Community college students are being forced to delay future educational goals, due to the lack of financial support. Grants, student loans and financial aid support from government sources are in short supply. While past resources from state legislative bodies are being restricted and have been reduced to historic levels; educational organizations –community college foundations - have had to associate themselves with numerous outside sources. Collaborative partnerships with business, government, and industry have helped to relieve financial short- falls and student scholarship pressures while building long term and sustaining relationships. The purpose of this study was to investigate the process of annual giving within Texas Gulf Coast Community Colleges. A framework for the study was structured inside of five different institutions in the Gulf Coast region. Additionally, this study set out to examine the overall context of annual giving and whether college foundations were utilizing annual giving as a relationship tool for development and fundraising purposes. The research design followed an interview, case study format utilizing qualitative data. The study had several major findings. First, all colleges adhere to inputs, processes, and outputs. Second, by analyzing each of the inputs and processes, a set of output relationships- were discovered. Third, all institutions have a set of functions – financial, organizational, operational, and structural – which are in alignment with inputs, process and outputs. Fourth, brand identity helps to integrate donors and thereby, builds sustained and long-term support. Annual giving within Texas Gulf Coast community colleges has become a major fixture as a fundraising practice. Foundations are making the most of this tool by positioning themselves with their community and thus, reaping the benefits of donor relationships. / text

Stimulating in situ microbial communities in oil reservoirs to produce natural gas is a potentially viable strategy for recovering additional fossil fuel resources following traditional recovery operations. Little is known about what geochemical parameters drive microbial population dynamics in biodegraded, methanogenic oil reservoirs. We investigated if microbial community structure was significantly impacted by the extent of crude oil biodegradation, extent of biogenic methane production, and formation water chemistry. Twenty-two oil production wells from north central Louisiana, USA, were sampled for analysis of microbial community structure and fluid geochemistry. Archaea were the dominant microbial community in the majority of the wells sampled. Methanogens, including hydrogenotrophic and methylotrophic organisms, were numerically dominant in every well, accounting for, on average, over 98% of the total Archaea present. The dominant Bacteria groups were Pseudomonas, Acinetobacter, Enterobacteriaceae, and Clostridiales, which have also been identified in other microbially-altered oil reservoirs. Comparing microbial community structure to fluid (gas, water, and oil) geochemistry revealed that the relative extent of biodegradation, salinity, and spatial location were the major drivers of microbial diversity. Archaeal relative abundance was independent of the extent of methanogenesis, but closely correlated to the extent of crude oil biodegradation; therefore, microbial community structure is likely not a good sole predictor of methanogenic activity, but may predict the extent of crude oil biodegradation. However, when the shallow, highly biodegraded, low salinity wells were excluded from the statistical analysis, no environmental parameters could explain the differences in microbial community structure. This suggests that the microbial community structure of the 5 shallow, up-dip wells was different than the 17 deeper, down-dip wells. Also, the 17 down-dip wells had statistically similar microbial communities despite significant changes in environmental parameters between oil fields. Together, this implies that no single microbial population is a reliable indicator of a reservoir's ability to degrade crude oil to methane, and that geochemistry may be a more important indicator for selecting a reservoir suitable for microbial enhancement of natural gas generation.

Aboveground plant community dynamics in the oligohaline marsh at Big Branch Marsh National Wildlife Refuge, Louisiana, USA, were assessed in response to nutrient loading (3 N x 3 P treatments) and disturbance (both planned lethal disturbance and stochastic tropical storm/hurricane disturbance). Sampling was conducted seasonally from April 2004 to September 2006. Spartina patens and Schoenoplectus americanus are co-dominant plant species in this marsh. Low N-loading additions resulted in increased S. patens cover. However, increased N loading did not result in a shift in plant community composition despite S. americanus consistently having higher leaf tissue N than S. patens. Our results indicate that S. americanus may be more resilient than S. patens to disturbances that do not increase marsh surface elevation. Hurricane Katrina deposited significant amounts of sediment into remaining plots (August 29, 2005). By 2006, this disturbance resulted in a significant increase in both species richness and S. patens cover.

A sea-level database following a new protocol of quality evaluation standards has been constructed and is used for a comparative analysis to reconcile conflicting hypotheses about Holocene relative sea-level change in the Gulf of Mexico. Sea-level data are assessed quantitatively by assigning errors to both sample elevation and radiocarbon age. Sources of elevation uncertainty include sample thickness, indicative range, sampling errors, and surveying errors. Radiocarbon ages are corrected for bulk peat contamination, reservoir effects, and isotopic fractionation. Error calculations are performed as conservatively as possible. Furthermore, other variables such as sediment compaction are considered, in part relying on descriptive and semi-quantitative information that can prove useful for future studies. Overall, this database is valuable as a guideline for sea-level database standardization. A relative sea-level database has been compiled for coastal Louisiana following the proposed protocol. Comparing relative sea-level records from the Mississippi Delta and the southwest Louisiana Chenier Plain reveals that local sea-level change in both areas exhibits the same trend. This result challenges a recent model used to reconcile the smooth trend of rising sea level in the Mississippi Delta with a mid-Holocene highstand elsewhere along the US Gulf Coast, which advocated cyclic uplift and subsidence of the Mississippi Delta caused by sediment excavation and filling of the Lower Mississippi Valley, respectively. Therefore, it is concluded that vertical crustal movements in coastal Louisiana (i.e., subsidence) are mainly controlled by glacio-isostasy, associated with the melting of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. / acase@tulane.edu

The Gulf Coast of Texas has been proposed as a high capacity storage region for geologic sequestration of anthropogenic CO₂. The Miocene section within the Texas State Waters is an attractive offshore alternative to onshore sequestration. However, the stratigraphic targets of interest highlight a need to utilize fault-bounded structural traps. Regional capacity estimates in this area have previously focused on simple volumetric estimations or more sophisticated fill-to-spill scenarios with faults acting as no-flow boundaries. Capacity estimations that ignore the static and dynamic sealing capacities of faults may therefore be inaccurate. A comprehensive fault seal analysis workflow for CO₂-brine membrane fault seal potential has been developed for geologic site selection in the Miocene section of the Texas State Waters. To reduce uncertainty of fault performance, a fault seal calibration has been performed on 6 Miocene natural gas traps in the Texas State Waters in order to constrain the capillary entry pressures of the modeled fault gouge. Results indicate that modeled membrane fault seal capacity for the Lower Miocene section agrees with published global fault seal databases. Faults can therefore serve as effective seals, as suggested by natural hydrocarbon accumulations. However, fault seal capacity is generally an order of magnitude lower than top seal capacity in the same stratigraphic setting, with implications for storage projects. For a specific non-hydrocarbon producing site studied for sequestration (San Luis Pass salt dome setting) with moderately dipping (16°) traps (i.e. high potential column height), membrane fault seal modeling is shown to decrease fault-bound trap area, and therefore storage capacity volume, compared with fill-to-spill modeling. However, using the developed fault seal workflow at other potential storage sites will predict the degree to which storage capacity may approach fill-to-spill capacity, depending primarily on the geology of the fault (shale gouge ratio – SGR) and the structural relief of the trap. / text

Stacked storage systems are a viable carbon management operation, especially in regions with potential growth in CO₂ enhanced oil recovery (EOR) projects. Under a carbon constrained environment, the industrial Texas Gulf Coast is an ideal area for development of stacked storage operations, with a characteristically high CO₂ intensity and abundance of aging oil fields. The development of EOR along the Texas Gulf Coast is limited by CO₂ supply constraints. A stacked storage system is implemented with an EOR project to manage the temporal differences between the operation of a coal-fired power plant and EOR production. Currently, most EOR operations produce natural CO₂ from geologic formations. A switch to anthropogenic CO₂ sources would require an EOR operator to handle volumes of CO₂ beyond EOR usage. The use of CO₂ in an EOR operation is controlled and managed to maximize oil production, but increasing injection rates to handle the volume of CO₂ captured from a coal plant can decrease oil production efficiency. With stacked storage operations, a CO₂ storage reservoir is implemented with an EOR project to maintain injection capacity equivalent to a coal plant's emissions under a carbon constrained environment. By adding a CO₂ storage operation, revenue can still be generated from EOR production, but it is considerably less than just operating an EOR project. The challenge for an efficient stacked storage project is to optimize oil production and maximize profits, while minimizing the revenue reduction of pure carbon sequestration. There is an abundance of saline aquifers along the Texas Gulf Coast, including the Wilcox, Vicksburg, and Miocene formations. To make a stacked storage system more viable and reduce storage costs, maximizing injectivity is critical, as storage formations are evaluated on a cost-per-ton injected basis. This cost-per-ton injected criteria, also established as injection efficiency, incorporates reservoir injectivity and depth dependant drilling costs to determine the most effective storage formation to incorporate with an EOR project. With regionally adequate depth to maximize injectivity while maintaining reasonable drilling costs, the Vicksburg formation is typically the preferred storage reservoir in a stacked storage system along the Texas Gulf Coast. Of the eleven oil fields analyzed on a net present value basis, the Hastings field has the greatest potential for both EOR and stacked storage operations. / text

In marine flatfish of the genus Paralichthys, temperature plays a large role in sex determination. Thus, global climate change could have significant effects on southern flounder (Paralichthys lethostigma), a commercially and recreationally important flatfish whose populations have steadily declined in Texas in the last 25 years. The most susceptible areas to global climate change are shallow water environments, particularly estuaries, which serve as essential nursery habitats for juvenile southern flounder. While in the estuaries, juveniles develop, and sex is determined. Juvenile southern flounder possess genotypic sex determination; however, the sex of females is highly influenced by temperature and can result in sex reversal. The temperature-sensitive enzyme complex responsible for estrogen biosynthesis in vertebrates is aromatase cytochrome P450 (P450arom), a critical component in ovarian differentiation that can be used to measure presumptive males and females exposed to a gradient of temperatures. This research identifies that sex is influenced by temperature between 35 and 65 mm total length (TL) and establishes that increases in temperature from 18 °C during this size range produce increasingly male skewed sex ratios in southern flounder from Texas. The findings presented here are critical for optimizing production of females in culture and for developing stock enhancement programs of southern flounder in Texas. / text

abstract: This archaeological study applies a world-systems-based approach in evaluating regional economic interaction among independent polities. It focuses specifically on interaction between local polities and Teotihuacan-affiliated populations in the Western Tuxtlas Region of the Gulf Coast of Veracruz, Mexico during the Early Classic and Middle Classic periods (A.D. 300-650). Changes in regional economics followed the founding of the Teotihuacan-linked center of Matacapan in the Catemaco River Valley. To assess these changes, this research characterizes the consumption of Matacapan-produced imports in two independent neighboring polities to reconstruct regional distribution networks and assess Matacapan’s impact on the region. The Central Highland capital of Teotihuacan had variable influence throughout Mesoamerica. One pronounced occurrence of this influence has been identified at Matacapan, which displays strong material culture and architectural connections to Teotihuacan. This research therefore employs a modified world-systems framework which removes the assumption of hierarchy and instead focuses on regional interaction within the periphery. It views the establishment of regional distribution networks centered at Matacapan that articulate with the two neighboring polities as a form of incorporation, the process wherein external groups are brought into a system. To assess incorporation, four potential Matacapan-centered networks are analyzed. These networks consist of the distribution of two ceramic types and obsidian blades produced from two sources. Artifacts from survey, surface collection, and excavation were subjected to ceramic analysis, lithic analysis, petrography, neutron activation analysis, and X-ray fluorescence analysis to identify source, form, and production technology. These data aid in determining network participation in each polity. By assessing importation in these local polities, the form and degree of their incorporation will be identified. Incorporation of indigenous polities into regional networks was not uniform within the Western Tuxtlas Region. Two Matacapan-centered networks were identified, and they differ in form and extent. One indigenous polity, Teotepec, participated in both networks while the other, Totocapan, participated in one. I argue that Teotepec’s incorporation into a second network was strategic in that it was mutually beneficial to both involved parties. Additionally, indigenous Tuxtlas’ polities were able to negotiate interaction with their Teotihuacan-affiliated neighbor for desired goods without forfeiting political or cultural autonomy. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Anthropology 2016

The study of the economic development of the Gulf Coastal Prairie has been divided into the following seven chapters: (1) Physical Aspects, (2) Grazing, (3) Development of Farming, (4) Development of Transportation, (5) Development of Mineral Resources, (6) Development of Industry and (7) A Look to the Future.

Master of Science