Abstracts for Oral Presentations and Posters

Oral Presentation Abstracts

Mark Adams, madams3@une.edu, U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station; and Susan Charnley, U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station. Mapping the Environmental Justice Implications of U.S. Forest Service Hazardous Fuel Reduction Activities. Hazardous fuel reduction (HFR) is a central part of the U.S. Forest Service’s efforts to mitigate the trend toward increasing size and intensity of wildfires in the western U.S., and it is an important tool for forest landscape restoration. HFR also has the potential to reduce the risk of losses from catastrophic wildfire in communities adjacent to national forests. Federal agencies have a mandate to analyze the potential environmental-justice consequences of their activities, yet the environmental justice implications of Forest Service programs and policies, including HFR, are poorly understood. To address this gap, we are using GIS to assess whether the benefits associated with HFR treatments on national forests are equitably distributed among nearby populations, particularly minority and low-income populations. This paper presents the approach we are using to integrate socioeconomic data from the U.S. Census with Forest Service HFR management-activity data, including methodological challenges and results of a pilot test of our methods in central Oregon. The approach enables direct comparison of the spatial distribution of Forest Service HFR activities and the social vulnerability characteristics of affected populations. Our goal is to provide a tool that helps managers incorporate environmental justice considerations into decision-making about where to conduct HFR.

Sanchayeeta Adhikari, sadhikari@csun.edu, California State University, Northridge. Temporal Change Analysis of St. Croix Watershed: A Remote Sensing Approach. Multi-temporal satellite imagery change-detection analysis helps in understanding landscape dynamics. The present study focuses on the St. Croix River Watershed (SCRW) situated in the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin, an area rich in wildlife, vegetation, water bodies, and wetland. Nonetheless, the region has experienced immense land-cover and land-use changes in the past few decades. Changes in forest cover, agricultural land abandonment, changes in wetland, infrastructure, and built-area development are a few of the transformations taking place in this basin. The close proximity of the watershed to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul further adds to the concern of urbanization and its impact on the natural resources of the basin. Mapping the historical land changes provides a method to observe, assess, and monitor the effects of changing land uses and land covers on SCRW’s natural resources and assist in making conservation plans. The present study uses multi-temporal Landsat TM and ETM+ satellite imagery (1981–2011) to measure the rate and extent of spatial and temporal change in the watershed.

Stuart Aitken, saitken@mail.sdsu.edu, San Diego State University. Erasure and Precarious Youth. In this paper, I discuss the curtailment of minority young people’s spatial and developmental rights in the face of the transformation of Slovenia away from state socialism and toward seemingly free and open neoliberal statehood. The case of Slovenia’s erased minority populations was recently raised as one of the worst human-rights abuses in contemporary Europe. I highlight the privations and struggles of Izbrisani (“Erased”) youth from the mid-1990s to the present day using stories and other data collected by the Ljubljana Peace Institute, and interviews that I conducted over a seven-month period, 2013–2014. In the first part of the paper, I look at some of the spatial and cultural effects of the erasure, including the trauma of families forced apart and children locked-in-place, deprived of human rights including health and education. The second part of the paper focuses on the Izbrisani’s ongoing fight for recognition and justice, and how their collective struggle for legal status changes young people and their culture, and creates the potential for what Slavoj Žižek calls radical ethical acts.

Matthew Anderson, manderson22@ewu.edu, Eastern Washington University; Damon M. Hall, St. Louis University; Jamie McEvoy, Montana State University; Susan J. Gilbertz, Montana State University; and Lucas Ward, Rocky Mountain College. Defending Dissensus: Participatory Governance and the Politics of Water Measurement in Montana’s Yellowstone River Basin. The...