Current stormwater management practices (SMP) are not sufficient for maintaining predevelopment runoff volumes. Low impact development (LID) uses site scale SMP to reduce runoff. Bioretention cells, one practice within LID, are small planting beds designed to filter and infiltrate runoff using amended soil and vegetation. The bioretention cell can create a harsh soil moisture regime for plants that has not been adequately characterized. Bioretention cell construction, meteorological, and soil science data were built into the Happy Plant Model to determine how often bioretention plants were saturated and experienced water stress over a thirty year period. The model takes into account eight design factors: soil media depth and texture, gravel storage, ponding depth, drainage area, in situ soil infiltration rate, the landscape coefficient, and root zone depth. The Happy Plant model will aid future studies and landscape architecture practitioners with bioretention plant selection.

There is growing concern that human access into areas of wildlife habitat and the management of that access has become one of the most significant issues in sustaining wildlife populations worldwide. Although access management is recommended throughout primary wildlife research and provincial land management plans as a means of wildlife management, limited research has been conducted on measuring the status of access or on access management strategies. Based on a review of the literature on resource management plans and provincial management strategies, this thesis identifies and describes fifteen potential ecological indicators for measuring and monitoring access and access management. Five key findings are summarized from this review. (1) Meaning and implementation of the term `access management' remains vague and ambiguous. (2) Measures of human access are often tied to large mammal management and studies. (3) Access management is a big question, encompassing cumulative impacts, and when viewed from a systems approach should consider ecological indicators across multiple levels of biological organization. (4) Attention is brought to two sub-types of indicators to monitor access management, land use indicators and wildlife use indicators. (5) Ecological indicators of access and access management share one similar data layer, GIS access infrastructure data.

Research for this study built on the experience of salmon restoration by exploring the lived experience of children ages eight to 12 who participated in an eight-month salmon restoration education program, the Salmonid Enhancement Program (SEP), through the Kamloops School District and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO). The study used a qualitative multimodal phenomenological approach that is theoretically framed through deep ecology and systems theory to answer: What meanings and impacts do children experience when participating in restoration projects? Data was gathered through: children's reflections from the experience, observations from the field experience, researcher reflections, photographs, children's drawings, and six follow-up semi-structured interviews collected from five participating classes in the Kamloops School District. The research will support the Kamloops School District and participating teachers better understand the meaning and experiences of youth participating in Salmonid Enhancement Program in order to create more inclusive program design in the future.

Planners and designers of sustainable communities claim they design them according to sustainability principles, but residents must also embrace those principles in their private lives in order to reduce the community's ecological footprint. One such sustainable community is the "UniverCity" on Burnaby Mountain next to the Simon Fraser University. This research investigated the influence of the residents' individual behaviour on the total ecological footprint of this sustainable community and how planners can influence their residents' behaviour. Using the UniverCity as a case study, this research demonstrates that not all sustainable community planners attempt to influence the residents' behaviour to be more sustainable and that the planners do not always measure the ecological footprint of a community. The study recommends that community planners should attempt to measure this or similar indicators and use direct and indirect influencing methods to build an active and engaged community and foster sustainable behaviour.

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Graduate students' teaching contributes to undergraduate education throughout North America (Park, 2004), the United Kingdom (Muzaka, 2009), Australia (Kift, 2003), and New Zealand (Barrington, 2001), particularly in first-year courses. Mandatory and voluntary training programs, courses, workshops, and certificate programs have been implemented centrally (Mintz, 1998) and departmentally (Ronkowski, 1998) to develop graduate students’ knowledge and skills and improve their teaching. Research assessing outcomes of these programs indicates improvements in individuals’ conceptions about teaching (Saroyan, Dagenais, & Zhou, 2009), but limited impact on practice (Buehler & Marcum, 2007). A potential explanation for this discrepancy is that current individual-focused support for graduate students is not sufficient; rather, teaching and teaching development are influenced by local disciplinary and institutional culture (Taylor, 2010; Trowler & Bamber, 2005). Literature on graduate studies completion further indicates the role of informal supports in graduate students’ academic success (e.g., Lovitts, 2004). This mixed-method research sought to widen the traditional research focus regarding support for graduate students’ scholarly teaching by examining: (1) how support is characterized and described in official visioning documents, policies, and websites at a single institution; (2) how graduate students at this institution generally viewed department and institution-wide supports listed on past surveys, and (3) how current graduate students and supportive individuals from the same institution described available and desired supports. Four themes emerged during analysis of the survey and interview data: formal support, informal support, communication/collaboration, and feedback. These themes were sometimes echoed and sometimes absent in the official documents and existing literature on graduate students’ teaching, which primarily focused on formal supports. Throughout this research, support was explored within the contextual reality in which graduate students learned and taught by examining the sources of such support across the social ecological layers of sector, institution, department, courses, faculty members, peers, and the individual. By broadening the conceptualization of support beyond formal programming, a single social ecological layer, a small group of official support providers, or a one-time event, this study expands both the depth and breadth of possibilities for resource planning within institutions, and future research on teaching supports and graduate student experiences. / Thesis (Ph.D, Education) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-26 17:24:15.055

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Determining the factors responsible for the origin and maintenance of diversity remains a difficult problem in evolutionary biology. There is extensive theoretical work which suggests that environmental heterogeneity plays a major role. This theory argues that diversification is ultimately due to divergent natural selection for alternative resources. In this thesis I investigate adaptation and the evolution of diversity in experimental populations of the asexual bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens. In all experiments I introduce clonal isolates of Pseudomonas to a novel environment and allow evolution to occur through the substitution of random mutations. Adaptation can then be quantified by comparing evolved genotypes to the ancestor. These experiments show that when Pseudomonas is selected in a complex environment containing several resources, sympatric genotypes adapt to use different resources, leading to the evolution of genetically diverse populations. In environments containing just a single resource, most genotypes adapt to use the same resource and no such diversity is observed. Adaptation in the experimental populations is caused by the fixation of beneficial mutations of intermediate fitness effect. My results highlight the value of microbial model systems for answering evolutionary questions and provide strong evidence for the role of ecological factors in the origin of diversity.