scholarly journals Environmental history of a closed-basin lake in the US Great Plains: Diatom response to variations in groundwater flow regimes over the last 8500 cal. yr BP

The Holocene ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (8) ◽  
pp. 1203-1216 ◽  
Author(s):  
William O. Hobbs ◽  
Sherilyn C. Fritz ◽  
Jeffery R. Stone ◽  
Joseph J. Donovan ◽  
Eric C. Grimm ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Groundwater Flow ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Northern Great Plains ◽  
Dust Bowl ◽  
Strong Connection ◽  
Lake Water Level ◽  
Closed Basin ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of

Sediment records from closed-basin lakes in the Northern Great Plains (NGP) of North America have contributed significantly to our understanding of regional paleoclimatology. A high-resolution (near decadal) fossil diatom record from Kettle Lake, ND, USA that spans the last 8500 cal. yr BP is interpreted in concert with percent abundance of aragonite in the sediment as an independent proxy of groundwater flow to the lake (and thus lake water level). Kettle Lake has been relatively fresh for the majority of the Holocene, likely because of the coarse substrata and a strong connection to the underlying aquifer. Interpretation of diatom assemblages in four groups indicative of low to high groundwater flow, based on the percent of aragonite in sediments, allow interpretations of arid periods (and probable meromictic lake conditions) that could not be detected based on diatom-based salinity reconstructions alone. At the centennial–millennial scale, the diatom record suggests humid/wet periods from 8351 to 8088, 4364 to 1406 and 872 to 620 cal. yr BP, with more arid periods intervening. During the last ~ 4500 years, decadal–centennial scale periods of drought have taken place, despite the generally wetter climate. These droughts appear to have had similar impacts on the Kettle Lake hydrology as the ‘Dust Bowl’ era droughts, but were longer in duration.

Naming Violence in United States Colonialism

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-193
Author(s):  
Taylor Spence
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Northern Great Plains ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Cover Up

Abstract This article reexamines a highly public dispute between a powerful and well-connected Episcopal bishop and his missionary priest, men both central to the government’s campaign of war and assimilation against Indigenous Peoples in the Northern Great Plains of the nineteenth-century United States. The bishop claimed that the priest had engaged in sexual intercourse with a Dakota woman named “Scarlet House,” and used this allegation to remove the priest from his post. No historian ever challenged this claim and asked who Scarlet House was. Employing Dakota-resourced evidence, government and church records, linguistics, and onomastics, this study reveals that in actuality there was no such person as Scarlet House. Furthermore, at the time of the incident, the person in question was not a woman but a child. The church created a fictional personage to cover up what was taking place at the agency: sexual violence against children. After “naming” this violence, this article makes four key historical contributions about the history of US settler colonialism: It documents Dakota Peoples’ agency, by demonstrating how they adapted their social structures to the harrowing conditions of the US mission and agency system. It situates the experiences of two Dakota families within the larger context of settler-colonial conquest in North America, revealing the generational quality of settler-colonial violence. It shows how US governmental policies actually enabled sexual predation against children and women. And, it argues that “naming violence” means both rendering a historical account of the sexual violence experienced by children and families in the care of the US government and its agents, as well as acknowledging how this violence has rippled out through communities and across generations.

The Historiography of Environmental History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Industrial Pollution ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.

scholarly journals Regional uptake and release of crop carbon in the United States

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (8) ◽  
pp. 2037-2046 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. O. West ◽  
V. Bandaru ◽  
C. C. Brandt ◽  
A. E. Schuh ◽  
S. M. Ogle
Keyword(s):  
Great Plains ◽  
Carbon Budget ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
The United States ◽  
Northern Great Plains ◽  
Agricultural Crops ◽  
Biomass Storage ◽  
The Us ◽  
Import And Export ◽  
Crop Biomass

Abstract. Carbon fixed by agricultural crops in the US creates regional CO2 sinks where it is harvested and regional CO2 sources where it is released back to the atmosphere. The quantity and location of these fluxes differ depending on the annual supply and demand of crop commodities. Data on the harvest of crop biomass, storage, import and export, and on the use of biomass for food, feed, fiber, and fuel were compiled to estimate an annual crop carbon budget for 2000 to 2008. With respect to US Farm Resource Regions, net sources of CO2 associated with the consumption of crop commodities occurred in the Eastern Uplands, Southern Seaboard, and Fruitful Rim regions. Net sinks associated with the production of crop commodities occurred in the Heartland, Northern Great Plains, and Mississippi Portal regions. The national crop carbon budget was balanced to within 0.3 to 6.1 % yr−1 during the period of this analysis.

Desert Geopolitics

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-105
Author(s):  
Natalie Koch
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Political Geography ◽  
Us Southwest ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Political Narratives ◽  
The Us ◽  
Milk Cows ◽  
History Of

Abstract In 2014 the largest dairy company in the Middle East, Almarai, purchased a farm near Vicksburg, Arizona, to grow alfalfa as feed for cattle in Saudi Arabia. Almarai is headquartered at Al Kharj farms, just outside of Riyadh, where it has a herd of more than 93,000 milk cows. Given that dairy and alfalfa farms both require an immense amount of water to maintain, what explains these developments in the deserts of Arizona and Arabia? The answers are historical and contemporary, demanding an approach to “desert geopolitics” that explains how environmental and political narratives bind experts across space and time. As a study in political geography and environmental history, this article uncovers a geopolitics of connection that has long linked the US Southwest and the Middle East, as well as the interlocking imperial visions advanced in their deserts. To understand these arid entanglements, I show how Almarai's purchase of the Vicksburg farm is part of a genealogy of exchanges between Saudi Arabia and Arizona that dates to the early 1940s. The history of Al Kharj and the decades-long agricultural connections between Arizona and Saudi Arabia sheds light on how specific actors imagine the “desert” as a naturalized site of scarcity, but also of opportunity to build politically and economically useful bridges between the two regions.

Evaluation of fungicide efficacy on sunflower rust (Puccinia helianthi) on oilseed and confection sunflower

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandt Berghuis ◽  
Andrew Friskop ◽  
Michelle Gilley ◽  
Jessica Halvorson ◽  
Bryan Hansen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Great Plains ◽  
Field Experiments ◽  
Field Trials ◽  
Northern Great Plains ◽  
Puccinia Helianthi ◽  
Action Threshold ◽  
The Us ◽  
Fungicide Efficacy ◽  
Rust Severity ◽  
Important Disease

Sunflower rust, caused by Puccinia helianthi, is an economically and globally important disease of sunflower. Two types of sunflowers are produced in the US Northern Great Plains; the oilseed type and the confection type. Although approximately 80% of the acreage in this region is planted as the oilseed type sunflower, fungicide efficacy and timing studies have been conducted primarily on the more rust-susceptible confection type. A total of ten sunflower rust efficacy field experiments were conducted on oilseed type and confectionary type hybrid trials from 2016-2018. Eleven fungicides from three FRAC groups were evaluated for efficacy and protection of yield. Severity differences among fungicide treatments were identified in both confection and oilseed type sunflower trials. A combined analysis of all confection field trials (five) indicated that rust severity was lower in all fungicide treatments as compared to the non-treated control. Despite rust severity levels below the fungicide action threshold for confection sunflower, seven of the eleven fungicide treatments had yield higher than the non-treated control. In oilseed trials, rust severity was lower in all fungicide treatments as compared to the non-treated control, similar to the findings of the confection type. Rust severity was too low to detect yield differences in oilseed trials. Additional work is needed to elucidate yield-loss potential on oilseed type sunflower and refine the fungicide action threshold on confection type sunflower.

Frederic Clements, climatology, and conservation in the 1930s

2006 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHE MASUTTI
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Plant Ecology ◽  
Plant Succession ◽  
Dust Bowl ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Intensive Farming ◽  
Roosevelt Administration ◽  
History Of

ABSTRACT The study of climate change has deep roots in the history of North American ecology. At the time of the Wall Street crash and the Depression of the 1930s, America .s Great Plains were struck by the Dust Bowl, a phenomenon of catastrophic soil erosion that resulted from the combined effects of intensive farming practices and a particularly harsh drought. Contemporaneously, the ecologist Frederic Clements proposed a theory of plant succession that itself took the history of the Great Plains as its model, and drew on the notion of climatic cycles. This theory became established as the model for ecological expertise in the politics of conservation adopted by the Roosevelt administration. In this paper, I will show how climatology became inscribed in plant ecology not only for epistemological reasons, but also due to an ideology that promoted the ecologist as an expert in the optimization of resources, in an illustration of the tripartite relationship between ecology, politics, and climate change.

ON THE DISTRIBUTION AND HISTORY OF SOD TABLES IN THE EXPOSURE AREA OF THE WHITE RIVER GROUP, NORTHERN GREAT PLAINS, USA

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Burkhart ◽  
◽  
Paul Baldauf ◽  
Kaitlyn Marie Bouch ◽  
Maraina Miles ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Great Plains ◽  
Northern Great Plains ◽  
White River ◽  
White River Group ◽  
History Of
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