In September of 2017, Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria, both category 5 hurricanes, swept across the Caribbean, including the U.S. Territory island of Puerto Rico. These two storms, particularly Hurricane Maria, caused catastrophic damages from high winds and flooding to the island paradise. This research investigates the direct effects that Hurricane Maria had on the residential construction industry within Puerto Rico and evaluates how to better prioritize and manage these types of efforts in the future. This research was initiated to identify challenges and opportunities that have been encountered within the Puerto Rican construction industry during the first year of reconstruction, post-Hurricane Maria. Residential structures that were built using current building codes experienced minimal storm damage. Many of the damaged residential structures, on the other hand, were made up of informal construction, predominantly using light wood framing methods. Unfortunately, homes built using informal construction practices were not insured nor eligible for government rebuilding assistance. Therefore, these damaged structures will more than likely be rebuilt using informal building practices again. Other immediate challenges faced by the construction industry included finding skilled labor and creating access to resources. The results of this research can be used to help prioritize reconstruction efforts and provide best practices following other similar disasters that will inevitably occur in the future. This research is unique in that it specifically targets the construction industry's experience and ultimately the ability to increase the effectiveness of the critical role the construction industry plays in rebuilding efforts.

This dissertation examines local congregations in Puerto Rico to help articulate a theology of sustainable hope revealed through their outreach practices and ecclesiologies of public and political participation. Nurtured by qualitative research with six Christian congregations in Puerto Rico, the work moves from an articulation of context, hope, practice, and future to reveal its aim of liberation through sustainable hope. Puerto Rico’s continuous colonial history, and most recently its devastation during and after Hurricane María, heightened the socio-economic crisis that continues to hinder the hope of Puerto Ricans inside and outside the island. In this dissertation, I analyze the operations of political systems that suppress hope in Puerto Rico. I weave the theme of a theology of hope, with the fields of ecclesiology, memory studies, postcolonial and decolonial theory, liberation theology, and the study of social movements to build a model that puts hope at the center of our practices and moves toward a recipe for a hope that is sustainable in practice. Along with many other theologians and theorists, I converse with the work of theologians Rubem Alves and Ellen Ott Marshall. Alves shapes the definition of hope in this dissertation by challenging how society is organized and revealing how this organization oppresses imagination and people’s liberative agency. Marshall describes hope as elastic, making room for the expectation of a hopeful future that coexists in tension with the challenges of our daily lives. My writing is framed by an ecclesiological context; an articulation of a hope that does not remain static and responds to the challenges of colonialism, the erasure of memory, and oppression; and a liberation theology of creation. I present a way to articulate a hope that is able to sustain the people of Puerto Rico through their practices of hope. / 2021-07-23T00:00:00Z

Seagrass meadows, like coral reefs, are in decline globally but are often neglected in marine policy and conservation despite their equally critical ecosystem services. Both habitats can be heavily impacted by wave surges, rainfall-induced earth movement and flooding, changes to water temperature, salinity, and acidity, and increased levels of turbidity—all occurring at increased rates due to a changing global climate. We demonstrate that multispectral satellite imagery, geospatial tools, and classification techniques can be used to inform management by identifying and quantifying changes in seagrass distribution and the presence of sediment-related threats. Results from Dominica indicate near-shore seagrass habitat area increased by 195.7 hectares between 2016 and 2019, suggesting a continued expansion of Halophila stipulacea. Further analysis showed 22.4 hectares of accreted coastal sediment and 1362.2 hectares of suspended sediment captured, placing 424.4 hectares of sensitive reef area at risk of experiencing tissue abrasion or reduced photosynthetic activity. Our methods can be used by marine resource managers and policy makers to inform decisions relating to fisheries production, emissions trading, disaster risk mitigation, and invasive species monitoring, facilitating sustainable growth in the blue economy.

In September 2017 Hurricane Maria made landfall on the U.S territory island of Puerto Rico, causing substantial damage to the already weakened infrastructure and other aspects of the built environment. This research attempted to identify the challenges and opportunities that have been encountered within the Puerto Rican commercial and civil construction industry during the first year of reconstruction, post-Hurricane Maria. This was done by identifying the effects of the storm as well as the strategies of construction companies involved in the reconstruction process. The study used the events occurring after the passing of the hurricane as a case study to conduct interviews with those involved in the reconstruction efforts. The interviews followed a semi- structured interview approach to gather the data. The research found how the reconstruction efforts in Puerto Rico affected the commercial and civil construction industries, exploring the challenges, opportunities, and changes to typical business practices with regard to finances, labor, equipment, and material changes after Hurricane Maria. This was accomplished by highlighting the methods and processes used by the construction industry professionals and identifying the ones that were effective and/or ineffective in rebuilding the island. This research provided a number of key findings regarding reconstruction efforts. first, the large amounts of reconstruction related work following the storm boosted the economy of the industry and companies began growing in size and employing more personnel to fit their business needs. Second, unfortunately the vast amounts of reconstructive work created by Hurricane Maria also created a deficit in skilled labor in Puerto Rico. Third, initial reconstruction efforts were heavily focused on clearing debris, greatly benefitting companies that owned their own equipment. Finally, material availability proved to be a limiting factor in reconstruction, and lead times were directly increased because of Hurricane Maria.

The intent of this thesis is to analyze the racial attitudes of residents in the Orlando MSA towards Puerto Rican migrants that have moved as a result of Hurricane Maria and analyze the effects these attitudes may have on racial residential segregation in Central Florida. As the state with the third largest population of Latinos, Florida's residential landscape continues to be uniquely formed by a diverse, and markedly Latino, population. Florida's location in relation to South American and Caribbean countries has made it an opportune destination for immigrants and refugees. Therefore, it came as no surprise that when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in late 2017, thousands of Puerto Ricans sought refuge in Florida. This thesis examines racial attitudes towards this group of Puerto Rican migrants and the ways in which they could potentially affect neighborhood demographics. The study proceeds by collecting survey responses from participants living in the Orlando areas being analyzed. The survey asks participants about their general views of Puerto Rican migrants, it tests their knowledge of racial residential patterns in Orlando, and it analyzes their neighborhood preferences using a show card method.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the health outcomes of diabetic patients in Puerto Rico, before, during, and after Hurricane Maria, in 2017. The Department of Health in Puerto Rico provided the secondary data for the variables low-density lipoproteins (LDL) cholesterol, hemoglobin A1C (HbA1c), mortality, and consumer price index (CPI). The inclusion criteria were participants for whom electronic data were available before, during, and after Hurricane Maria; the sample size was 450. The theoretical framework for this investigation was the health outcomes and impact assessment. The data were analyzed by univariate and analysis of variance (ANOVA) to compare means and normality test analysis. Results of this study revealed that before Hurricane Maria, diabetics in Puerto Rico did not have control of their health. The American Diabetes Association (ADA) guideline for Hgb AIC is < 7.0; prior to Hurricane Maria Hgb AIC was 7.30 and after it was 7.21. The ADA LDL goal is

𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧) Tropical forests are the world’s most structurally complex ecosystems, providing key functions like biomass accumulation and harboring biodiversity. Yet climate-change poses a potential threat to the stability of these forests – tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic are projected to increase in intensity, leading to higher forest damage rates, potentially reducing their carbon sequestration and biodiversity potential. Hurricane Maria in 2017 was a possible portent of this dynamic, causing widespread devastation in Puerto Rico. How do forests resist such severe disturbances? Forests ecosystems contain ecological memory – physical and biological legacies from past natural disturbances like fires and windstorms – that can increase their resilience to future disturbances. In fire-prone forests, for example, prior exposure to non-severe fires has been shown to increase resistance to severe wildfires. Does the same mechanism apply in cyclone-prone tropical forests? In this dissertation, I examine how chronic exposure to non-hurricane winds impacts hurricane damage at the tree, stand, and landscape scales in Puerto Rico. Specifically, I ask – 1) Do chronic winds alter tree architecture to reduce their risk of stem-breaks? 2) Do chronic winds reduce forest stand structural complexity? 3) Do chronic winds and lower canopy structural complexity reduce individual tree and forest stand damage from Hurricane Maria? 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐝𝐬) I used a novel combination of remote sensing, fieldwork, and high-resolution Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data collected in 2016 to address the above questions. In Chapter 1, I connected sub-meter resolution GPS data and 30 years of forest inventory with 0.03m resolution airborne LiDAR data to evaluate chronic wind impacts on the tree architecture and wind-risk of 124 forest trees of four key species. In Chapter 2, I used machine learning, remote-sensing and LiDAR data to predict the chronic wind impacts on the canopy height and structural complexity of ~20,000 0.28 ha forested sites across climatic, forest age and topographic gradients. In Chapter 3, I used pre-storm size and damage assessment field data for ~7,000 trees of 160 species across 14, 0.25 ha sites spanning an 800 m elevation gradient, alongside a remote-sensing dataset of ~12,000 forests to evaluate multiscale drivers – including canopy structural complexity – of individual, stand and landscape level hurricane damage. 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐥𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬) At the individual tree scale, I found that long-lived species grew ~3.5 m shorter and ~ 4 m2 smaller crowns on average due to chronic wind-exposure, substantially reducing their estimated wind-risk, whereas short-lived species did not respond architecturally to chronic winds. At the stand and landscape scales, I found that chronic winds reduced canopy height by 2.12 m on average, and that structural complexity decreased substantially with forest age. I found that stand-level hurricane damage was primarily a function of increased canopy structural complexity, which in turn decreased with elevation; and that individual tree damage increased with stem size and varied only slightly by species, with short-lived species much more susceptible to damage. My findings suggest that tropical forest resistance to increasingly severe hurricanes depends largely on the physical structure of their canopies, and only then on adapted species-level life-history traits. The physical structure of forest canopies, in turn, changes substantially with exposure to non-hurricane winds. In old-growth forests in Puerto Rico, there is therefore evidence that ecological memory driven by exposure to non-hurricane winds can protect forests from severe wind disturbances. However, younger, more structurally complex forests may be potentially increasingly more vulnerable in a changing climate.

In this study, a qualitative rhetorical analysis is done on U.S. president Donald Trump’s crisis communication on Hurricane Maria, which was an Atlantic hurricane that struck areas such as Puerto Rico and Dominica in the autumn of 2017. Given that the former is an unincorporated territory of the U.S., the need for effective relief measures by the Trump administration became of particular importance there. However, in the media, the actual response by the administration was widely criticised as being slow and inefficient by actors like the relief group Oxfam and the humanitarian organisation Refugees International. Therefore, this study critically evaluates Trump’s crisis communication strategies on the hurricane to assess their success. The material consists of statements by Trump in both traditional and social media through official remarks and tweets, which are analysed through the crisis communication theories of image repair theory and situational crisis communication theory. In doing so, of interest is also to examine whether any differences can be seen in the strategies used by Trump in these two kinds of media channels. To address the hurricane, the findings showed that Trump mainly used the crisis communication strategies of corrective action, bolstering, defeasibility and attack accuser from image repair theory and compensation, reminder, ingratiation, excuse and attack the accuser from situational crisis communication theory. Moreover, no distinctive differences were found in which strategies Trump used in the respective channels, even if the attacks on Twitter were often more aggressive. While both positive and negative evaluations could be made of how Trump used these strategies overall, the main conclusion of the study is that his crisis communication was largely ineffective due to the strategies sometimes being contradictory and inconsistent.