"Undercurrents of Urban Modernism: Water, Architecture, and Landscape in California and the American West" conducts an art-historical analysis of historic waterworks buildings in order to examine cultural values pertinent to aesthetiteics in relationships between water, architecture and landscape in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Visual study of architectural style, ornamental iconography, and landscape features reveals cultural values related to water, water systems, landscape/land use, and urban development. Part 1 introduces a historiography of ideas of "West" and "landscape" to provide a context for defining ways in which water and landscape were conceived in the United States during turn-of-the-century urban development in the American West. Part 2 provides a historical context for California waterworks with a discussion of major U.S. city waterworks from 1799 to 1893 in Philadelphia, Louisville, New York, and New Orleans. Primary architectural styles discussed are Greek Revival, Egyptian Revival, and Roman Revival. Part 3 presents the dissertation's central object of study: waterworks and hydropower architecture for the greater San Francisco Bay Area between 1860 and 1939. From substations to dams, architects who designed waterworks structures drew from historical revival, academic eclecticism, and structural design traditions. The specific waterworks structures anchoring inquiry in this chapter are two round, peripteral, neoclassical water temples built for San Francisco's water supply to mark key underground aqueduct features. I analyze these two temples--the Sunol Water Temple from 1910 and the Pulgas Water Temple from 1939--in formal terms as well as from within broader urban and historical contexts. Part 4 culminates the dissertation with a case study of two dams whose aesthetic features were obscured by unneeded buttresssing when concerns for dam safety arose after a Southern California dam failure had killed several hundred people in 1928. I inquire into a cultural ambivalence stemming that seems to stem from historical conflicts determining the relative aesthetics of "use" and "beauty" in utilitarian waterworks structures. The overall questions in this dissertation inquire into ways in which aesthetic aspects of architectural design of waterworks structures expressed cultural values regarding water, architecture, and landscape in California between 1860 and 1939. / text

An integrating approach, including knowledge about whole systems of processes, is essential in order to reach both development and environmental protection goals. In this thesis Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are suggested as a tool to realise such integrated models. The main hypothesis in this work is that several natural technical and social systems that share a time-space can be compared and analysed in a GIS. My first objective was to analyze how GIS can support research, planning, and, more specifically, bring a broad scattering of competence together in an interdisciplinary process. In this process GIS was ivestigated as a tool to achieve models that give us a better overview of a problem, a better understanding for the processes involved, aid in foreseeing conflicts between interests, find ecological limits and assist in choosing countermeasures and monitor the result of different programs. The second objective concerns the requirement that models should be comparable and possible to include in other models and that they can be communicated to planners, politicians and the public. For this reason the possibilities to communicate the result and model components of multidimensional and multi-temporal data are investigated. Four examples on the possibilities and problems when using GIS in interdisciplinary studies are presented. In the examples, water plays a central role as a component in questions about development, management and environmental impact. The first articles focus on non-point source pollutants as a problem under growing attention when the big industrial and municipal point sources are brought under control. To manage non-point source pollutants, detailed knowledge about local conditions is required to facilitate precise advices on land use. To estimate the flow of metals and N(itrogen) in an area it is important to identify the soil moisture. Soil moisture changes over time but also significantly in the landscape according to several factors. Here a method is presented that calculate soil moisture over large areas. Man as a hydrologie factor has to be assessed to also understand the relative importance of anthropogen processes. To offer a supplement to direct measurements and add anthropogen factors, a GIS model is presented that takes soil-type, topography, vegetation, land-use, agricultural drainage and relative position in the watershed into account. A method to analyse and visualise development over time and space in the same model is presented in the last empirical study. The development of agricultural drainage can be discussed as a product of several forces here analyzed together and visualized with help of colour coded "Hyper pixels" and maps. Finally a discussion concerning the physiological and psychological possibilities to communicate multidimensional phenomena with the help of pictures and maps is held. The main conclusions in this theses are that GIS offer the possibilities to develop distributed models, e.g., models that calculate effects from a vide range of factors in larger areas and with a much higher spatial resolution than has been possible earlier. GIS also offer a possibility to integrate and communicate information from different disciplines to scientists, decision makers and the public. / <p>Diss. (sammanfattning) Umeå : Umeå universitet, 1993, härtill 6 uppsatser.</p> / digitalisering@umu

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This interdisciplinary project offers new insights into the reclamation history of two of the most controversial and contaminated sites in Canadian history: the Sydney tar ponds and coke ovens and the Athabasca oil sands. It argues that Canada’s natural resource-dependent economy, combined with jurisdictional uncertainty, created a hesitant, fragmentary site cleanup regime, one that left room for different ideas about landscapes to shape and even distort reclamation’s goals and processes. In the absence of substantive reclamation standards and legislation, researchers struggled to accommodate the unique challenges of the oil sands during the 1960s and 1970s. Ambitious goals for reclamation faltered, and even the most successful examples of oil sands reclamation differed significantly from the pre-extraction environment; reclamation was not restoration. Planners envisioned transforming northeastern Alberta into a managed wilderness and recreation nirvana, but few of these plans were realised. The Sydney tar ponds experience suggests that truly successful reclamation cannot exist unless past injustices are fully acknowledged, reparations made, and a more complete narrative of contamination and reclamation constructed through open deliberation. Reclamation, after all, does not repair history; nor can it erase the past. Effective oil sands reclamation, then, requires a reconsideration of the site’s past and an acknowledgement of the perpetuated vulnerabilities and injustices wrought by development and reclamation.

Comprendre comment la biodiversité des prairies répond aux changements d’utilisation des terres constitue un enjeu majeur pour la conservation de la biodiversité et le maintien des services écosystémiques dans les paysages agricoles. Dans ce travail de thèse, nous avons cherché (i) à analyser la réponse simultanée d’un ensemble de taxons appartenant à différents niveaux trophiques (plantes, herbivores, pollinisateurs, prédateurs) aux changements d’utilisation des terres agissant à différentes échelles spatiales et temporelles ; (ii) à approcher les mécanismes impliqués dans cette réponse et notamment le rôle des interactions trophiques. Notre approche est basée sur l’utilisation de multiples traits fonctionnels liés à l’acquisition des ressources, la taille et la mobilité des organismes. Nous avons testé la réponse de ces traits à l’histoire des paysages, leur configuration et leur composition. Nous montrons qu’il existe une réponse générale de la diversité fonctionnelle multitrophique aux changements d’utilisation des terres. Nous mettons en évidence l’importance des effets historiques du changement d’utilisation des terres à l’échelle des paysages agricoles menaçant le maintien de communautés fonctionnellement diversifiées dans ces paysages. En considérant un set de traits multiples, notre travail a permis d’approcher certains mécanismes par lesquels les changements d’utilisation des terres présents et passés impactent différentes facettes de la biodiversité. Enfin, l’utilisation des traits fonctionnels a permis d’appréhender l’importance des interactions trophiques et leur implication dans la structuration des communautés animales dans les milieux agricoles. / Understanding how grassland biodiversity responds to land use intensification is crucial for both biodiversity conservation and the management of key ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. My PhD aims at (i) identifying and generalising the effects of land use intensification operating at different spatial and temporal scales across multiple taxonomic groups and trophic levels (plants, herbivores, pollinators, predators and top-predators) ; (ii) investigating the underlying mechanisms of biodiversity response, and particularly the role of trophic interactions. We used multiple functional traits related to resource acquisition, the size of the organisms and their mobility. We tested how multitrophic functional trait diversity responded to landscape history, composition and heterogeneity. Considering multiple taxonomic groups simultaneously, our study brings out a clear response of overall biodiversity to land use intensification. We found that legacy effects of land use intensification operating at the landscape scale are major drivers of present-day multitrophic functional trait diversity in agricultural landscapes. By considering a core set of organismal traits reflecting similar functions across trophic levels, our approach reveals multiple dimensions by which land use intensification filters out biodiversity over time and allows us to generalise its effect across multiple trophic levels and trait-spectrum. Finally, trait-based approach allowed us to assess the importance of trophic interactions and their contribution in shaping animal communities in agricultural landscapes.

Deep anthropogenic topsoils – those augmented through long-term additions of mineral bulk among fertilising agents – retain in both their physical and chemical make-up significant indicators for cultural activity. This project researched the geographical distribution and historical context of deep anthropogenic topsoils in Scotland and the Isles, and used this information to investigate the impact of current land cover upon the cultural information they retain. In so doing, the project investigated the potential for conservation of this significant cultural resource. A review of the historical information available on agricultural and manuring practices for Scotland identified several factors likely to affect deep topsoil distribution and frequency. These were: the availability of bulk manures to Scottish farmers, the significance of the seaweed resource in determining fertiliser strategies in coastal areas, and the influence of urban settlement and associated patterns of domestic and industrial waste disposal on the location of deep topsoils. Evidence for widespread deep topsoil development was limited. The primary data source used – the First Statistical Account of Scotland – was manipulated into a spatial database in ArcView GIS, to which geographical data from the Soil Survey of Scotland and national archaeological survey databases were added. This was used to devise a survey programme aiming both to investigate the potential factors affecting soil development listed above, and to locate deep topsoil sites for analysis. Three sites were identified with deep topsoils under different cover types (woodland, arable and pasture). The urban-influenced context of two of these highlighted the significance of urban settlement to the location of Scottish deep topsoils. Analysis of pH, organic matter, and total phosphorus content showed a correlation between raised organic matter and a corresponding increase in phosphorus content in soils under permanent vegetation. By contrast, soils under arable cultivation showed no such rise. This was attributed to the action of cropping in removing modern organic inputs prior to down-profile cycling. The potential for pasture and woodland cover to affect relict soil signatures was therefore observed. Thin section analysis aimed to both provide micromorphological characterisation of the three deep topsoil sites and investigate the effect of modern land cover on micromorphological indicators. Distinctive differences in micromorphological character were observed between the rural and urban deep topsoils, with the latter showing a strong focus on carbonised fuel residues and industrial wastes. All sites showed a highly individual micromorphological character, reflective of localised fertilising systems. There was no correlation between land cover type and survival of material indictors for anthropogenic activity, with soil cultural indicators surviving well, particularly those characteristic of urban-influenced topsoils. Suggestions for preservation strategies for this potentially rare and highly localised cultural resource included the incorporation of deep anthropogenic topsoil conservation into current government policy relating to care of the rural historic environment, and the improvement of data on the resource through ongoing survey and excavation.