Nature and Society Relations Commons^™

Protecting Cultural Heritage In A Changing Climate: A Risk Assessment Model For Galleries, Libraries, Archives, And Museums In Florida, United States, Emily E. Fisher

LSU Master's Theses

The aim of this research is to develop a climate threat risk assessment scale for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums within the State of Florida. Current research neglects the localized impact of tropical cyclones, inland flash flooding, and exposure to SLR on cultural institutions. Tropical cyclone events bring in flooding, intense wind speeds, and power outages which affect these institutions. Tropical cyclone data from the National Hurricane Center are used to represent historical wind occurrence. Finally, flash flood warning data are used to represent the flooding likelihood in each county. Each threat is assessed individually across Florida counties. The range …

Impacts Of Extreme Weather Conditions On Coastal Fisheries Near Bayou Teche, Louisiana From 2019–2023, Georgia C. Davis

LSU Master's Theses

The region of Southcentral Louisiana, particularly around Bayou Teche, thrives on its commercial and recreational fisheries. These fisheries are occasionally subject to events like extreme weather that cause sudden and unexpected losses (NOAA Fisheries, 2024a). Between 2019 and 2023, a series of extreme weather events impacted southcentral Louisiana near Bayou Teche. This series of extreme events includes Hurricane Barry (2019), Hurricane Laura (2020), Hurricane Delta (2020), Hurricane Zeta (2020), Hurricane Ida (2021), and a United States Drought Monitor (USDM) D4 drought (2023). This study analyzes the impacts of the extreme weather series on coastal fish observed species richness (SR) in …

Human-Environment Interactions In Coastal Belize: Insights Into Sea-Level Rise And Ancient Maya Activities At The Paynes Creek Salt Works, Cheryl Mae Foster

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Dissertation excavations were carried out in 2019 and 2022 at the underwater sites of Ta’ab Nuk Na and Ek Way Nal in Paynes Creek National Park, Belize. Sea-level rise submerged the sites in antiquity and preserved the artifact record in red mangrove (Rhizophora mangle) peat. Red mangrove peat can be used as a proxy for sea-level rise. The goals of the two excavations included: 1) excavating a 14m-long transect within and extending beyond building J at Ta’ab Nuk Na to determine the function of the building, 2) investigating the production of salt making pottery at Ta’ab Nuk Na; …

Effects Of Social Media Use Disparities On Community Resilience To Disasters, Kejin Wang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

With the rapid development of social media, many researchers chose to use social media data to conduct studies of disaster resilience. This dissertation addresses three fundamental challenges related to social media use and disaster resilience analysis including: how the spatial analysis scale affects the results of social media use disparity and its impacts on disaster resilience; how different vulnerability and resilience measurement methods can generate very different results; and how social media use disparity can be identified to help improve the fairness of AI-based emergency rescue model development. Therefore, the first part of the dissertation measured the relationships between disparities …

A Subspecies-Level Database Of Amazonian Bird Distributions, With Inferences On Suture Zones And Conservation, Marco Antonio Rego

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Amazonia has the largest and most biodiverse tropical forest on the planet. However, the distributions of its species are still poorly understood, even for well-studied vertebrates such as birds. Available distribution maps for Amazonian birds often lack accuracy in delimiting the area where species occur. Existing distributional information for Amazonian birds is often limited to species-level level taxonomy, even though many Amazonian bird subspecies represent biological species. Here, I investigate the geographic distributions of 4,148 bird taxa (species and subspecies) using museum scientific specimens as the primary source of data. To build the data base I use more than 600,000 …

Local And State Climate Initiatives In Louisiana Since 2005: Content And Thematic Analyses, Jessie F. Parrott

LSU Master's Theses

Louisiana is uniquely exposed to severe weather because of its geography and climate. Louisiana’s extreme weather is exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change, which will worsen in the future. The risks its population and environment are exposed to has generated several policies and planning documents, nine of which are analyzed in this thesis. Three plans are from the state level, three are from the parish level, and three are from the urban (New Orleans) level. These planning documents pose various adaptation and mitigation actions to ameliorate and address multiple climate issues. These actions utilize specific mitigation strategies. The content and thematic …

Structural Problems Of Latin American Cities 450 Years After Caracas’ Foundation, Fabio Capra-Ribeiro

Faculty Publications

Latin American cities face many problems that compromise them from different angles such as lack of infrastructure, government fragmentation, and environmental degradation. At the same time, each city tries to come up with its own solutions, but there are so many difficulties that in many cases it is difficult to keep attention and efforts focused on all these directions. For these reasons, this research aims to define some of the most common problems faced by cities in Latin America. Disseminating these similarities could help to face those problems, since, if local governments recognize that they face the same situations as …

Environmental Perception In Colombia's Páramo Protected Areas, Juliana Delgado

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis analyzes the gap between farmers' environmental perceptions in Téquita, a small village in Colombia, and the definition of protected areas has led to a conflict for the use of natural resources. I examine if the protected area's policies have dealt with the social and ecological issues in the páramos and recognized the social construction of the landscape, farmers' identities, and their interpretations about work and land. The case study focuses on Güina High Mountain in the Guantiva-La Rusia páramo complex, which recently the Colombian government declared as a protected area. In light of anthropologist Tim Ingold's meaning of …

Uncertain Regional Urbanism In Venezuela. Government, Infrastructure And Environment, Fabio Capra-Ribeiro

Faculty Publications

Uncertain Regional Urbanism in Venezuela explores the changes cities face when they become metropolises, forming expanding regions which create both potential and problems within settlements. To do so, it focuses on three metropolitan areas located in Venezuela’s Center-North region: Caracas, Maracay and Valencia, designated as "Camava."

Considering three core topics, government and territorial administration, infrastructure and environment, as well as looking at the reciprocal impact, this book describes and analyzes the determinant variables that characterize the phenomenon of regional urbanization in this area and in the wider Global South. It includes documentary research, semi-structured interviews and Delphi methodology, involving a …

Changing Geographies Of Flood Mitigation Policies: A Case Study Of Central, Louisiana, Ria Mukerji

LSU Master's Theses

In 2016, the Baton Rouge region experienced what would come to be record-setting precipitation levels. The 1,000 year rainfall event dumped almost triple the amount of water on Louisiana than was seen during Hurricane Katrina (some areas received over 10 inches of rain in a matter of hours), with rain persisting from August 12^th until the 17^th. Previously a part of Baton Rouge, Central is a relatively new development that expanded into the 100 year floodplain in 2005. This thesis will present the changing geographies of flood mitigation policies since a major flood in 1983 to the …

Assessment Of Barrier Island Restoration Planning And Management In The Terrebonne Basin, Louisiana, Sean Russell Williams

LSU Master's Theses

Louisiana holds the majority of the contiguous United States’ coastal wetlands by area, providing significant benefits to users in the form of ecosystem services. Climate change, relative sea level rise, and coastal sediment budget deficits among other anthropogenic processes impact the resilience and sustainability of Louisiana’s coastal systems. Since the implementation of the Coastal Wetland Planning, Protection and Restoration Act (CWPPRA) to restore coastal wetlands in the United States, multiple barrier island restoration projects have taken place in the greater Terrebonne Basin. Amassing a catalog of case studies elucidates the social, ecological, and economic frameworks behind barrier island restoration and …

"La Llorona": Evolución, Ideología Y Uso En El Mundo Hispano, Raquel Sáenz-Llano

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis studies the evolution, ideology and use of the myth of La Llorona through time in the Hispanic World. Considering this myth as one of the most known traditional narratives of the American continent, I begin by providing visual, ethnohistorical and ethnographical insights of weeping in Mesoamerica and South America and the specific mention of a weeping woman in some Spanish chronicles to say how western values were stablished in “the new continent” through this legend. I suggest that during the postcolonialism the legend did not tell anymore about a mother that cries and search a place for their …

Natural Resources-Based Conflicts In Coastal Louisiana: A Multi-Faceted Social And Ecological Setting, Audrey Grismore

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Louisiana coastal zone supports numerous natural resource-based economies and due to overlapping demands on the same territory, conflicts among users and resource managers have emerged. When the state recognized serious depletion of oysters in the late nineteenth century, it intervened with a set of conservation polices to try to establish sustained yields that produced one set of conflicts. When the oil industry began operating in the coastal estuaries and wetlands in the 1930s, it produced additional conflicts with fishing folk. The zone of conflict gave rise to cyclic adaptations as each group struggled to sustain its environmentally based economic …

Reading Between The Vines: Analyzing Climate Change Adaptive Capacity In The Tulbagh Valley Wine Industry, South Africa, Jana Catherine Brady

LSU Master's Theses

There is great concern across the wine industry about the effect climate change will have on wine production and quality. These worries are valid because wine grapes are sensitive to the climatological conditions in which they are grown. However, not all viticultural areas will experience climate change in the same manner and the effects of climate change could vary considerably by region. This thesis examines the potential impact of climate change on the wine industry in the already hot and dry Tulbagh Valley, South Africa. The valley has produced wine since the early 18^th century, but today the valley …