Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item FragMENDED(2024) Deist, Chase Manning; Ezban, Michael; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The spatial fragmentation of suburban zones, both living and built, has real consequences on how people interact with each other and the places in which they live. Ecological disconnection and social isolation are endemic to urban sprawl. Pervasive fragmentation separates people from natural amenities and disengages them from the environment and the role they play within it. The youth are specifically vulnerable to the effects of suburban sprawl, lacking a freedom of movement and access to outdoor educational and recreational programming. By interacting with the environment through the lenses of play and education, children can form a connection between themselves and the place they learn, helping them develop into multifaceted and ecologically conscious people. The goal is to explore how youth-driven ecological practices and nature-based program can reweave children into local ecologies through a pedagogy of play.Item Why Do Rebels Split? Examining The Causes Of Rebel Group Fragmentation(2022) Stern , Moran; Telhami, Shibley; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Why do rebel groups undergo fragmentation? While extensive research about the consequences of rebel fragmentation exists, research on the process of fragmentation remains relatively nascent. This dissertation collects three papers on the causes of rebel group fragmentation. In the first paper, I develop a junior cadres-based explanation of fragmentation. I argue that in a centralized rebel group, factions will emerge when leaders block junior cadres’ access to senior decision-making bodies. Junior cadres who want to influence the organization’s politics therefore face a choice between remaining within the rebel group and exiting it. Factionalizing is a way to redress grievances by aggrieved junior cadres who deem peaceful mechanisms for upward mobility ineffective. Using original datasets and personal interviews, I find strong evidence supporting my argument in the case of Palestinian Fatah. In the second paper, I argue that the solution to the question of fragmentation lies in rebel socialization—specifically, military training (MT). MT increases group cohesion by strengthening horizontal bonds among combatants; vertical bonds between combatants and commanders; and members’ institutional bonds to the organization’s overall mission and esprit de corps. Members become mutually dependent, thus making splintering more costly and fragmentation less likely. I test this argument on a global sample of 83 rebel groups active between 1989 and 2010. I find that rebel groups that have recently conducted MT are less likely to fragment by about 75 percent. In the third paper, I explore the effect of foreign fighters (FFs) on rebel fragmentation, examining a number of mechanisms derived from previous research. First, I explore how reduced group dependency on local fighters, preference divergence, strategic disagreements, and member segregation increase the likelihood of fragmentation for rebel groups that recruit FFs. Second, I posit that if the foreignness of FFs in relation to local insurgents makes fragmentation more likely, then rebel groups that recruit coethnic FFs will be less likely to experience fragmentation. I test these arguments on a global sample of 227 rebel groups active between 1989 and 2011. I find that rebel groups that recruit FFs are significantly more likely to fragment, even after accounting for the endogenous choice of rebel groups to recruit FFs. Against my expectations, I find that the recruitment of coethnic FFs does not diminish the probability of fragmentation. This finding raises questions about the value of ethnic homogeneity in the context of FFs in particular.Item Contemporary Forest Cover Dynamics in Myanmar(2016) Biswas, Sumalika; Justice, Christopher O.; Vadrevu, Krishna P.; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Understanding forest cover dynamics is important for a nation’s environmental, social and political commitments. In the past decade, Myanmar had the highest deforestation rate, in mainland South East Asia (Hansen et al., 2013). Further, in 2009, Myanmar embarked on a landmark political change from military regime to democratic transition which significantly impacted its forest cover. Myanmar also ranks first with respect to forest fires in South/Southeast Asia. In Myanmar, forest cover loss and fire are intrinsically linked through the traditional taungya system of slash and burn. Thus, quantifying factors controlling forest fires in Myanmar is an important topic that needs attention. Although the Myanmar government established protected areas throughout the country to conserve forests, their effectiveness remains unevaluated. This dissertation aims to understand the current status of forest cover dynamics in Myanmar. The five chapters in this dissertation address the impact of the political transition on forest cover loss and fragmentation, fire disturbance in tropical evergreen and deciduous forests including the factors controlling vegetation fires in the protected and non-protected forests. The dissertation contributes to the existing knowledge in land cover and land use change science (LCLUC), ii especially the impact of institutional changes on forest cover in the tropics. The analysis of the relationship between forest loss, fire and effectiveness of the protected areas addressed in the study, contributes to regional knowledge on fire and conservation science respectively. The findings of this dissertation depict that in Myanmar, the political transition to democracy significantly influenced its forest cover. Our analysis showed that during 2001-2014, a total loss of 2,030,101 ha of forest occurred at the rate of 145,007.21 ha/year with a linear increase of 15,359 (±1793) ha/year. The observed increase in variance in between 2008-2011 coincides with political transition period which started with the formation of the new Constitution in 2008 and ended with the military government handing over power to the democratic government in 2011. Analysis of trend and variance patterns of two landscape fragmentation metrics (Number of Patches and Mean Patch Area) at the provincial level show the influence of the political transition on landscape fragmentation. The impact of political transition was more pronounced in provinces associated with plantations and urban areas. Among the rubber producing States, the border States, Shan, Kayah, and Kayin were more impacted compared to inland Mon. Tanintharyi and Bago Regions showed higher variance in residuals of both metrics before the transition occurred due to the military government supported oil palm and teak plantations. Fragmentation and the variance in fragmentation metrics in Kachin increased post 2008. Apart from plantation areas, urban areas like Yangon and Mandalay showed high fragmentation post 2009 period after the new government was formed. We attribute the forest loss and fragmentation to the economic and structural reforms of the democratic government, specifically to the increased granting of agricultural concessions and logging for plantations. iii A study of the fire regime from 2003 to 2012 using MODIS satellite data suggested March as the peak of the fire season with 12900 km2 of Burned Area (BA) and 95000 fire counts. Forests accounted for majority (41.3%) of the total BA and most fires (89.7%) resulted in medium or high vegetation disturbance. A higher negative correlation between BA and Gross Primary Productivity (GPP) was reported for deciduous forests than for evergreen forests (r=0.49 vs r = 0.36, p ~ 0). A maximum decrease in 29% of original GPP (2007-2012) was observed in the evergreen forest patches. The scale-dependent correlation analysis suggested significant BA-GPP correlation at 1 × 1 degree, as compared to finer resolutions. These results highlight the significance of fires impacting carbon cycle. An in-depth analysis of fire causative factors in Myanmar was studied. The mean fire density in non-protected areas was found to be two times more than in protected areas. Fire-land cover partition analysis suggested dominant fire occurrences in the savannas (protected areas) and woody savannas (non-protected areas). The five major fire causative factors in protected areas in descending order were found to be population density, land cover, tree cover percent, travel time from nearest city and temperature. The causative factors in non-protected areas were population density, tree cover percent, travel time from nearest city, temperature and elevation. The fire susceptibility analysis showed distinct spatial patterns with central Myanmar as a hot spot region of vegetation fires. Results from propensity score matching suggested that forests within protected areas have 11% less fires than non-protected areas. These findings provide information to policy makers about the current forest loss, forest fragmentation and forest fire hotspots, status of forest conservation and can be used to inform, update or evaluate policies. These findings are timely and can guide policy makers to arrive at best management strategies as the new government is formulating policies and laws and amending old ones to aid forest conservation.Item Egg from the River's Ice(2013) Djordjevic, Ena; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Drawn from the experiences of enduring genocide, displacement, and resocialization in the United States, "Egg from the River's Ice" acts as a demonstration of irreparability as the poems shift emphasis from past to present. Beginning as rooted in a more traditional, romantic- lyric/narrative formation, these poems--as the weight of experience presses heavier on them-- come to embody a more radical, disjunct, and often fragmented poetic.Item Firms' Organization of Global Production: Theory and Evidence(2012) Fort, Teresa Clark; Haltiwanger, John C.; Limao, Nuno; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)It is increasingly common for firms to break up their production process across different regions and countries. While the existing literature credits improvements in communication technology with enabling fragmentation, there is practically no empirical evidence on the determinants of firms' sourcing strategies. In this dissertation, I document the roles of communication technology, distance to suppliers, and labor cost differences in a firm's decisions about i) whether to fragment production across distinct geographic locations; ii) whether to offshore fragmented production; and iii) how much to offshore. To do so, I construct an original data set about U.S. plants' and firms' fragmentation choices. The data yield a rich set of new facts about firms' sourcing decisions which I incorporate into a theoretical model. I then use the new data to test the model's predicted equilibrium relationships and to assess the relative importance of communication technology, distance, and labor costs in firms' sourcing strategies. I construct the fragmentation dataset using new information about U.S. manufacturing plants' decision to contract for manufacturing services from domestic or foreign suppliers in 2007. Chapter two describes these data and presents ten new stylized facts about plants' and firms' sourcing decisions. Most notably, the data show that fragmentation: (i) is 13 times more prevalent from domestic than foreign suppliers; (ii) is done mostly by larger and more productive plants; and (iii) varies substantially within industries. The new facts are also consistent with the premise that firms fragment to access cheaper labor but that they pay a fixed cost to do so. In the third chapter, I incorporate these new facts into a model of heterogeneous firms that decide where to locate the various stages of their production process. Firms fragment production to access cheaper labor, but breaking up production is costly. Firms incur a fixed cost to establish a supply network and additional per-task costs to coordinate production and transport inputs. The fixed costs deliver standard productivity sorting predictions, while the marginal costs add a new dimension of heterogeneity in firms' organization of production. In particular, firms with access to better communication technology, or in locations closer to their potential suppliers, will find fragmentation relatively more profitable. The model also shows that firms in high wage locations have more to gain from fragmentation, while firms in low wage states must offshore to access cheaper wages. The fourth chapter provides an empirical assessment of the model's predicted equilibrium relationships. I estimate the relative importance of labor cost savings, technology, and distance to suppliers in a plant's decision to fragment production. The estimates indicate that plant use of electronic networks (as a proxy for communication technology) is associated with an 18 percentage point increase in the probability of fragmentation, and a ten point increase in the probability of locating fragmented production offshore. While wage differences and distance to suppliers also have statistically significant relationships with plants' sourcing strategies, communication technology accounts for five times more of the explained variation than wages and distance combined. In contrast, for the decision about how much to offshore, wage differences are relatively more important than distance, and technology explains almost none of the observed variation. Because plant technology may be endogenous, I estimate the differential impact of plants' use of electronic networks on fragmentation in industries whose production process can be codified electronically more easily. As expected, plant use of electronic networks has a bigger impact on fragmentation in industries that are better able to specify production processes electronically. However, plants that use networks in industries with high electronic codifiability are less likely to locate their fragmented production offshore. Estimates from firm-country level import data suggest that successful electronic communication depends upon suitable technology in the sourcing location. The results support the premise that technology facilitates production fragmentation, but uncover substantial heterogeneity in technology's effectiveness across firms, industries, and sourcing locations.Item The Textualization of Pat Tillman: Understanding the Relationships Between Person, Discourse, and Ideology(2011) Herbig, Arthur William; Gaines, Robert N; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project is a critical examination of the ways in which the life and death of Pat Tillman were shaped into a discursive Pat Tillman. This is not a project that examines the life led by the person Pat Tillman. The discursive Pat Tillman can be found in the pages of magazines, on television, invoked by politicians, and even memorialized in song. It is Pat Tillman, the discursive creation, that is my focus. In this project I take for granted that Pat Tillman only existed in places like the pages of books or on film. What is not lost on me and should not be lost on the reader of this project is my own participation in this process. With this project I have entered into the very discourses that I seek to critique. This is an analysis of the existence of a Pat Tillman that many people still know and the ideas that help shape how that existence is communicated. My critique focuses on the existence of a discursive Pat Tillman as a rhetorical phenomenon, drawing upon scholarship that can inform an understanding of how the life of Pat Tillman became the material for public discourse. My analysis interconnects Michel Foucault's (1972) work on knowledge and discourse with Michael Calvin McGee (1990) referred to as rhetorical fragments, in order to provide a foundation for understanding the discursive existence of Pat Tillman. Using how discourse producer connected various facts, stories, and images with conceptions of heroism, masculinity, and the American Dream, I reveal how the life and death of Pat Tillman was used as the material to represent political and cultural positions that exist external to that life. Through an analysis of the various news reports, books, documentaries, blogs, and other mediated texts that were produced in response to the life and death of Pat Tillman, this study presents a clearer picture of what is meant by "fragmentation" in critical analysis.Item Genetic diversity and persistence of mayfly populations in disturbed headwater streams(2007-04-25) Alexander, Laurie Constance; Lamp, William O.; Hawthorne, David J.; Entomology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Movements of individuals shape the spatial structure of populations and play an important role in their persistence. For aquatic insects with winged adult stages, properties of the terrestrial landscape influence in-stream habitat quality and, in naturally patchy habitats such as dendritic stream networks, connectivity among habitat patches. Connectivity here refers to the population dynamics dependent on migration and gene flow among insect populations in semi-isolated stream segments. When populations are spatially connected, effects of local disturbance (e.g., habitat loss or degradation) can have a ripple effect, ultimately altering regional processes that reflect back to the local patch. But since regional and local population dynamics occur at different rates, detrimental effects of local disturbance are often not detected by biomonitoring efforts at the patch level until they have rippled through regional processes, by which time large-scale population extinction risk may have become unacceptably high. My dissertation examines the effect of local and regional disturbance on the population density, genetic structure, genetic diversity, and persistence of mayfly populations living in forested and deforested headwater streams in the Central Piedmont region of Maryland and Virginia. I sampled populations of the mayfly Ephemerella invaria (Walker) in 24 first-order streams across 9 headwater stream networks. The sampling period (2001-2004) spanned a regional drought during which some of the streams went dry. Thus I was able to look at the interaction of local deforestation and stochastic regional disturbance in my study system. In summary, my results indicate that in these mayfly populations: 1. Historically, long-range dispersal of Ephemerella occurred at levels sufficient to maintain gene flow across major watersheds, indicating excellent passive or active dispersal capability in these insects. 2. Deforestation of small watersheds decreases the rate of stream re-colonization and the recovery of prior population densities following a major disturbance. 3. Deforestation is correlated with loss of population genetic diversity. 4. Highly differentiated migrants represent a disproportionate share of the diversity in some mayfly populations. 5. Stochastic regional disturbance (e.g., drought) interacting with local disturbance (e.g., small scale watershed deforestation) can increase population extinction risk.