The Willamette River floodplain has been highly modified by urbanization, conversion of land to agriculture, construction of dams and revetments, and regulation of flow, all of which have reduced floodplain processes that provide valuable ecosystem services such as fish and wildlife habitat and flood storage. Efforts to protect and restore...
The concept of "adaptive governance" represents a spectrum of hybrid approaches to environmental governance employed to guide management of complex social-ecological systems under conditions of high uncertainty. While the concept of adaptive governance has benefited from over a decade of theoretical development, empirical examples of transitions towards adaptive governance are...
In the western United States, climate change is likely to bring greater uncertainty and extreme events outside the range for which water infrastructure, governance, and allocation mechanisms have been designed. In addition, many water systems already struggle with issues of institutional fragmentation, ineffective governance, and unsustainable management practices. Adaptive capacity,...
Irrigated agriculture accounts for 90 percent of consumptive use of freshwater in the western US and is considered the largest contributor to nonpoint source water pollution. The diffuse nature of most water quality and quantity challenges necessitates institutions that can more effectively engage agricultural producers in strategic, integrated, watershed-scale approaches...
Rivers impacted by human activities often have multiple stressors present. The effects of multiple stressors on biological communities can often be difficult to predict, due to the potential for complex interactions between stressors and communities. This thesis explores the impacts of two stressors often associated with agricultural land use, increased...
This thesis is a report of a phenomenological-informed study of public university student spiritual development. The research was based primarily upon semi-structured personal interviews and a focus group with undergraduate students at a large, public research institution on the west coast. Since the introduction of scientific objectivity into the academy...
Snow is a critical component of global climate regulation and provides water resources to over one billion people worldwide. Yet current measurement methods and modeling techniques lack the ability to fully capture snow characteristics such as snow water equivalent (SWE), snow depth, and density variable landscapes. In recent years, the...