"Shifting Terrain" is about the theater's potential to offer crucial resources to resist ecological crisis. Despite the efforts of a number of theorists over the past twenty years, ecocritical theater, which draws upon ecological language and concepts, has failed to thrive in part because it lacks a cohesive, discursive framework to organize its ideas. This dissertation seeks to define the goals of this nascent ecocritical theater along topical, discursive and formal lines by establishing two distinct ecocritical genres: landscape theater and ecology theater. Theater theorists have argued that, formally and ideologically, landscape and ecology are roughly synonymous. In the first half of "Shifting Terrain," however, I argue that landscape resists ecological concerns, contributing to anthropocentric attitudes by delineating the natural world from humans and the theater they make. Using Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blind (1890), Anton Chekhov's The Seagull (1895) and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1949) as examples, I argue that landscape theater performs nature as a framed, aesthetic creation in order to criticize the "ruptures" between humans and the ecosystem generated, at times, by the theater itself. Conversely, through readings of ecologically oriented plays including Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (1882), Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1904) and Heiner Müller's Despoiled Shore / Medeamaterial / Landscape with Argonauts (1982/83), I argue that ecology theater seeks connections between ecosystems, their inhabitants and the theater, pointing beyond the theatrical frame, physical or conceptual, to the ecosphere. In the latter half of the dissertation, I investigate the genres of landscape theater and ecology theater in the context of environmental or, more specifically, immersive staging. I first challenge the notion that immersive staging inherently resists the aesthetic distance between theatrical worlds and the ecosphere, using productions of Maria Irene Fornes' Fefu and Her Friends (1977) and Punchdrunk Theatrical Experiences' Sleep No More (2011). Both performances surround their audiences with rich environments, but they are also insular, engaging only the synthetic spaces created by performers and designers. Then, I examine the ways in which the outdoor, immersive productions of Robert Wilson's KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDENIA TERRACE (1972) and Big House Theater's Across (2000) apply ecological ideals by emphasizing theater's capacity to make direct contact with the ecosystems the plays present. No production entirely eliminates the theater's mimetic division from the surrounding world, but performances such as KA MOUNTAIN and Across represent significant movement toward limiting the aesthetic distance between audiences, worlds of performance and the world itself.

<p> Streamflow information is essential for many important uses across a broad range of scales, including global water balances, engineering design, flood forecasting, reservoir operations, navigation, water supply, recreation, and environmental management. </p><p> Natural streams are characterized by changes in cross-section geometry, slope, and geophysical properties (bed-roughness, channel slope, etc.) along their reaches. Variations in the shape and size of the channel bed geometry result from several interacting features of the river system including the effect of different flow regimes, slope, sediment load, etc. Simplifying the river bed geometries could reduce the burden of assembling the required data, so implementing less detailed routing procedures could lower the computational burden. &ldquo;At-a-station&rdquo; hydraulic geometry (AHG) relationships are power-law functions which relate river discharge to key the hydraulics (i.e., velocity, depth, width, and flow area). The AHG relations have been introduced and discussed among researchers, engineers, and geomorphologist since the '50s based upon a limited number of observations made over few flow monitoring stations across the United States. </p><p> This doctoral thesis starts with an introduction to statistical data filtering procedures that are being trained and tested over both synthetic and realistic data followed by being applied over ~4000 U.S. Geological Survey&rsquo;s river monitoring stations to compute AHG parameters based upon robust discharge-hydraulic measures. Given &ldquo;refined&rdquo; dataset, estimated AHG parameters are combined with morphological (channel pattern, channel slope, etc.) and geophysical features at a site. Doing so, potential interrelation among independent and dependent variables will be highlighted. Accordingly, given some assumptions, it is verified how well channel morphology and hydraulic components are intertwined and combined with AHG parameters and how categorizing river monitoring stations according to these characteristics will be practical and useful for further studies. For instance, the application of AHG parameters in modifying numerical hydraulic routing coefficients will result in an improvement in predictability of flood routing schemes (here, Muskingum-Cunge). The thesis will be concluded by the analysis of trade-off between computation time and accuracy or complexity vs. simplicity among advanced, hydrodynamic (HEC-RAS 2D) vs. low-complexity (AutoRoute and HAND) models that is also an alternative way to affirm the advantage of idealizing or simplifying a hydraulic system over-relying on time- and energy-costly approaches.</p><p>

No description available.

The lower Chesapeake Bay and adjacent coastal waters serve as the primary summer nursery areas for juvenile sandbar sharks (Carcharhinus plumbeus) in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean. The large population of juvenile sandbar sharks in this ecosystem benefits from increased food availability that fuels rapid growth and from limited exposure to large shark predators. Juvenile growth and survival is the most critical life history stage for sandbar sharks, and juvenile nursery grounds will continue to play an important role in the slow recovery of this stock from severe population declines due to overfishing. The goal of this study was to assess the possible impacts of juvenile sandbar sharks as apex predators on the lower Chesapeake Bay ecosystem and to evaluate the energetic benefits of using this nursery. The bioenergetics model was used as a tool to predict energy consumption rates of individual sandbar sharks based on their energetic demands: metabolism, growth, and loss of waste. Metabolic rate is the largest and most variable component of the energy budget, particularly for species such as the sandbar shark that must swim continuously to ventilate their gills. The standard (basal) and routine metabolic rates of juvenile sandbar sharks were measured in two laboratory respirometry systems, using oxygen consumption rate as a proxy for metabolic rate. These data span the entire range of body sizes and water temperatures characteristic of the Chesapeake Bay population. Standard metabolic rates of sandbar sharks were similar to values obtained for related shark species by extrapolation of power-performance curves. The effects of body size and temperature on standard metabolic rate were similar to previous results for elasmobranchs and teleost fishes. In fifteen sharks, routine metabolic rate while swimming averaged 1.8 times the standard metabolic rate when the sharks were immobilized. Data obtained from the literature support the theory that limited gill surface areas and narrow metabolic scopes of many elasmobranchs help to explain their slow growth rates, since growth has the lowest rank of the multiple metabolic demands placed on the oxygen delivery system. These new metabolic rate data were then combined with other species-specific data to construct a bioenergetics model for juvenile sandbar sharks for the time they spend in Chesapeake Bay each summer. This model predicted higher daily rations than previous estimates for this species that were based on simple bioenergetics models or stomach contents and gastric evacuation rate models. However, the predicted rations agree with reconstructed meal sizes of juvenile sandbar sharks and are comparable to those of ecologically similar shark species. When extrapolated from individuals to the population level, the model predicted a negligible effect of predation by juvenile sandbar sharks on the lower Chesapeake Bay ecosystem; the consumption rate of juvenile sandbar sharks pales in comparison to other carnivorous fishes and to humans, the true apex predators in the system.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, School of Management, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

In recent years, physically-based hydrological models provided a robust approach to better understand the cause-effect relationships of effective hydraulic properties in soil hydrology. These have increased the flexibility of studying the behavior of a soil system under various environmental conditions. One disadvantage of physical models is their inability to model the vertical and horizontal heterogeneity of hydraulic properties in a soil system at the regional scale. In order to overcome this limitation, inverse modeling may be used. Near surface soil moisture, which has been collected routinely by remote sensing (RS) platforms, and evapotranspiration, that is also a pivotal key for water balance near the land surface can be used as alternatives for quantifying the effective soil hydraulic parameters through inverse modeling. However, the new approach suffers from not only the scale discrepancy between RS pixel resolution and model grid resolution, but also its application in complex terrains. Furthermore, hydrological models require a number of required input parameters. Hence, this dissertation focuses on developing a methodology for addressing these problems. The field-scale Soil-Water-Atmosphere-Plant model (SWAP) was extended to regional application, and then coupled with a Genetic Algorithm (GA), to operate as the core of the developed decision support system at the regional level. Also, various stochastic processes were developed and applied to the GA for improving the searching ability of optimization algorithms. The computational simulation-optimization approach was tested and evaluated under various synthetic and field validation experiments demonstrating that the methodology provided satisfactory results. In this dissertation, the proposed methodologies analyzed the spatio-temporal root zone soil moisture with RS and in-situ soil moisture data at the multiple scales. Also, these approaches could provide better input parameters for hydro-climatic models, resulting in better understanding of the hydrologic cycle. Thus, a better understanding of water cycle would help us to be better prepared for efficient water resources management, agriculture, and devastating natural disasters in the real world.

This thesis aims to understand how Manonnye Gorge in eastern Botswana can be sustainably managed as both a natural and cultural landscape. At issue are conflicting views over the meaning and legitimate uses of the Gorge by the National Museum, Monuments and Art Gallery (NMMAG), tourists, and the community in Moremi, at the edge of the gorge. Regional survey in the gorge and ethnographic research with the Moremi community led to a more complex understanding of how conflicting perceptions of the gorge as a sacred cultural landscape by community members and as a natural monument by NMMAG have affected implementation of ecotourism projects. The thesis critiques the idea of the gorge as simply a natural monument and provides recommendations for reassessing management plans and ecotourism projects.

<p> The specific problem under study results from the growth of multinational workforces in U.S. hospitals and the gap in the literature explaining how the presence of these workforces impacts hospital leadership, decision-making, and financial performance. The purpose of this qualitative embedded multi-case study was to discover and describe hospital nursing leader&rsquo;s beliefs from their experiences about how having employees from multiple national cultures affects nursing leadership, decision-making, and departmental financial performance in the hospital. The challenge faced by many hospitals is that the U.S. workforce is becoming culturally diverse as the global workforce increases its geographical mobility. The current research was important because results revealed nurse leaders&rsquo; beliefs about a link between the cultural dimensions of a multinational workforce and the decision-making, financial performance, and patient care within a hospital nursing department. The sample included eight nursing leaders from seven hospitals where the workforces are multinational and culturally diverse. The cultural dimensions by Hofstede were used to study the impact of a multinational workforce on the organizational practices of a nursing department in a hospital setting. Results revealed nine core themes, expected from the literature, and two emerging themes provided answers to the research questions. The nine core themes were Hofstede&rsquo;s cultural dimensions, workforce values, nursing organization impact, immigration/migration, nursing leadership, nursing workforce, organization culture, change, and develop multicultural organization attributes. The two emerging themes were familismo (family loyalty influences multinational workforce decision making) and hospital refusal to hire multicultural nurses whose national culture conflict with the organization&rsquo;s culture.</p>

<p> Almond water use was investigated at the leaf, plant and canopy level under a range of irrigation conditions in commercial orchards in California. Understanding plant response to water stress, specifically the behavior of plant transpiration and water use during periods of water stress, has important implications for irrigation scheduling in agriculture but also for water resources management and policy making. </p><p> Leaf gas exchange measurements of stomatal conductance and photosynthetic rate were performed at midday on shaded and on sunlit leaves, with midday stem water potential used to assess plant water stress. An essentially linear decline in both photosynthetic rate (from 25 to 5 &mu;mol m^-2 s^-1) and stomatal conductance (from 400 to 50 mmol m^-2 s^-1) as stem water potential declined over the range of -0.5 to -3 MPa was observed in sunlit leaves. These data indicated a strong sensitivity of leaf-level physiological processes to water stress. However, evapotranspiration at the canopy level, measured using Eddy Covariance, did not show a reduction relative to atmospheric demand during periods of water stress. The apparent disconnect observed between leaf conductance, responsive to water stress and canopy evapotranspiration, insensitive to water stress, is the central problem investigated in this study.</p><p> When the transpiration data was analyzed in the framework of a "Big Leaf" model, decoupled conditions (i.e. a limited stomatal control of transpiration) were shown to prevail at the experimental site, contrary to previous findings reported in the literature for tall crops such as almond orchards. Low coupling implies only a moderate sensitivity of transpiration to stomatal closure. Measured coupling increased substantially with wind speed but showed a wide range of values at the low wind speeds (&lt;1m s^-1) that were observed at the site. At any wind speed however, higher canopy resistance resulted in higher coupling. The high leaf area index observed in the orchard may have been responsible for causing decoupled conditions, because when leaf area decreased as a result of harvesting operations, canopy transpiration appeared to become more sensitive to water stress. </p><p> Cumulative daily sap velocity was used as an estimate of plant transpiration. At the plant level, contrasting behaviors were observed in plant transpiration in the presence of water stress, depending on the duration and intensity of the stress. During long soil dry-down periods encompassing several weeks, plant transpiration relative to the evaporative demand of the atmosphere showed a statistically significant decline associated with a decrease in stem water potential and in stomatal closure. However, when the cycle of water stress was short (days), reductions in stem water potential seemed to be associated with an increase in cumulative sapflow velocity. The analysis of these results led to the development of a simple model that describes the theoretical interactions between three dependent variables, namely stem water potential, stomatal conductance and transpiration. The model output suggested that in wet soil, an increase in transpiration may be caused by increasing evaporative demand even if stem water potential and stomatal conductance decrease.</p>