Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Hollow Ground: Industry, Extraction, and Ecology in the Floodplains of Early Maryland(2024) Hess, Sophie; Bell, Richard; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Hollow Ground: Industry, Extraction, and Ecology in the Floodplains of Early Maryland,” investigates histories of natural resource commodification, environment, and culture in the Patapsco River Valley, or “The Hollow” as it was called by its first European settlers. Beginning in the seventeenth century, English colonists seized the powerful currents of the Patapsco and the forests surrounding it, the ancestral floodplains of Piscataway and Susquehannock peoples, to build large-scale agricultural projects and industrial factories. These operations altered the environment, and as the valley grew into a center of extractive production, its communities experienced more frequent and severe floods which have continued into the present. This dissertation examines these entwined consequences of environmental capitalism and settler colonialism through a site-specific, multi-century lens, studying how humans, plants, and animals within various spaces of production—iron furnaces, wheat fields, grist and cotton mills, schools, prisons, local governments, and family units —experienced industrialization. It traces trace labor ecologies within communities of enslaved, convict, and low-wage workers, and the ways that soil exhaustion, flooding, and other environmental forces both threatened these enclaves and created opportunities for freedom. This work uses a microhistorical methodology to intervene in histories of energy transition, labor, and the Anthropocene. “Hollow Ground” argues that early American industrialism can help us to better understand how local desires for capital growth have accumulated into global processes of toxic emissions, and how the frontline issues faced by post-industrial communities today relate not only to global production but to local histories of extraction and the culture that perpetuates it. These same communities also hold critical histories of commoning, stewardship, labor resistance, and environmentalism that can help create a blueprint for survival in the face of the climate crisis.Item In Situ and laboratory studies of soil treatment areas experiencing flooding(2023) Waris, Aleem; Kjellerup, Birthe V.; Civil Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Onsite wastewater treatment is used by over one in five American households to treat wastewater by soil biogeochemical transformations. In Maryland alone, 420,000 septic systems are in use primarily in rural and near coastal areas. Issues of sea level rise can threaten coastal infrastructure due to flooding damage that also can impact the ability of soil to efficiently treat nutrients found in wastewater. In this study, two onsite wastewater treatment systems with different soil types and treatment techniques were assessed in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. It was found that soil texture can impact the health of a soil in its function of treating wastewater, in addition to treatment techniques affecting inorganic nitrogen in the soil treatment area. To model the impacts of flooding damage to a soil treatment area, tidal flooding with fresh, brackish and saltwater was simulated in a laboratory-scale column study. The results from the month-long study showed decreases in the treatment efficiency for inorganic nitrogen and dissolved organic solids.Item WHEN ROADS WANT TO BE DAMS: LOOKING TO DAM SAFETY TO REGULATE TRANSPORTATION EMBANKMENTS(2022) O'Shaughnessy, Amanda; Davis, Allen P; Aydilek, Ahmet H; Civil Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The potential for various failure processes impacting transportation embankments temporarily impounding water has not been a common consideration in the design and management of these structures. However, changes in water elevations due to land development and climate change has prompted concern about impoundment on seepage rates and overall stability of the constructed embankments. The goal of the research was to examine how different aspects of dam safety can be incorporated in transportation embankment management. Current U.S. Mid-Atlantic state policies were summarized, evolving issues pertaining to water impoundment were investigated, transportation and dam embankments were compared, and seepage and slope stability numerical modeling were conducted to understand how example transportation embankments behave under various water impoundment scenarios. Performance assessment of granular materials commonly used in transportation embankments indicates their ability to withstand piping erosion but poor slope stability during rapid drawdown. Results demonstrate the need for infrastructure inventories and hydrologic research on this topic.Item ACCESSIBILITY BASED EVALUATION OF COASTAL RURAL COMMUNITIES’ VULNERABILITY TO COASTAL FLOODING AND THEIR ADAPTATION OPTIONS(2022) Yahyazadeh Jasour, Zeinab; Reilly, Allison C; Civil Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Global climate change and sea-level rise will cause significant risks to coastal communities. To make inclusive and cost-effective adaptation planning decisions, we need to understand who may be impacted and when. Currently, planning literature generally focuses on housing impacts; when will a house be inundated, and what adaptation strategies are useful to keep a house habitable? Housing, though, is only one of many types of infrastructures people need to reside in an area. Reliable roads are another. This dissertation conducts an analysis of parcel-level impacts of SLR on local residents’ ability to reach key amenities such as emergency services, grocery stores, and schools. Furthermore, it strategically evaluates where road protection should be implemented so that access is maintained in an equitable manner. Next, I use the accessibility analysis to identify the important roads for gathering high-resolution flood data to improve the accuracy of the analysis. I use Dorchester County, Maryland, U.S., as a case study. It is an extremely low-lying rural county and is expected to shrink in half by the end of the century due to SLR. The results from the case study indicate that some parcels are not expected to be inundated by SLR but are expected to experience accessibility impacts. Road protection appears to be a temporary strategy that can buy time for long-term adaptation strategies such as relocation. However, the protection strategies should be cautiously selected based on decision-makers priorities. The insight obtained by this dissertation highlights that when policy and decision-makers are deciding among adaptation strategies, they need to reach some level of consensus about assumptions for which a possible future is planned, and also the trade-off between increasing accessibility levels and balancing the distribution of accessibility among different demographic groups.