published_or_final_version / Conservation / Master / Master of Science in Conservation

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To the Southern Paiutes, the Spring Mountains are the center of Creation. They believe that they, as a people, were created in these mountains at the beginning of time. Southern Paiutes believe that the Spring Mountains constitute a living being that has a zoomorphic shape. This being has a head which is found at the northern end of the range at Mount Sterling, a tail located at Mount Potosi, and in the center at Mount Charleston, a womb which created life. Mount Charleston is the geographic and cultural center of the Spring Mountains. The Spring Mountains are located within the traditional Pahrump and Las Vegas districts of the Southern Paiute Nation. The mountains, today, serve as a boundary between the cities of Las Vegas and Pahrump, Nevada. In 2003, the United States Forest Service (USFS) funded an applied ethnographic study that focused on a cultural landscape assessment of the Spring Mountain National Recreation Area, Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest. The project examined the traditional, religious, and cultural values of Southern Paiute people inherent in the Spring Mountains of southern Nevada. The study design required that Richard Stoffle and his research team from the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology work with tribal representatives to prepare a map through a rapid assessment to identify sites, areas, and landscapes that are of cultural and religious importance to the Southern Paiute people. The second task was to provide the USFS with an overview essay summarizing the ethnographic archival field notes and literature relevant to Southern Paiute cultural values of the Spring Mountains. The third task required field visits and interviews with tribal members that focused on the overall cultural importance of the Spring Mountains and individual places visited throughout the mountain range. This work served as the ethnographic core of the overall report and the basis for USFS management decisions and tribal consultation.

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Health regions in Canada are primarily associated with the rationalization of conventional, historically expensive provincial health care systems. At the same time, it is unclear what contribution health regions make to advancing health system reform, particularly health-promoting activities. This work sets out to understand the relationships between regionalization and health-promoting activity by studying two health regions in Canadian provinces that have different approaches to regionalization (British Columbia and Ontario). I use a constructivist grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2006) to analyse data from nineteen key informant interviews with senior management working in the two regional health authorities and in provincial health organizations. The iterative analysis of the empirical data and the review of corporate documents from both regional organizations result in the identification of three core themes grounded in the data. The dominant theme emerging from the analysis is identified as place-making referring to a region’s ability to facilitate health-promoting activity by making the region a place with special meaning and resonance for the populations served. The other two themes are creating space within organizations for health-promoting activity and developing networks. The former refers to a region’s willingness and ability to operationally support health-promoting activity and the latter refers to efforts undertaken to establish relationships with other organizations in the health-promotion and healthcare networks. I conclude that these three themes characterize critical components of a therapeutic region. A therapeutic region suggests a conceptualization of regional health authorities (RHAs) in which priority is given to health-promoting activities, alongside an entrenched curative healthcare agenda (the medical model). A therapeutic region is conceived of as a region that implements policies and develops structures aimed at achieving improvements in the overall health status of the population it serves. In this research I develop a four-cell matrix to frame the theory of therapeutic regions. One axis represents a continuum of place-making, while the second axis reflects a continuum depicting how regions develop the two other themes -- one extreme represents a piecemeal or patchwork approach, and the other an integrated strategic approach. The implications of this research relate to practice and policy. The practice of improving the health of the population served requires regions to open pathways, and remove longstanding barriers by making place-making core to all community engagement and develop health-promoting activity within their organizations and their networks. Policy-makers need to bring clarity to the regions’ role in health-promoting activity. This research indicates that health-promoting activity, innovation and progress occur when a region has the ability to manage both conventional, curative health care and health-promoting activities. Whether that is through direct governance or new ways to bring together decision-making, service co-ordination and evaluation is a subject for future work. / Graduate

Student Number : 8905619P - PhD thesis - School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies - Faculty of Humanities / In this thesis I identify and clarify the archaeological signature of rain-control sites in the Shashe-Limpopo Confluence Area (SLCA). I use a landscape-based approach to investigate rain-control in the ideology of SLCA farming communities. I investigate the archaeology of ritual by viewing rain-control as materialised ideology. Using this insight, I examine the material culture and spatial manifestation of rain-control, the transition from ritual to residential sites, and how these transitions articulated with the ritualised landscape. Specifically, I explore the local manifestation of rain-control and its relationship with the ideologies of farming communities in the period leading up to SLCA state formation, between AD 1000 and AD 1250. I also scrutinize the relationship of the Leopard’s Kopje elite with hunter-gatherers and other farming people on the same landscape, as this relationship was partly grounded in ritual and raincontrol. Furthermore, this thesis explores the ideological roots of the Mapungubwe state. The ideology manifest in the location of the Mapungubwe royal residential area germinated during the K2 occupation. In this period rain-control was slowly removed from nature and located in farmer society. The final step in this course was nationalising rain-control and locating it on Mapungubwe hill. Initially, however, rain-controllers resisted this centralisation.

Cladonia perforata is an endangered lichen endemic to the Atlantic Coastal Ridge, Lake Wales Ridge, Southwest Florida, and the North Gulf Coast of Florida. In all but a single locality, C. perforata relies entirely on asexual reproduction through fragmentation for reproduction, dispersal, and recruitment. This study suggests a positive correlation between fragment size and survivability of fragments after one year. The average thallus grew at a rate of 10.42% per year and younger branches of a thallus grew at a quicker rate than older branches. Additionally, a review of thalli morphology suggests C. perforata has a diverse form, and becomes more bifurcated as it increases in size. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This thesis accompanies a practice as research doctoral project that investigates the perceptual mechanisms and conceptions of land as a site of constant change. It utilises photographic practice as a form of visual communication. The aim is to examine the roles of movement and memory in the perceptual experiences of the environment through a phenomenological framework that involves the consideration of the concepts of place and space from a temporal perspective. The principal theme is how the moving and changing environment can be interpreted through the stasis of photography and what this implies about the individual’s relationship to it. The research methodology is a Rhizomatic multi‐site and multi‐process approach, utilising various methods and investigating site types appropriately as an interwoven practice. This has resulted in five separate bodies of work that deal with different forms of movement. The work employs close range photogrammetry techniques liberated from the empirical traditions of archaeological photography and time‐lapse to investigate the human‐scaled aerial view and visually interpret embodiment in the environment. An exhibition, titled Continuum derived from this practice was also shown at Avenue Gallery, Northampton University, UK, from 27th October 2014 ‐ 7th November 2014. A catalogue of works, titled In Flux; Land, Photography and Temporality accompanies this thesis as a PDF on the disc provided (appendix # 1). The research concludes that a consideration of time and space as durational and flowing can be interpreted through the stasis of photography. Through this the changing nature of the environment can be investigated. This is achieved by extending the duration of photographic processes and making them evident in the resulting works. It is also enhanced through curatorial sequencing in a body of work that mimics environmental temporal experience as perceived by the mobile individual.