Humans are evolutionarily programmed to respond positively to nature, and maintaining a connection to it is necessary to the health and well being of every individual while we collectively stride for the goal of sustainability. This Thesis proposal will examine land and water restoration through the service of a sustainable community center. Environmentally low impact, organic, and vernacular design will be investigated as a means to heal, site and community with various techniques of resilient applications. The area of research is the Blackstone River Valley, once the heart of America’s first industrial revolution. Canals, factories and mills bordered the shores of the Blackstone River and left the land and water with a legacy of pollution. The Blackstone River was once known as the most polluted waterway in the country, with extensive toxic sediment that continues to require remediation. The Thesis is located on the former Fisherville Mill site, a brownfield-designated area in the town of Grafton, Massachusetts. This design will be a possible prototype for other mill sites within the Blackstone River Valley by re-inserting an environmental and economic component into the site. The goal will be to return a degraded location into a site that will allow the community to reinvest in a spirit of reverence for their land and water.

This dissertation develops a new distributed split-flow stormwater management strategy and compares its site design feasibility and construction cost to existing stormwater management methods. The purpose of the split-flow strategy is to manage stormwater by preserving predevelopment flows in terms of rate, quality, frequency, duration and volume. This strategy emulates the predevelopment hydrology: it retains and infiltrates additional runoff volume created by development by using bioretention and paired weirs as proportional flow splitters connected to small infiltration facilities distributed throughout a site. Results show that 1) the distributed split-flow stormwater management strategy can provide a higher level of environmental protection at comparable construction cost to existing detention-based methods, 2) split-flow systems are less expensive to construct than current truncated hydrograph-based bioretention and infiltration systems and 3) non-point source water pollution-reduction objectives, currently achieved with either detention with first flush or comparable bioretention and infiltration systems, could be achieved in a more cost-effective manner using distributed split-flow stormwater management strategy. / Ph. D.

Bayesian approaches are increasingly being used to embed mechanistic process models used into statistical state space frameworks for environmental prediction and forecasting applications. In this study, I focus on Bayesian State Space Models (SSMs) for modeling the temporal dynamics of carbon in terrestrial ecosystems. In Chapter 1, I provide an introduction to Ecological Forecasting, State Space Models, and the challenges of using State Space Models for Ecosystems. In Chapter 2, we provide a brief background on State Space Models and common methods of parameter estimation. In Chapter 3, we simulate data from an example model (DALECev) using driver data from the Talladega National Ecosystem Observatory Network (NEON) site and perform a simulation study to investigate its performance under varying frequencies of observation data. We show that as observation frequency decreases, the effective sample size of our precision estimates becomes too small to reliably make inference. We introduce a method of tuning the time resolution of the latent process, so that we can still use high-frequency flux data, and show that this helps to increase sampling efficiency of the precision parameters. Finally, we show that data cloning is a suitable method for assessing the identifiability of parameters in ecosystem models. In Chapter 4, we introduce a method for embedding positive process models into lognormal SSMs. Our approach, based off of moment matching, allows practitioners to embed process models with arbitrary variance structures into lognormally distributed stochastic process and observation components of a state space model. We compare and contrast the interpretations of our lognormal models to two existing approaches, the Gompertz and Moran-Ricker SSMs. We use our method to create four state space models based off the Gompertz and Moran-Ricker process models, two with a density dependent variance structure for the process and observations and two with a constant variance structure for the process and observations. We design and conduct a simulation study to compare the forecast performance of our four models to their counterparts under model mis-specification. We find that when the observation precision is estimated, the Gompertz model and its density dependent moment matching counterpart have the best forecasting performance under model mis-specification when measured by the average Ignorance score (IGN) and Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), even performing better than the true generating model across thirty different synthetic datasets. When observation precisions were fixed, all models except for the Gompertz displayed a significant improvement in forecasting performance for IGN, CRPS, or both. Our method was then tested on data from the NOAA Dengue Forecasting Challenge, where we found that our novel constant variance lognormal models had the best performance measured by CRPS, and also had the best performance for both CRPS and IGN for one and two week forecast horizons. This shows the importance of having a flexible method to embed sensible dynamics, as constant variance lognormal SSMs are not frequently used but perform better than the density dependent models here. In Chapter 5, we apply our lognormal moment matching method to embed the DALEC2 ecosystem model into the process component of a state space model using NEON data from University of Notre Dame Environmental Research Center (UNDE). Two different fitting methods are considered for our difficult problem: the updated Iterated Filtering algorithm (IF2) and the Particle Marginal Metropolis Hastings (PMMH) algorithm. We find that the IF2 algorithm is a more efficient algorithm than PMMH for our problem. Our IF2 global search finds candidate parameter values in thirty hours, while PMMH takes 82 hours and accepts only .12% of proposed samples. The parameter values obtained from our IF2 global search show good potential for out of sample prediction for Leaf Area Index and Net Ecosystem Exchange, although both have room for improvement in future work. Overall, the work done here helps to inform the application of state space models to ecological forecasting applications where data are not available for all stocks and transfers at the operational timestep for the ecosystem model, where large numbers of process parameters and long time series provide computational challenges, and where process uncertainty estimation is desired. / Doctor of Philosophy / With ecosystem carbon uptake expected to play a large role in climate change projections, it is important that we make our forecasts as informed as possible and account for as many sources of variation as we can. In this dissertation, we examine a statistical modeling framework called the State Space Model (SSM), and apply it to models of terrestrial ecosystem carbon. The SSM helps to capture numerous sources of variability that can contribute to the overall predictability of a physical process. We discuss challenges of using this framework for ecosystem models, and provide solutions to a number of problems that may arise when using SSMs. We develop methodology for ensuring that these models mimic the well defined upper and lower bounds of the physical processes that we are interested in. We use both real and synthetic data to test that our methods perform as desired, and provide key insights about their performance.

Objective: The purpose of the following study was to test the feasibility of using an ecological momentary assessment strategy during participation in water exercise. This assessment strategy was used to collect ratings of pain intensity level, affective status and self-efficacy for engaging in regular exercise prior to, during and following participation in water exercise for women with chronic pain. Design: Participants (N=15) completed six measures assessing physical activity level and reactions to physical activity and exercise participation and participated in elicitation interviews focused on their experiences with chronic pain and physical activity and exercise. Participants reported daily pain intensity levels, affect and self-efficacy each morning by phone and used cellular phones to report momentary ratings immediately following participation in water exercise for 6 weeks. Results: Participant profiles were developed to display patterns of pain intensity, affect and self-efficacy over the course of 6 weeks. Profiles indicated a variety of levels of exercise consistency in participants. Pain intensity, affect and self-efficacy varied over the course of an exercise event and revealed varied patterns across participants. Overall, momentary self-efficacy (M¹= 7.98, SD=1.65; M²= 8.29, SD=1.62; M³=8.45, SD=1.45) and affect mean ratings (M¹= 2.05, SD=1.42; M²= 2.76, SD=1.22; M³=3.02, SD=1.06) increased over the course of the exercise events while pain levels decreased from pre-exercise levels (M¹= 2.67, SD=2.30; M²= 1.85, SD=1.86; M³=1.95, SD=2.05). Elicitation interviews indicated themes related to the importance of enjoyment of exercise, social factors, and impact on pain level and overall physical condition. Final interviews provided information about the reactions of participants to the assessment strategy and offered insight into the acceptance of this approach for future studies of exercise behaviors. Conclusion: Overall, this approach to ecological momentary assessment of variables associated with exercise was acceptable to participants and revealed variable patterns of pain intensity, self-efficacy and affective state in relation to water-exercise engagement. / Ph. D.

The purpose of this research was to examine the relationship between a parents' goals for their children and their parenting behaviors. An ecological framework (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 1990) provides the primary theoretical basis for the study, locating the relationship between parent goals and parent practices within a network of other influences on parenting practices, such as family income, ethnicity, parent educational level, and the degree of similarity in temperament between parent and child. Three different types of parental goals were investigated, using the Parenting Goals Questionnaire (Martin, Halverson, & Hollett-Wright,1991); achievement, independence, and respect for parents. These goals were relevant to subscales of the Child Rearing Practices Questionnaire (Block, 1986). Results indicated partial support for a relationship between parenting goals and parenting practices. The hypothesized link was found for independence-oriented goals and practices, and for traditional goals and authoritarian behavior, but not for traditional goals and parental encouragement of emotional expression. / Ph. D.

This thesis proposes that sensory experience should play an important role in setting up a direct relationship between people and the natural environment, and it is based on the premise that contemporary urban public space ecological designs. Are often deficient in this regard. In order to develop a design methodology that addresses both ecological function and sensory experience, the author examine both contemporary western ecological design and classical Chinese garden design. The former focuses on the ecological functions of the environment, while the latter typically emphasizes the sensory qualities of the landscape. Drawing from the strengths of both approaches, an experience-oriented ecological design framework is proposed with the goal of improving human experience in urban public spaces. The framework emphasizes both sensory experience and ecological functions in two phases of the design process — site analysis and site design. The framework is applied to a design for Bridge Park in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts. The design is evaluated to assess efficacy of the framework for the design urban public spaces that address both sensory experience and ecological processes. The evaluation suggests that the framework could be an effective tool for designers, and also draws conclusions regarding the potential role of sensory experience as a tool for creative discovery in the design process. Finally the paper raises questions regarding the desirability of employing sensory experience as a didactic tool to enhance environmental awareness. / Master of Landscape Architecture

Ecological interventions hold promise for meeting the needs of post-disaster communities, yet little systematic quantitative evidence is available about such programs. This study evaluated the short-term outcomes of participants in the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) program, a novel and exemplar ecological intervention for helpers working in post-disaster settings. It is a one week training and support program for helpers working in disaster-affected communities. Changes in the psychological distress of 42 STAR participants, across four STAR sessions, were assessed and identified as primary outcome variables. Knowledge, attitude, and intended practice changes were also assessed, along with perceived support, using a pre (T1)/post (T2) design. These indicators were then tested as possible predictors of participants' changes in distress. An integrity check was conducted on a sample of the seminar modules to assess fidelity to the program manual. Qualitative data were also gathered from follow up visits conducted with two participants. These data were used to help interpret quantitative findings, as well as to plan for future studies of how STAR effects might extend out from helpers into their home communities. Results showed that participants exhibited significant changes in knowledge, attitudes, and intended practices from the beginning of the seminar to the end. Results also showed significant decreases in psychological distress over the STAR week. Regression analyses showed that changes in knowledge, attitudes, and practice, as well as perceived social support during the seminar, explained significant amounts of variance in self reported trauma symptoms at T2. Variance in T2 burnout and compassion fatigue explained by these predictors was notable but not statistically significant due to lack of power. Results suggest that STAR can change knowledge and attitudes of helpers from disaster communities and that participants in this program experience decreases in distress during their stay. The lack of a valid comparison group makes causal interpretations of these findings premature. Findings also suggest that changes in distress are not caused by, or even significantly related to, learning that takes place during the STAR week. The mechanism for distress reduction during the STAR week is an unresolved question. Other significant unresolved questions remain regarding the STAR intervention and ways the present findings can be generalized to ecological interventions more broadly. For example, while the current study suggests important changes occur in helpers during the STAR week, it is of central importance to explore how these changes translate into the disaster-affected home communities. Discussion also focuses on the difficulties involved in conducting systematic research with organizations and helpers whose primary goals are practical or clinical, not scientific. Despite the questions that remain, taken together, results point to the promise of STAR to address the mental health needs of helpers and perhaps eventually disaster communities. / Ph. D.

This study assesses the contextual aspect of working in a family business on intimate relationships. Guided by principles of ecological theory, this study explores the unique situation of individuals who work with an intimate partner in a business they own and how this situation manifests itself in their close relationship. Individuals in a family business are confronted with a potentially unique family-work experience, especially for spouses/partners who work together in a business. It is hypothesized that objective and subjective work time influence couple relationship quality. Six specific hypotheses centered on the connection between family and work microsystems as well as the influence of macrosystem beliefs regarding family, work, and gender were assessed by regression analysis. Ninety-nine individuals completed a demographic and daily diary online. The sample was 52.53% men, 78.79% White, and educated (63.63% held at least Bachelor degrees). The majority of the sample was legally married (91.92%), with an average relationship length of 16.20 years (SD = 12.74 years). Regression analyses revealed limited support for the hypotheses. For people in family businesses, working more hours was associated with greater withdrawal from their intimate partner. Perceiving work time as sad was linked to more withdrawal from partner and more anger with partner, but not linked with feelings of closeness to partner. People who felt time at work as appreciated reported feeling closer to their intimate partner. The more respondents believed it was meaningful to distinguish between work and family, the less closeness to their partner they reported. Finally, age was significant for relationship quality, with younger individuals reporting more withdrawal and anger with partner and less closeness to their partner than did older individuals. This study contributes to research exploring the connection between family and work among individuals who work together in family businesses. While objective work time was associated with the measure of withdrawal from a partner, objective work time did not significantly contribute to the report of anger with a partner or closeness to a partner. Overall, how individuals felt during work time had an effect on their spousal/partner relationship, with feeling sad at work associated with more relationship withdrawal and anger, and feeling appreciated at work associated with more closeness. Limited support for the model suggests there may be unique processes of work and family operating within family businesses. Although work and family microsystems were connected in this study of family business owners, the links between work and family were different from previous research on dual- and single-earner families. Future research should untangle the processes through which work and family and time are connected, with attention to larger cultural influences, particularly how individuals within family businesses do work and family and how families ascribe to and enact gender within family businesses. In addition, further research should assess the degree to which microsystems can be differentiated in populations characterized by an extreme mesosystem connection between work and family. / Ph. D.

This thesis explores the ecological design of schoolyard environments. It employs a systems approach, and considers energy, hydrologic, biotic, and social systems and their interrelation. The question of how to integrate experiential learning with the school landscape is also examined, as the concept of empowerment through experience in the landscape is a strong component of this project. With insights gained from an extensive literature review, the author tests the design position through the design explorations of a single schoolyard. The design process, described herein, illustrates the potential for ecological schoolyard design. / Master of Landscape Architecture

Ecological studies of crime explore how crime and delinquency are distributed within a geographical area. The most famous of these studies was done by Shaw and McKay (1942). The present study analyzes juvenile incarceration data by geographic location, measures of social disorganization, gender and race for the years 1993, 1994, and 1995 for each county and independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Regression analysis indicated that a rural/urban difference does not exist for all incarceration categories used in the study. When the control measure of arrest rate was added to the regression, no rural/urban difference was found. The percent non-white yielded the only consistently significant variable related to incarceration rates, except female incarceration for which no independent variable was found to have a significant relationship. / Master of Science