Giant kelp ("Macrocystis pyrifera") forests are icons of marine beauty, acting as critical marine ecosystems with great ecological and economic value. Kelp forests are hot spots for biodiversity and provide myriad ecosystem services such as nursery habitat for commercial fisheries, nutrient cycling, wave attenuation, as well as…

The magnitude and scale of current threats to ecosystems requires interdisciplinary approaches to both science and training. For example, urbanization has resulted in increased runoff from communities into coastal habitats, necessitating work across the marine-terrestrial interface. This runoff holds myriad pollutants which can impact vulnerable…

This multi-case study analyzed the formal and informal development of adaptive capacity in fire service leaders within the context of increasingly complex situations driven by urbanization and climate change. Triangulating interviews, observations, and documentation review, this study included two urban fire service cases impacted by past complex…

This project examines, how, through educational mobility, the economic, educational, and housing transformations of one city in China influence the class and racial relations of another in the United States (US). Drawing on theories from education, urban geography, migration studies, and transnational racial theories, this research connects…

Language shift happens when a group of people stops using one language in favor of another, such that subsequent generations no longer acquire the original language. Research on the sociolinguistics of language shift has tended to focus on languages in advanced states of endangerment, where most or all children in the community have already…

Learning Language, Transforming Knowledge investigates the relationships among language shift, urbanization, and social change in the lives of Amdo Tibetan children. Amdo, the easternmost region of greater Tibet, is today incorporated into the Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, and Gansu. The homeland of a Tibetic language, also known as Amdo,…

This study examined if and to what extent selected institutional services and special learning and credit opportunities in the 2-year private, for-profit college sector and community colleges in the United States are related to race, socioeconomic status and urbanicity. The researcher evaluated whether the institutional services and special…

Traditional teacher education programs focus on pedagogy and, to a lesser extent, assessments of knowledge (Siedlecki, 2012). Pedagogy and assessments should be fundamental components of any secondary teacher's curriculum planning (Knight, Shum, & Littleton, 2014). This study sought to consider the possible effects of three pedagogical…

In the United States a high school diploma offers a pathway to the growing professional occupations creating the American middle class. The continuous influx of minority families into suburban school districts eventually urbanized districts. As a result, multiple districts struggle in the process of educating a shifted population. Studies have…

This dissertation constitutes a multi-scale quantitative and qualitative investigation of patterns of urban development in metropolitan regions of the United States. This work has generated a comprehensive data set on spatial patterns of metropolitan development in the U.S. and an approach to the study of such patterns that can be used to further…

Urban development, the pinnacle of human land use, has drastic effects on native ecosystems and the species they contain. For the first time in recorded history there are more people living in cities than in the rural areas surrounding them. Furthermore, the global rate of urbanization continues increasing; raising serious concerns for earth's…

Flying into China is both exhilarating and daunting. The great cities of this country confront each visitor with modernity and antiquity, sparkling skyscrapers and hazy pollution, growing consumerism and extensive poverty, as well as the opportunities and challenges of a built environment, expanding at a rate exceeding that of any other country in…

Due to the inappropriate planning and explosive population growth in urban areas, especially in developing countries, sustainable and disaster-safe urbanization has become the most important challenge for governments. Urbanization presents benefits in different ways but has led simultaneously to changes in land use/land cover (LULC), impacting…

The purpose of this study was to examine differences in tuition rates and college affordability indexes (CAIs) between and among U.S. public community colleges formulated upon urbanization criteria extracted from the Integrated Post Secondary Data System (IPEDS) maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which operates…