Filtering by
- All Subjects: Sonoran Desert
- All Subjects: Ecology
- Creators: School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
![136167-Thumbnail Image.png](https://d1rbsgppyrdqq4.cloudfront.net/s3fs-public/styles/width_400/public/2021-05/136167-Thumbnail%20Image.png?versionId=gSORkYbTPKUJSPDW5tSdU0RjXbEYSbgq&X-Amz-Content-Sha256=UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIASBVQ3ZQ42ZLA5CUJ/20240613/us-west-2/s3/aws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20240613T132651Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=120&X-Amz-Signature=99fd151cd72656fcc60f43e9cee2ed67283593be203b56b4bbca70311e9d036a&itok=R9hqn8n8)
![136012-Thumbnail Image.png](https://d1rbsgppyrdqq4.cloudfront.net/s3fs-public/styles/width_400/public/2021-07/136012-Thumbnail%20Image.png?versionId=i80VtyerF2V5hoiuqKT.pBqdr1IPpd0J&X-Amz-Content-Sha256=UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIASBVQ3ZQ42ZLA5CUJ/20240613/us-west-2/s3/aws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20240613T132651Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=120&X-Amz-Signature=574286e4c2a76c8d2128e8e356728da0903d8cfbb8ee33389b27f209d7f07d7e&itok=kacJSESo)
![133732-Thumbnail Image.png](https://d1rbsgppyrdqq4.cloudfront.net/s3fs-public/styles/width_400/public/2021-07/133732-Thumbnail%20Image.png?versionId=6KgBgZ3uCF.nuXiwx0R3NF2AzGH.foPg&X-Amz-Content-Sha256=UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIASBVQ3ZQ42ZLA5CUJ/20240613/us-west-2/s3/aws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20240613T142621Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=120&X-Amz-Signature=1b5d5ec105aa62c3219414e57687c867b49caaaa22018de33816b049db2d4695&itok=nEM1SODn)
Pollution causes many health problems in the modern world and the desert climates struggle with pollution in unique ways. In the Sonoran Desert, the research was conducted with the purpose of expanding the knowledge of the topic in this area. A literature review was conducted based on air, soil and noise pollution in the region. The Sonoran Desert has high levels of carcinogenic elements along with other pollutants due to the main industries of mining, agriculture and manufacturing. Overall, these findings show people in desert climates deal with high levels of pollutants.
The ever-increasing importance of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases continues to grow as populations across the world are affected by death and aging. The vitamin A (RXR) and vitamin D (VDR) receptor pathways offer promising potential to aid in treatment of cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. This thesis discusses the potential application of novel analogs of Bexarotene (RXR agonist), MeTC7 (a new potent VDR antagonist), and vitamin D as possible therapeutics for cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
There is no possibility for an ecological crisis without someone to be in crisis. The environment is not in danger as such, humanity’s ability to persist in it with well-being is. Thus, the ecological crisis is a human crisis, a crisis of meaning. Although ecology is required to understand and address these problems, we must understand the human condition if we wish to address them with any amount of seriousness or hope for success. We will be concerned with the relevance of hermeneutic practices in the study and practice of ecology. By hermeneutic practices, I mean the practices central to the human condition of world-building through perpetual interpretation and re-interpretation informed by one’s facticity. By the study and practice of ecology, I mean the education of ecology’s concepts within a scholastic, primarily university, setting and the usage of said concepts for the purpose of research or societal development respectively. I will argue that the study and practice of ecology would benefit from an inclusion of hermeneutics into its study in the scholastic system by way of developing nuanced understandings of oneself and their relation to the environment, thereby revealing new horizons of possibility in decision-making in society regarding the environment and oneself. To do this, I begin by using hermeneutic strategies in a reading of Gilgamesh to draw comparisons between Gilgamesh’s journey and the development of human society’s relationship to progress. Juxtaposing the concerns posited by the hermeneutic reading of Gilgamesh with Neil Postman’s claim that our contemporary understanding of the world is helpfully understood as what he calls a “Technopoly,” I argue technology has altered our orientation towards the environment in a way that falsely suggests hermeneutics has no place in ecology or any science. Exploring passages from Martin Heidegger, I then argue how humans’ fundamental relationship to interpretation makes hermeneutics the ground from which ecology is able to rise from. Further exploring passages from Heidegger’s work and exploring the etymology of the words “preserve” and “beforehand,” I argue that not only does hermeneutics allow for the study of ecology, but by studying ecology without it we are left in a state prime for mis-handling the Earth, thus making hermeneutics a crucial part of an education in ecology. I close by providing an example of using hermeneutic practices on two essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson to display how these hermeneutic practices could be used in conjunction with an education in ecology and illustrate the benefits therein.
![166091-Thumbnail Image.png](https://d1rbsgppyrdqq4.cloudfront.net/s3fs-public/styles/width_400/public/2022-05/166091-thumbnail-image.png?versionId=mOz61WT0stEtsZAvEm43U_BG2kM86Y2n&X-Amz-Content-Sha256=UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIASBVQ3ZQ42ZLA5CUJ/20240613/us-west-2/s3/aws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20240613T142621Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=120&X-Amz-Signature=2dfa43f65e7d973770bafd92c0ee0b74bc6e41c722856de334bdb9d22314b0e2&itok=AXzxcNuW)
Aboveground-belowground relationships between vegetation and its associated soil biotic community play an important role in every terrestrial ecosystem for nutrient cycling and soil health maintenance. Deserts are especially sensitive to change and little is known about Sonoran Desert soil microbiota, while exotic herbaceous species are increasingly invading into the ecosystem with other harmful effects. In many other environments, soil communities have been associated with both plant species and plant functional type. The soil community food web depends on the sustenance brought by vegetation, and different soil community members are adapted to different diets. In this paper, we hypothesized that invasive plants would cause belowground soil communities to have greater abundance and lesser diversity than those under native, more locally established plants. To test this hypothesis, we selected four desert understory plant taxa: one native grass, one native forb, one invasive grass, and one invasive forb. We predicted that the invasive plants would be associated with a greater count of microarthropods per unit mass of soil but lesser microarthropod species diversity. The invasive plants were not statistically associated with a greater count of microarthropods per kilogram of soil nor lesser microarthropod species diversity. There was not a significant difference in abundance in the microarthropod categories between native and invasive plants, so the hypothesis was rejected. However, the invasive Erodium cicutarium was found to harbor high soil mite abundance, which warrants further study, and it is yet to be seen whether soil moisture and proximity to trees played a role in the data. The results of this study should help in generating more informed hypotheses regarding desert aboveground-belowground relationships.