Browsing by Subject "South America"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Four new species of Contulma from South America (Trichoptera: Anomalopsychidae)
    (Magnolia Press, 2006) Holzenthal, Ralph W.; Robertson, Desiree R.
    Four new species in the caddisfly genus Contulma Flint 1969 (Trichoptera: Anomalopsychidae) are described from Bolivia and southeastern Brazil: C. boliviensis n. sp. (Bolivia), C. fluminensis n. sp. (Brazil), C. meloi n. sp. (Brazil), and C. tripui n. sp. (Brazil). The Bolivian species represents the first record of the genus and family for Bolivia. The Brazilian species form a closely related group of species also including C. tijuca Holzenthal & Flint 1995.
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    A new genus of long-horned caddisfly from the Amazon basin (Trichoptera: Leptoceridae: Grumichellini)
    (Magnolia Press, 2004) Holzenthal, Ralph W.; Pes, Ana Maria Oliveira
    Amazonatolica hamadae, new genus, new species (Leptoceridae: Grumichellini), is described from the Amazon basin of Brazil. The adult male and female, larva, pupa and case are described and illustrated. The biology and habitat of the new species is unusual for members of its tribe in that it occurs attached to vegetation in acidic, lowland streams.
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    Order of Operations: A Practical Road Map for Government Policy to Increase the Well Being of Citizens in South America
    (Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, 2009-05-21) Grill, John
    The purpose of public policy is to improve the welfare of citizens. How, exactly, to do that is less obvious. Development and freedom are near-universal ideals, but which government policies can developed countries achieve them? This paper seeks to provide an incremental strategy for governments to improve the wellbeing of their citizens by examining the various paths taken by the countries of South America. This paper will propose that countries should first initiate the pro-growth policies of economic liberalization until a certain level of development is achieved and only then should these countries begin to fully democratize. These democracies will be more stable and will continue the process of liberalization. The countries of South America show both the effectiveness of this pattern and the ineffectiveness of the reverse pattern. This recommendation will be supported by reviewing the theoretical literature, analyzing comparative indicators, and examining detailed case studies.
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    Systematics of the Neotropical caddisfly genus Notidobiella Schmid (Trichoptera, Sericostomatidae), with the description of 3 new species
    (Pensoft Publishers, 2010) Holzenthal, Ralph W.; Blahnik, Roger J.
    Three new species of Notidobiella Schmid (Insecta: Trichoptera) are described from South America: Notidobiella amazoniana sp. n. (Brazil), N. brasiliana sp. n. (Brazil), and N. ecuadorensis sp. n. (Ecuador). In addition, the 3 previously described species in the genus, N. chacayana Schmid, N. inermis Flint, and N. parallelipipeda Schmid, all endemic to southern Chile, are redescribed and illustrated, including the females of each species for the first time, and a key to males of the species in the genus is provided. The occurrence of Notidobiella in Brazil and Ecuador represents a signifi cant extension of the range of the genus beyond southern Chile where it previously was thought to be endemic. The biogeography of Sericostomatidae and other austral South American Trichoptera is reviewed. The presence of the family in South America may not be part of a “transantarctic” exchange, but instead may represent an earlier occurence in the region. The distribution of Notidobiella in tropical South America likely represents recent dispersal from southern South America to the north.
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    Understanding Tropical South American Rainfall Response to Global Climate Dynamics: A Speleothem Multi-Proxy Approach
    (2024-05) Parmenter, Dylan
    One of the greatest challenges facing climate scientists today is predicting large scale tropical rainfall response to climate change. One of the goals of speleothem paleoclimatology has been focused on using stalagmite oxygen isotopes to reconstruct tropical rainfall response to global climate processes on millennial and orbital timescales, in the hope that proxy enabled models may improve rainfall predictability. In South America, oxygen isotope records in the Andes and Amazon Basin have helped to paint a picture of large-scale rainfall response to glacial/interglacial cycles, greenhouse gasses, and ocean circulation. These studies interpret changes in oxygen isotope composition as reflecting rainout along a give moisture trajectory. While this type of analysis is informative in terms of inferring large-scale rainfall changes, complimentary proxies may help to constrain changes to specific regions, especially in cases where the moisture reaching a given site travels a long distance, or where the moisture source changed over time. In this dissertation, we have extended existing oxygen isotope records in the Eastern Amazon and Central Peruvian Andes deeper in time, with the new Amazon record pushing another 25,000 years into the Last Glacial, and the new Peru record extending another 55,000 years, now covering the entire Last Glacial Period and part of the Last Interglacial. In order to constrain rainfall to these specific regions, we analyzed Metal to Calcium ratios, which can be used as a proxy for local aridity, for both our extended portions of the records and for multiple intervals where only oxygen isotopes were published. We also replicated previously published oxygen isotope ratios with a new sample from the Central Peruvian Andes that grew over a precessional cycle during the Penultimate Glacial, and obtained Metal/Calcium ratios to test our hypotheses further in time. Our multi-proxy findings suggest that the Eastern Amazon oxygen isotope record does in fact reflect regional rainfall, and that high-latitude forcing is the primary control for Amazon rainfall variability during the Last Glacial on millennial timescales. In the Central Peruvian Andes, however, our record indicates that the majority of high-latitude forced millennial scale variability occurred further upstream. The lack of end-member shifts in our carbon isotope records from both regions suggests that vegetation did not undergo any major changes on millennial or orbital timescales over the last glacial/interglacial cycles. On orbital timescales, our records indicate that a rainfall dipole exists between the two regions, controlled by the regional Walker Circulation. During periods of higher orbital variability such as the Holocene, Last Interglacial, and Penultimate Glacial, our results suggest that this circulation pattern is controlled by regional insolation. Over the Last Glacial period when eccentricity was low, however, the pattern appears locked and does not respond to insolation, with sustained rainout in the Peruvian Andes, and higher subsidence causing overall drier conditions in the Eastern Amazon. Possible mechanisms causing this locked regional Walker Circulation include ice volume and greenhouse forcing, the latter of which also seems to have exerted a direct control on Eastern Amazon rainfall across Termination 1 and the MIS 4/3 boundary.
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    Well-Being, Community Development, and Andean Worldview: An Analysis of Meanings and Changes in Pedro Moncayo, Ecuador using Photovoice
    (2019-04) Fricas, Jennifer
    The goals of the research presented in this dissertation were to understand and analyze how communities in Andean Ecuador think about, initiate, and engage with their own community development. The study focused on health-related community development and its findings contribute to broader debates about what constitutes development and about how community members act as agents of their own development. The findings also resist the traditional discourse and practices of international development and complicate the ways in which U.S. university faculty educate students about global (health) development. The study was framed by decolonial theoretical approaches and the notion of cosmovisión Andina – an epistemology of the south – which I bring into conversation with the capability approach. Data collection was informed by ethnography, community-based participatory research, and the visual arts. The data collection method was photovoice, a form of participatory photography which enables co-researchers to build capacity in basic photography, after which they engage with the themes under investigation by capturing photos of parts of their daily lives and belief systems, which they then choose to bring forward for further explanation, discussion, and debate. I spent a total of four and a half months in Cantón Pedro Moncayo and during this time I also employed the ethnographic research methods of participant observation, interviewing, and document review. The study findings are presented here in two separate results chapters, the first of which deals with the characteristics of sumak kawsay/buen vivir, the way they appear in and condition everyday life, and the ways in which they have changed in the last two decades. These findings are analyzed in terms of embodiment, which can be thought of as a way of looking at the interaction between human bodies and their environments by regarding the body not just as an object, but an existential ground for culture. Embodiment presupposes certain ideas that also align with principles of Cosmo vision Andina, such that the human being is social and intersubjective, living in a community and an environment simultaneously, as well as within an evolving historical context. Particularities of embodiment appeared repeatedly in the co-researchers’ explanations of what it means to actively enact a good life and how these meanings are under tension, changing, and continually negotiated with a context of various internal and external development-related pressures. The second results chapter pertains to modes of participation and area programs and services which either operate to help co-researchers live in alignment with sumak kawsay/buen vivir or need improvement in order to do so. These study findings point to the ways in which co-researchers and their communities simultaneously work to produce and survive community development. What emerged was an interesting tension between the scale of services (both among governmental levels and within areas of parishes), citizen involvement in services, and their perceptions of the utility of their involvement. Issues of scale and friction help to problematize the effectiveness of sumak kawsay/buen vivir at a national versus a hyper-local scale and shed light on the sources of and possible solutions to frustrated development aspirations and cross-level community development collaboration. This study produced a number of implications for the fields of international development, global health, and U.S. higher education teaching and research in these disciplines. First, the study reinforces the need for a discourse and practice of development which centers hyper-local development, which is better aligned with the epistemologies and praxis of indigenous knowledges and represents a refusal of being coopted into discourses of sustainable or participatory development. Second, those working in health and development nonetheless need to expand their notions of what constitutes well-being. An enlargement of notions of well-being which is more aligned with the embodied characteristics of sumak kawsay counters the narrowmindedness of traditional economically-based notions of development. Third, and based on the previous two points, I argue that we must actively resist the single narrative of development and the single narrative of well-being in U.S. higher education institutions. Finally, I outline the ways in which visual research methods hold unique possibilities for advancing active participation and additional understanding of indigenous knowledges of well-being and practices of hyper-local development. I also outline the challenges which stem from an international, participatory, visual arts, and cross-language research study and how I dealt with these. What all of the study implications share is a decolonial focus on the absolute necessity of coupling concepts and praxis in resistance to the status quo, whether that be in development practice, health practice, teaching practice, or research.