Exploration and production of oil in the Gulf of Mexico has seen an astonishing increase since the first well was drilled in 1936. Much of the current exploration is occurring in waters greater than 5000 feet. The largest and most unprecedented oil spill in the United States occurred on April...
The use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is rapidly expanding in almost every field of inquiry. The field of Archaeology is also learning to use GIS to improve both initial data collection in the field and data analysis in the lab. This paper evaluates the usefulness of the GIS software...
The spatial organization of farm units in Polk and Linn counties
in the mid-Willamette Valley has undergone significant change over
the past 30 years. Whereas most study areas operations in the
1930's and 1940's consisted of small family owned farms with contiguous
land bases, present mid-Willamette Valley units vary considerably...
The purpose of this thesis is to analyze an abrupt case of climate change in the past as a means to understand the mechanisms that force climate change. By looking to past analogs of climate change, we hopefully will gain an understanding of these events, which could be used to...
Oregon's Special Farm Use Assessment program is investigated
in this paper for its effectiveness in preserving farmland from urban
sprawl. Basic research for this study was conducted in Jefferson
County, a rural central Oregon county. Data from a similar study conducted
in Washington County, an urbanizing northern Willamette Valley
county,...
The objective of this dissertation is to enhance the monitoring of forest ecosystems through the utilization of remotely sensed data to address the exigencies posed by the Anthropocene. On a global scale, rising temperatures and fluctuating precipitation patterns have strained forests and produced shifts in natural disturbance regimes. Additionally, the...
The agricultural sector is one of the largest contributors to global climate change but is also one of the most vulnerable to its impacts. Farmers are at increasing risk of livelihood loss, which produces risks for their physical and emotional wellbeing on a global scale. Swift and effective adaptation is...
This research presents the Colorado River basin as a social-ecological
system. Utilizing event data on cooperative and conflictive interactions over fresh water, the system is decomposed to look for evidence of outcomes of resilience enhancement. The Animas-La Plata Project in the upper San Juan basin is presented as a case...
In recent years the conversion of agricultural lands to more
intensive non-rural land uses has become a focus of increasing public
awareness and concern. The growing attention to farmland conversion
is manifested in increasing public policies and legilsation to protect
agricultural and forestry land uses. Nevertheless, our understanding
of the...
This dissertation constitutes a multi-scale quantitative and qualitative investigation of patterns of urban development in metropolitan regions of the United States. This work has generated a comprehensive data set on spatial patterns of metropolitan development in the U.S. and an approach to the study of such patterns that can be...