a thirteenth century prose text preserved in several versions. This paper focuses on Icelanders' myth of origin as presented in the various Landnámabók redactions, and explores how a largely fictional medieval text can assert ownership and control over territory, and ultimately …

Shifting Rurality American Gothic, Iowa Nice, Biotech And Political Expectations In Rural America, William D. Nichols 890252

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

This paper traces the linkage between heritage landscape within the context of the election of Donal Trump. Trump's invocations of heritage riled certain regions of the US which had a distinct connection to Regionalism, both as a political idea and as an aesthetic practice. Focusing on Iowa, home to the quintessential American painting, American Gothic, the paper looks at modernity and agriculture, and how the two categories seem to rely on (but also negate) heritage. By examining what a genetically modified landscape might mean in relation to the historical image of the pastoral/provincial farmer, a network of frictions and …

On The Wire, Sarah F. Lumba

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

“On the Wire” is a work of creative non-fiction that weaves together a local myth and actual events to describe the devastating effects of Typhoon Ketsana, which struck Marikina, a small but progressive city in the Philippines, on September 2009. It explores how colonial subjugation has erased a people’s memory of their collective soul and has severed their strong ties to the land, thus putting the lives of future generations in jeopardy.

Poetry Of Roe 8, Nandi Chinna

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Poetry of Roe 8

The occasion for the writing of these poems was activism surrounding the controversial highway known as the Roe 8 extension in the areas of Cockburn and Fremantle in Western Australia. Planned in the 1950s, Roe 8 is contentious for a number of reasons, including extraordinary political deals over funding, undue process regarding environmental reporting, lack of a business case, inadequate noise and traffic modelling, erasure of Indigenous heritage sites, and clearing of the sensitive Beeliar wetlands and Coolbellup banksia woodlands which were designated a Threatened Ecological Community in 2016. During the summer of 2016/2017 contractors started …

Review Of Thinking Continental: Writing The Planet One Place At A Time, John Charles Ryan Dr

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Review of Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2017) edited by Tom Lynch, Susan Naramore Maher, Drucilla Wall and O. Alan Weltzien

Darwin’S Landscapes (And Seascapes), Patrick H. Armstrong

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

Charles Darwin, particularly in his early writings, had a strong appreciation of landscape. He describes scenery that he regarded as attractive and spectacular in his writings from the Beagle period with considerable perception. Through much of his career, he integrated ideas and facts from different sources supremely well; thus understanding that a landscape was a product of the rocks, the processes they had undergone, vegetation, animal life, and human activities. Another component in the development of his appreciation of landscape – or ‘scenery’ as he usually identified it – was his quite strong aesthetic sense which existed from his teenage …

Saturn/Cronus-11, Joel Weishaus

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

“Saturn/Cronus-11” is from a Cosmography, an in-progress project of Literary Digital Art that invokes the gods of seven planets in our celestial neighborhood; plus The Sun, The Moon; and Incognita. It includes my trope of invagination: fragments exhumed from the authored corpus and transplanted into the body of a living text, which, along with superimposed images and animations, advances us toward a more magnanimous, transdisciplinary sphere. The project also includes notes.

A Naturalist’S Guide To The Great Plains, Paul A. Johnsgard

Zea E-Books Collection

This book documents nearly 500 US and Canadian locations where wildlife refuges, nature preserves, and similar properties protect natural sites that lie within the North American Great Plains, from Canada’s Prairie Provinces to the Texas-Mexico border. Information on site location, size, biological diversity, and the presence of especially rare or interesting flora and fauna are mentioned, as well as driving directions, mailing addresses, and phone numbers or internet addresses, as available. US federal sites include 11 national grasslands, 13 national parks, 16 national monuments, and more than 70 national wildlife refuges. State properties include nearly 100 state parks and wildlife …

Defining Extreme Events: A Cross-Disciplinary Review, Lauren E. Mcphillips, Heejun Chang, Mikhail Chester, Yaella Dipletri, Erin Friedman, Nancy B. Grimm, John S. Kominoski, Timon Mcphearson, Pablo Méndez-Lázaro, Emma J. Rosi, Javad Shafiei Shiva

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

Extreme events are of interest worldwide given their potential for substantial impacts on social, ecological, and technical systems. Many climate-related extreme events are increasing in frequency and/or magnitude due to anthropogenic climate change, and there is increased potential for impacts due to the location of urbanization and the expansion of urban centers and infrastructures. Many disciplines are engaged in research and management of these events. However, a lack of coherence exists in what constitutes and defines an extreme event across these fields, which impedes our ability to holistically understand and manage these events. Here, we review 10 years of academic …

Athabasca River Glacial Melt Global Warming Blues, Gene Hyde

The Goose

“Athabasca River Glacial Melt Global Warming Blues” is a poem and photograph by Gene Hyde, a writer, photographer, and archivist living in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. This is part of his PhotoEpigraphic51 series that combines a photograph, an epigraph, and a 51 syllable, three haiku verse structure. The photograph was taken in September 2017 along the Athabasca River in Jasper National Park.

Locating Provisioning Ecosystem Services In Urban Forests: Forageable Woody Species In New York City, Usa, Patrick T. Hurley, Marla R. Emery

Environment and Sustainability Faculty Publications

Scholarship on the ecosystem services provided by urban forests has focused on regulating and supporting services, with a growing body of research examining provisioning and cultural ecosystem services from farms and gardens in metropolitan areas. Using the case of New York, New York, USA, we propose a method to assess the supply of potential provisioning ecosystem services from species and spaces other than those explicitly designated for food production. We analyze the abundance and spatial distribution of trees and shrubs with known uses for food, medicine, craft, and other purposes across urban greenspace types. To do so, we created a …

Plant Community Composition And Structure Monitoring For Scotts Bluff National Monument, 2017 Data Report, Ryan Manuel

United States National Park Service: Publications

Abstract

This report presents the results of vegetation monitoring efforts in 2017 at Scotts Bluff National Monument (SCBL) by the Northern Great Plains Inventory and Monitoring Network (NGPN) and Northern Great Plains Fire Ecology Program (NGPFire).

During the seventh full year of field work, crew members from NGPN visited eight long-term monitoring plots on May 22-25, 2017 to collect data on the plant communities at SCBL. This is part of a long-term monitoring effort to better understand the condition of the vegetation at SCBL. NGPN staff captured data relating to species richness, herb-layer height, abundance of individual native and non-native …

Acoustic Surveys Of Bats At Northern Great Plains Parks And Preliminary Results From 2014-16, Daniel S. Licht

United States National Park Service: Publications

Executive Summary

From 2014-16, the Northern Great Plains Inventory & Monitoring Network (Network)—in collaboration with the Midwest Regional Biologist—used acoustic methods to monitor bat populations at 12 Network parks. Six parks were monitored using the nascent North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) framework. Six other parks did not meet a priori criteria for inclusion in NABat so they were monitored using similar methods, but a non-systematic sampling frame.

Fifty-five NABat stations were established along with 62 non-NABat stations. Stations were typically monitored for 4-7 nights each year using equipment that records the echolocation calls of bats. Fourteen mobile survey routes …

Human Trafficking, Alyssa Noosbond

Global Issues in Public Health

Human trafficking is a major problem not just somewhere around the world but possibly in your own neighborhood. Human trafficking is a non-communicable disease that is caused by a person being in a vulnerable position whether they are in a foreign country, leaving a place of poverty, leaving for political reasons, or for an overall change to better their life. With human trafficking being a $150 billion industry, there are unfortunately 20.9 million victims with 26 percent being children, 55 percent of the people being trafficked are women and girls leaving 45 percent to be men and boys. Women and …

Paleoflood Hydrology And Basin Morphometric Characteristics Related To Flooding In The Colorado Front Range, Natalie Trivino

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Flooding hazards are common in the Colorado Front Range due to the steep, complex terrain of the mountains where waters quickly spill out onto the most populated region of Colorado. This region has experienced numerous catastrophic floods, such as the 2013 Front Range Floods, the Fort Collins Flood of 1997, and the Big Thompson Canyon Flood of 1976 to name a few. The objective of this study was to analyze basin morphometric characteristics of several drainage basins throughout the Colorado Front Range South Platte River tributaries and determine how these characteristics relate to extreme flooding. This was done through three …

From Bison To Cattle: The Ecology Of The Southern Plains 1500-1750, Jenni Tifft-Ochoa

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

Bison made their home on the Southern Plains for millennia. However, their migratory patterns began to shift in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. My research investigated what caused this drastic shift and how it had far reaching effects on the ecology of the Southern Plains. Using archives from two prominent Catholic priests, I began to piece together why the bison left the Southern Plains. Rather than focus on the Europeans as the main players, I instead focused on the Indigenous peoples, the animals, and the land as the centralized actors in this project. I discovered that the introduction …

Transitioning Montana To A Renewable Energy Future: The Social And Economic Impacts, Jacqueline O. Sussman

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Montana is home to the second-largest coal-fired power plant in the West, the Colstrip Generating Station. The value and demand for coal both domestically and globally is quickly diminishing, while the renewable energy industries of wind and solar are booming. As utilities in the Northwest transition their investments from coal to renewable energy, Montana faces a critical decision on the future of its energy system that will impact the lives of generations of Montanans to come.

This five-part report aims to aid in the discussion and decision-making process by reviewing the most up-to-date economic data on renewable energy; discussing the …

Evaluating Long-Term Trends In Vegetation And Management Intensity, Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve 1995–2014, Sherry A. Leis, Lloyd W. Morrison

United States National Park Service: Publications

Abstract

Inventory and Monitoring Networks of the National Park Service are charged with collecting and reporting data related to the status and trends of key natural resources. We have analyzed a suite of grazing data from 1995- 2016, fire history data from 1998-2015, and vegetation community data from 2002-2014 to better understand trends as they relate to management strategies at the preserve over time. We found that cattle stocking rates declined and fires became less frequent over the latter half of the record. Similarly, bare ground declined, woody species increased slightly, and the floristic quality index was relatively stable with …