Social Justice in Social-Ecological Systems: Resilience Through Stakeholder Engagement

Successful management of social-ecological systems (SES) is predicated on quality collaborative exchanges between project stakeholders and management. The Southwest Crown of the Continent Collaborative (SWCC) Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) provided an opportunity to explore landscape scale collaborative management and SES outcomes. Global change and future uncertainty of landscapes prompted the SWCC to employ restoration treatment alternatives throughout 1.4 million acres of forests, most of which are publicly held. The SWCC currently monitors environmental and economic variables, with plans to monitor social variables. This thesis formalizes a proposed framework to investigate SES resilience, and explores public engagement as an SES process in the SWCC landscape with recommendations for management improvements to bolster positive outcomes. Chapter two explores public engagement using a social justice theoretical lens, and is a stand-alone manuscript submitted to Society and Natural Resources (accepted with minor revisions on 3/26/2017). Public engagement is important for improving outcomes of social-ecological systems management. This manuscript reports on a study linking residents’ attitudes toward public engagement processes to their overall satisfaction with outcomes of a restoration project in Western Montana. We hypothesized that engagement efforts must incorporate both the process control (PC) and decision control (DC) dimensions of procedural justice because DC directly affects stakeholder satisfaction while PC affects stakeholder satisfaction both directly and indirectly through DC. We tested these predictions using a path analysis of intercept survey data collected from residents within the project area. We found process control had a significant and positive effect on satisfaction, but was fully mediated by decision control, suggesting successful engagement requires opportunities for stakeholders to not only participate, but to clearly shape decisions and outcomes. We discuss implications for public engagement, human dimensions research, and social monitoring of social-ecological systems. I conclude by exploring extant SES frameworks and provide suggestions for potential changes to SWCC management, as well as suggestions to improve social monitoring. Among the myriad recommendations provided to improve SES outcomes, improved engagement processes hold primacy; the quality of engagement directly affects stakeholder satisfaction, and may bolster support. Further research questions are raised, which might expand knowledge of how engagement affects support for restoration treatment alternatives

Bremsstrahlung in alpha-Decay Reexamined

A high-statistics measurement of bremsstrahlung emitted in the alpha decay of 210Po has been performed, which allows to follow the photon spectra up to energies of ~ 500 keV. The measured differential emission probability is in good agreement with our theoretical results obtained within the quasi classical approximation as well as with the exact quantum mechanical calculation. It is shown that due to the small effective electric dipole charge of the radiating system a significant interference between the electric dipole and quadrupole contributions occurs, which is altering substantially the angular correlation between the alpha particle and the emitted photon.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, v2: fix of small typo

Exposure Risks as a Criterion of Traffic Accidents Hazards in Iowa

Some very unusual conclusions are sometimes drawn regarding accident hazards in specific locations. Insurance rates are frequently calculated on the basis of the density of population, car registrations, and traffic flow. While there is some empirical support for this type of reasoning, little evidence has been presented to indicate the relative importance of the factors involved. A much more scientific method of establishing insurance rates for a given area could be used if underwriters were disposed to make use of it. The following described study was conducted to determine the relative importance of factors relative to fatalities in the state of Iowa

Global Atmospheric Aerosol Modeling

Global aerosol models are used to study the distribution and properties of atmospheric aerosol particles as well as their effects on clouds, atmospheric chemistry, radiation, and climate. The present article provides an overview of the basic concepts of global atmospheric aerosol modeling and shows some examples from a global aerosol simulation. Particular emphasis is placed on the simulation of aerosol particles and their effects within global climate models

Simulating aerosol microphysics with the ECHAM/MADE GCM ? Part I: Model description and comparison with observations

International audienceThe aerosol dynamics module MADE has been coupled to the general circulation model ECHAM4 to simulate the chemical composition, number concentration, and size distribution of the global submicrometer aerosol. The present publication describes the new model system ECHAM4/MADE and presents model results in comparison with observations. The new model is able to simulate the full life cycle of particulate matter and various gaseous precursors including emissions of primary particles and trace gases, advection, convection, diffusion, coagulation, condensation, nucleation of sulfuric acid vapor, aerosol chemistry, cloud processing, and size-dependent dry and wet deposition. Aerosol components considered are sulfate (SO4), ammonium (NH4), nitrate (NO3), black carbon (BC), particulate organic matter (POM), sea salt, mineral dust, and aerosol liquid water. The model is numerically efficient enough to allow long term simulations, which is an essential requirement for application in general circulation models. In order to evaluate the results obtained with this new model system, calculated mass concentrations, particle number concentrations, and size distributions are compared to observations. The intercomparison shows, that ECHAM4/MADE is able to reproduce the major features of the geographical patterns, seasonal cycle, and vertical distributions of the basic aerosol parameters. In particular, the model performs well under polluted continental conditions in the northern hemispheric lower and middle troposphere. However, in comparatively clean remote areas, e.g. in the upper troposphere or in the southern hemispheric marine boundary layer, the current model version tends to underestimate particle number concentrations

E+A Galaxies and the Formation of Early Type Galaxies at z~0

We present HST/WFPC2 observations of the five bluest E+A galaxies (z~0.1) in the Zabludoff et al. sample to study whether their detailed morphologies are consistent with late-to-early type evolution and to determine what drives that evolution. The morphologies of four galaxies are disturbed, indicating that a galaxy-galaxy merger is at least one mechanism that leads to the E+A phase. Two-dimensional image fitting shows that the E+As are generally bulge-dominated systems, even though at least two E+As may have underlying disks. In the Fundamental Plane, E+As stand apart from the E/S0s mainly due to their high effective surface brightness. Fading of the young stellar population and the corresponding increase in their effective radii will cause these galaxies to migrate toward the locus of E/S0s. E+As have profiles qualitatively like those of normal power-law early-type galaxies, but have higher surface brightnesses. This result provides the first direct evidence supporting the hypothesis that power-law ellipticals form via gas-rich mergers. In total, at least four E+As are morphologically consistent with early-type galaxies. We detect compact sources, possibly young star clusters, associated with the galaxies. These sources are much brighter (M_R ~ -13) than Galactic globular clusters, have luminosities consistent with the brightest clusters in nearby starburst galaxies, and have blue colors consistent with the ages estimated from the E+A galaxy spectra (several 10^8 yr). Further study of such young star cluster candidates might provide the elusive chronometer needed to break the age/burst-strength degeneracy for these post-merger galaxies.Comment: 30 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

A Candidate Sub-Parsec Supermassive Binary Black Hole System

We identify SDSS J153636.22+044127.0, a QSO discovered in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, as a promising candidate for a binary black hole system. This QSO has two broad-line emission systems separated by 3500 km/sec. The redder system at z=0.3889 also has a typical set of narrow forbidden lines. The bluer system (z=0.3727) shows only broad Balmer lines and UV Fe II emission, making it highly unusual in its lack of narrow lines. A third system, which includes only unresolved absorption lines, is seen at a redshift, z=0.3878, intermediate between the two emission-line systems. While the observational signatures of binary nuclear black holes remain unclear, J1536+0441 is unique among all QSOs known in having two broad-line regions, indicative of two separate black holes presently accreting gas. The interpretation of this as a bound binary system of two black holes having masses of 10^8.9 and 10^7.3 solar masses, yields a separation of ~ 0.1 parsec and an orbital period of ~100 years. The separation implies that the two black holes are orbiting within a single narrow-line region, consistent with the characteristics of the spectrum. This object was identified as an extreme outlier of a Karhunen-Loeve Transform of 17,500 z < 0.7 QSO spectra from the SDSS. The probability of the spectrum resulting from a chance superposition of two QSOs with similar redshifts is estimated at 2X10^-7, leading to the expectation of 0.003 such objects in the sample studied; however, even in this case, the spectrum of the lower redshift QSO remains highly unusual.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, Nature in pres