Despite a history of leadership and creative approaches to environmental issues, Oregon has struggled to adequately prepare for the current and future impacts of climate change. Oregon faces barriers and limits to understanding, planning, and implementing climate adaptation that can be examined and quantified. Climate change makes for an additional...
Environmental scientists, land managers, and policy actors are increasingly presented with high-stakes high-uncertainty problems stemming from human-ecosystem interactions. To help address these problems, scientists frequently use models that produce enormous geospatial and temporal datasets that are constantly modified and often seek input from communities outside their discipline. To assist scientists—as...
The Oregon wine industry is growing and becoming increasingly valuable to the regional economy. As with many production industries, the wine industry has faced concerns around its environmental practices and community impact. The use of synthetic pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and associated wastewater run-off are a few issues vineyard managers experience....
The state of Oregon is divided in important ways along rural and urban lines, including the way people make a living, individual and group relationships with the natural world, political ideologies, and personal values. This rural-urban divide has assisted policymakers in making decisions that balance the needs of Oregonians on...
This dissertation examines learning driven adaptations in salmon recovery efforts and water resources management in Oregon. The case study utilizes a framework highlighting the connections between human and natural systems. Semi-structured interviews are used to analyze interactions between rural riparian landowners and watershed council staffs living and working in Oregon’s...
The state of the environment, both from a preservation and toxicological point of view, is a continuing concern. One area of potential progress is the incorporation of green chemistry principles, which focus on reducing and eliminating harmful toxics in all aspects of industrial processes from the design and manufacturing to...
The VISualization of Terrestrial and Aquatic Systems (VISTAS) software development project began with the proposition that visualization would increase the ability of scientists to explore and communicate their data, especially complex datasets that span multiple spatial and temporal scales. A case study of VISTAS articulates how and why scientists intend...
Wind and solar energy levels are expected to increase in the Pacific Northwest as a result of maturing renewable energy technologies, and state and federal policies. Because wind and solar energy is intermittent, only producing electricity when weather conditions permit, the integration of these resources has posed challenges to operators...
Social vulnerability is often thought of as a culmination of social factors influencing the susceptibility of various groups to harm and govern their ability to respond. In an effort to identify communities that may be susceptible to social impacts from changes to fishery policies or fishing conditions, NOAA Fisheries is...
Over the past several decades, quality climate information has become extremely valuable to environmental decision makers, yet little is known about how this information is distributed within a social network of professionals. This study focuses on a climate knowledge network associated with a NOAA Climate Impacts Research Consortium (CIRC) study...