Sustainable Built Environments Senior Capstone Project / The city of Tucson is well known for its cycling culture and year-round moderate climate. It is a ‘Gold’ level cycling community according to the League of American Bicyclists. Less known about Tucson is that it can be a dangerous place to ride a bicycle. In an attempt to improve overall cyclist safety, the idea of implementing protected bike infrastructure is explored. With a focus on using protected bike lanes to create a low-stress network for bike movement, this project creates a rubric, and calibrates it against case-studies in New York City, Chicago, and Washington D.C., to analyze the potential streets in Tucson possess to host protected bike lanes.

Over the past several decades, the preservation of Brazil's natural landscapes and traditional cultures has received significant global attention; the focus of which has been primarily on the Amazon Basin. In order to safeguard the Amazon's unique biodiversity, natural resources, and traditional cultures, Brazil's state and federal governments have designated hundreds of thousands of square kilometers as conservation units with legally protected statuses. To effectively accomplish conservation objectives, it is necessary to maintain the permanence of protected areas. However, over the past decade, a host of circumstances has plagued Brazil's protected areas. Due to land use and economic pressures, the sizes of many protected areas throughout the Amazon are being reduced. Understanding the drivers and outcomes of reductions to protected areas is essential for the long-term preservation of ecosystem services. To that end, the objectives of this thesis were to understand why and how quickly a national park in the Legal Brazilian Amazon was being reduced in size by the Brazilian government. Interviews with key informants demonstrated that the park historically lacked legitimacy amongst newly arrived migrants which influenced the colonization amongst its borders. Moreover, inept governance regimes facilitated settlements within the park. Satellite imagery was used to detect and quantify the substantial rise in deforestation within the park. Spontaneous settlement in the region and a governance structure that did not enforce the park’s legality played a significant influence on the downsizing of Amazon National Park. In addition, domestic energy demands prompted the federal government to embark on a national energy strategy centered on hydropower construction that has directly impacted the park’s conservation effectiveness of maintaining natural forest cover. Together, these two drivers have united to considerably reduce both the size and the effectiveness of Amazon National Park. / text

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Stewardship is a key tool for the protection of natural areas at the landscape-scale. This is nowhere more evident than in the Carolinian Life Zone of Southern Ontario, where habitat exists for approximately 80% of Canada???s Species at Risk and where the majority of land is in private ownership. However, the implementation of stewardship initiatives has not always been successful. While an outcome of stewardship has been increased protection, initiatives that do not serve landowner needs can lead to reduced landowner support for future stewardship efforts. As such there is a need to look beyond landowner participation/non-participation, and instead examine the factors influencing landowner support for stewardship. The existing stewardship research on landowner support has found three main influencing factors: stewardship ethics, property rights concerns and bureaucracy. To examine if these themes are relevant to the Carolinian Life Zone interviews were conducted at three case study sites: Point Pelee, Rondeau and Long Point. The findings indicate that while the three broad themes are present, certain themes are more salient than others. It was also found that the local stewardship context made a great difference for landowner responses. Recommendations from the findings involve changes to stewardship programs, the role of landowners in conservation decision-making and land-use regulations.

Stewardship is a key tool for the protection of natural areas at the landscape-scale. This is nowhere more evident than in the Carolinian Life Zone of Southern Ontario, where habitat exists for approximately 80% of Canada’s Species at Risk and where the majority of land is in private ownership. However, the implementation of stewardship initiatives has not always been successful. While an outcome of stewardship has been increased protection, initiatives that do not serve landowner needs can lead to reduced landowner support for future stewardship efforts. As such there is a need to look beyond landowner participation/non-participation, and instead examine the factors influencing landowner support for stewardship. The existing stewardship research on landowner support has found three main influencing factors: stewardship ethics, property rights concerns and bureaucracy. To examine if these themes are relevant to the Carolinian Life Zone interviews were conducted at three case study sites: Point Pelee, Rondeau and Long Point. The findings indicate that while the three broad themes are present, certain themes are more salient than others. It was also found that the local stewardship context made a great difference for landowner responses. Recommendations from the findings involve changes to stewardship programs, the role of landowners in conservation decision-making and land-use regulations.

management as a route for solving conflicts. It argues that present approaches used to solve conflicts in protected areas have been ineffective in their aim because they fail to address the very root causes of conflicts as well as to understand their complex, diverse and dynamic nature. The thesis thus calls for a shift away from instrumental forms of participation, that put the control over the participatory process on conservationist and protected area managers, towards collaborative processes that would help to address the underlying issues in dispute. Although seldom acknowledged, conflicts in protected areas generally include struggles over complex issues such as modernity, identity, authority, ownership, knowledge systems and different cultural notions of nature and land use, among others. The long-term transformation of conflicts requires that these issues are adequately understood and addressed. A shift away from the dominant participatory paradigm also requires breaking away from a managerial conflict resolution approach that treats conflicts as static, negative and undifferentiated phenomena. In its place an approach that emphasises the dynamic, differentiated nature of conflicts and their transformative power in forcing necessary social changes in protected area management is advocated. Special attention is paid here to analysing the dynamics of power relations among actors and the history of their interactions in order to determine the factors that limit or offer opportunities for a productive engagement among actors in addressing the root cause of conflicts. In order to demonstrate the complex, dynamic and diverse nature of conflicts in protected areas this thesis studies three different types of conflicts currently taking place in Canaima National Park, Venezuela: conflicts over the use of fire, tourism management and the building of a high voltage power-line. Through this differentiated analysis this thesis concludes with a discussion of the types of collaborative processes that could help address and discuss the core issues in dispute in each case but also the factors that limit and offer opportunities for such engagement

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Case Western Reserve University, 2009 / Title from PDF (viewed on 19 August 2009) Department of Anthropology Includes abstract Includes bibliographical references Available online via the OhioLINK ETD Center

Thesis (Ph. D., Natural Resources)--University of Idaho, January 2008. / Major professor: William J. McLaughlin. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online (PDF file) by subscription or by purchasing the individual file.

The Dongsha Islands, a group of remote islands under Taiwan's jurisdiction, consist of Dongsha Atoll (the only atoll in Taiwan) and North Vereker Bank and South Vereker Bank (two coral reef groups). Dongsha Island is the only terrestrial portion of the islands. Owing to its location in the northern part of the South China Sea, the physical and chemical conditions fostered the formerly abundant marine and coastal biota of this region. This area is one of Taiwan's traditional fishing grounds. The islands are also located near the major sea route connecting the Pacific and Indian Oceans. However, due to improper fishing practices and the development of fishing facilities, the marine biota and habitats have been depleted in recent decades to the point of being threatened with extinction. These improper and excessive human activities/uses within the waters of the Dongsha Islands are threatening its ecosystems and resources through unsustainable exploitation and depletion. The current situation of the Dongsha Islands illustrates the difficulties of protecting the marine ecosystems of remote islands where the presence of law enforcement is not particularly in evidence. Even if the Kaohsiung City Government were to designate the Dongsha Islands a ¡§no-fishing zone¡¨, further steps, i.e., the planning and management of marine protected areas for example, would still require in-depth considerations and discussion. This study focuses on several aspects, including the planning process of developing the management plan, the legal and administrative framework of the management plan and associated action plans, and a model outline for developing the management plan and action plans. Following the results/guidelines are suggestions for further study.