The American Public Human Services Association states that behavioral health includes both mental health and substance use, encompassing a continuum of prevention, intervention, treatment and recovery support services (Neese, 2017). Missoula City-County has an abundance of behavioral health professionals and programs, yet public documents consistently rank lack of access to behavioral health services as a dire community need. Despite the above average number of providers and support services located in Missoula County, the persistent evidence of poor mental health is a reminder that having sufficient numbers of providers does not automatically improve access to services (CHIP, 2017).

Missoula County residents consistently report more frequent poor mental health days in the past month than the US average (in 2015, 3.4 compared to 2.8, respectively) even while Missoula County’s ratio of mental health care providers per population being 270:1, which is a greater ratio compared to 410:1 for Montana and 360:1 in the top 1% of counties in the US. Substance abuse is also a pressing issue in Montana. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that there were 390 alcohol attributable deaths in Montana from 2006 to 2010, for an overall alcohol attributable death rate of 37.7 per 100,000, the highest rate in the country.

While access to care has been a well-known barrier acknowledged by behavioral health professionals, very little data has been collected within the community to quantify this issue. In 2018, the Missoula City-County Health Department (MCCHD) developed a Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP) prioritizing data collection on lack of access to behavioral health services. In pursuit of this data, a partnership was developed between the University of Montana School of Public & Community Health graduate program and the CHIP Behavioral Health work group. In a collaborative effort, a survey was created and distributed in Missoula to collect data on barriers that low-income adults face when attempting to access behavioral health services in Missoula.

After reviewing the 2018 CHIP Report, 2017 Community Health Assessment (CHA) and other literature, the graduate students created a 16-item survey using Qualtrics, an online survey platform. After the survey was finalized, MCCHD distributed it to key informants including 68 individuals from 38 different organizations in Missoula. From those 68 individuals, we received a notable 62 responses. Graduate students utilized a process called thematic analysis to identify patterns of meaning across the 62 survey responses. After doing so, six recurrent barrier themes were identified: access to services, affordability, case management, crisis services, community and social support and system reform.

This presentation will summarize the data collected from the survey and will elaborate on current efforts to identify viable solutions amongst community agencies and organizations in hopes of alleviating the opposition Missoula residents face when attempting to access behavioral health services.

Many organizations strive to provide resources for individuals experiencing homelessness both in and outside of shelters. Studies analyzing the effects of religiosity on the practices of homeless shelters show that both faith-based and secular shelters generally offer a variety of services, from the accommodative, such as food and shelter, to the restorative, like housing, substance-use rehabilitation, and spiritual transformation (Snow and Anderson 1987). Although both types of shelters may require clients to participate in the latter to access the former, faith-based shelters often show a belief-based rigidity, with many requiring prayer, sermon attendance, or a proclamation of faith to access meals or lodging (Mulder 2004; Sager 2011). In contrast, very little data exist regarding religious influence on outreach services for individuals living outside the shelter system. Many individuals experiencing homelessness do not, or cannot, access shelter services for a variety of reasons. Some shelters or other organizations use homeless outreach teams to access people living outside of the shelter system. Using qualitative participant observation, I examined the differences in services, approaches, and goals between a faith-based and a secular homeless outreach team. I interviewed staff members and volunteers to reveal the connection between policy and practice. Method triangulation between participant observation, interviews, and policy content analysis allowed me to better understand how outreach teams interpret the organizations’ missions in the field. I found accommodative services provided by both organizations to be very similar, and although restorative services differed slightly, neither team required clients to participate in restorative services to access accommodative ones. Unlike much of the shelter data, religiosity did not show to drastically influence homeless outreach approaches. This research contributes to a gap in research on differences between faith-based and secular homeless outreach approaches.

Purpose: Depression has a recurring negative impact on quality of life, is heavily associated with increased risk of suicide, and has no universal safeguard to definitively prevent its development. The magnitude of this challenge is evident when acknowledging the steady rise in suicide across the United States with even steeper rises in states with already high rates, particularly Montana. Considering its elevated, vast, rural geographic setting, the inability to control for long, dark winters, psychiatric services existing few and far between in a state that is 4th largest in area but 3rd least largest in population density, and the inherent stigma that prevents mental health from adequately being addressed, individuals who reside in Montana are susceptible to countless overlapping mental health issues as they relate to depression. As a result, many clinical and scientific professionals mark Montana as the epicenter of mental health crises. The purpose of my research is to evaluate and disseminate more holistic approaches to better serve individuals experiencing depression in Montana by studying the physiological pathways that invoke certain treatments for depression between contrasting geographic regions and areas of practice.

Methods: A diverse sample of mental health and primary care practitioners currently practicing in Montana will be enrolled in this cross-sectional mixed methods study. Each provider will undergo a comprehensive qualitative interview to detail their patient populations, credentials, provider toolkits, and attitudes towards all independent treatment options for depression. This will identify distinctive biased underpinnings and how they may affect an individual’s pathway to treatment through the governance of different practitioners. Additionally, aggregate results from the most recent Montana Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System will be evaluated to provide patient-derived attitudes towards mental healthcare access, quality, and cost in corresponding geographic regions of Montana.

Originality: When considering all possible routes an individual may take to develop depression, the countless combinations of symptoms that may be exhibited when one has depression and the established differences individuals hold by their distinct physical, social, and cultural environments, one may infer that no two cases of depression are the same. To date, there has been no research conducted in Montana or in a comparable population to investigate the ambiguous nature of the depressed mind from neither the view of practitioners nor personal characteristics of patients, thus producing original value to this scope of research.

Significance: Although there are an abundance of treatments successful in reducing depressive symptoms, they each vary with respect to an individual’s perception of cost, convenience, and feasibility. As mental health professionals, we must recognize the array of options at our disposal and be careful not to administer treatment before considering the unique needs of the patient. When carried out properly, this can improve response of all forms of treatment, empower individuals to take their mental health more seriously, and allow more individuals in crisis to seek out treatment for which they have never done before.

Heat related illness (HRI) is a vital concern to those working in occupations often conducted in the heat. Personal protective equipment (PPE), required by wildland firefighters (WLFF), aggravates these issues due to uncompensable heat gain. Uncompensable heat gain can result in increased incidence of HRI. Helmets are a standard piece of PPE that WLFF’s must wear from the time they leave the trucks at the beginning of their shift until they are safely back in the vehicles. Previous research has demonstrated that the helmet significantly contributes to heat gain. This may negatively affect physical performance of the WLFF.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of the helmet microenvironment on perceived head heat and performance in simulated working conditions while wearing traditional non-vented WLFF helmet (H) compared to a vented helmet (VH).

METHODS: In this randomized crossover design, ten male subjects with a VO2max of 59.8 ± 3.6 ml/kg/min walked for two 180-minute trials (at 3.5 mph, 5% grade) in a heat chamber (35○C and 30% relative humidity). Trials started with a nude body weight measurement following urine collection, then a 10-minute chamber acclimation period in full WLFF gear. The trials involved three intervals of 50 minutes of exercise and 10 minutes of rest, followed by a performance test to exhaustion. A post trial nude body weight and urine sample were also collected. Subjects were provided with 5 ml of water/kg of body weight every 30 minutes. Separated by a two-week washout, subjects repeated the trial with the other helmet. Each trial measured % dehydration, sweat rate, and work performance (PS, PKJ). Peak helmet temperature, perceived head heat (PVAS), helmet humidity (PHH), heart rate, physiological strain index, rating of perceived exertion, core temperature (PTc), and skin temperature were collected during the performance test. Paired sample t-tests compared differences between the H and VH trials.

RESULTS: All 10 subjects were able to finish both trials. Neither sweat rate nor percent dehydration differed between trials. Performance was significantly greater in VH (109.3±8.5 KJ VH vs. 95.9±10.3 KJ H; 703.2 ± 37.5 sec VH vs. 662.7±51.0 sec H ). PHH (45.0±1.3% VH vs. 47.3±1.4% H) and PVAS (91.5±9.9 mm VH vs. 108.8±9.2 mm H) were all significant (p < 0 .05) between trials. A trend in PTc (38.18±0.10○C VH vs 38.32±0.11○C H; p≤0.08) existed.

SIGNIFICANCE: This study is one of the first to examine the differences in performance following an extended bout of exercise between non-vented WLFF and vented helmets. These data (PHH, PVAS, PS and PKJ) suggest that a vented helmet could result in an improved helmet microenvironment and greater performance for wildland firefighters. While PTc did not reach significance, a statistical trend suggests that a vented helmet could improve heat dissipation for the body. Thus, the current design of the WLFF helmet may contribute to heat gain, reduced performance, and heat related illnesses for the working WLFF.

Supported by the USFS (18-CR-11138100-005)

Heat related illness is a common issue in wildland firefighters (WLFF) and other occupations due to an inability to maintain thermoregulation over an extended period of time. Heat stress increases during continuous exercise and is magnified by the addition of personal protective equipment (PPE). PPE in the form of shirts, pants, and load carriage loads has been previously shown to result in heat accumulation leading to heat stress. Little research involving the effect of the standard WLFF helmet on heat dissipation exists. While it is understood there is a significant heat accumulation from wearing a helmet, little is known on how helmet vents affect heat stress. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study is to compare heat accumulation in simulated working conditions while wearing standard non-vented WLFF helmets (H) versus a vented helmet (VH). METHODS: In a randomized crossover design, ten male subjects with a VO2max of 59.8 ± 3.6 ml/kg/min walked for two 180-minute trials (at 3.5 mph, 5% grade) in a heat chamber (35○C and 30% relative humidity). Following a 10-minute acclimation period, the trial consisted of three intervals of 50 minutes of exercise and 10 minutes of rest. Separated by two weeks, subjects performed the opposing helmet trial. Each trial measured physiological strain index (PSI), skin blood flow at the head and neck (SBFh, SBFn), visual analog scale (VAS), helmet temperature and relative humidity (Th, Rh), rating of perceived exertion (RPE) and heart rate (HR). Data was analyzed using a 2X6 repeated measures ANOVA. RESULTS: All 10 subjects completed both trials. At the end of the 3 hour trial, PSI (6.08±1.45 H, 5.89±1.24 VH), SBFh (238.4±16.8 au H, 225.9±27.6 au VH), SBFn (85.6±8.9 au H, 74.3±10.7 au VH), Th (35.52±0.47°C H, 35.75±0.50°C VH), Rh (45.6±5.1% H, 41.0±5.9% VH), RPE (14.2±1.7 H, 13.3±1.7 VH), and HR (146.8±17.2 bpm H, 144.3±17.9 bpm VH),showed a significant effect of time (p < 0 .05) but were not significant between trials. There were trends towards a significant main effect of trial and interaction on RPE, helmet humidity, and VAS (p≤0.08). SIGNIFICANCE: This study is one of the first to examine the difference between heat accumulation and physiologic stress indices within non-vented WLFF and vented helmets for a duration beyond 90 minutes. While these physiological variables (HR, VAS, PSI, SBFh, SBFn, RPE, Th, and Rh) did not reach trial significance, trends for RPE, helmet humidity, and VAS suggest greater heat dissipation and individual comfort with the vented helmet. This suggests the standard unvented WLFF helmet may contribute to heat gain over time, which may contribute to work output and safety in the field.

Supported by the USFS (18-CR-11138100-005).

Research suggests the high rates of sport related deaths in secondary school athletics may be preventable with adequate planning, preparedness, and resources. An Emergency Action Plan (EAP) is designed to describe these protocols and provide a foundation for care with site-specific instructions. Efforts for schools to implement these documents have been significant in recent years, and have led to the development of evidence-based best practice recommendations (BPRs). The purpose of this study was to determine if existing EAPs in Montana Class AA secondary schools met BPRs. A cross-sectional study design and convenience sampling technique was used to target Montana Class AA secondary schools (enrollment size larger than 779 students). The Montana Secondary School Best Practice EAP survey (MSSBPEAPS) consists of 37 closed ended questions and was developed based on current BPRs concentrating on emergency planning, environmental related considerations, sudden cardiac arrest, catastrophic neck injuries, and emergency medical conditions. The MSSBPEAPS was piloted to establish content validity. The MSSBPEAPS was disseminated electronically to athletic trainers employed at the 14 Montana Class AA secondary schools with a request to complete the MSSBPEAPS and attach their most current EAP. Eleven responses were submitted. Responses were eliminated if more than 5 questions were unanswered or if an EAP was not attached, leaving 5 responses eligible for review for a response rate of 36% (n=5/14). The remaining 5 surveys and EAPs were blinded then scored independently by two members of the research team. A scoring rubric to quantitatively assess survey responses and EAP congruence with BPRs was developed, whereby points were awarded for meeting outlined criteria. The weighted scores were tabulated to calculate an aggregate score and schools were then ranked based on the aggregate score achieved. This research is the first to compare current practices to evidence-based BPRs related to emergency preparedness in athletics in class AA secondary schools in Montana. The development of the MSSBPEAPS and the EAP content rubric provide a new approach to understanding the current practices of secondary schools within the state. While there has been research done on a national level, narrowing to a more local lens provides the ability to present practical strategies applicable to the current procedures at each school. The intent of the study was to observe the adoption rate of BPRs, which illustrate the school’s anticipation and readiness for an emergency situation to occur. While Montana Class AA secondary schools provide evidence of development and implementation of EAP, there is significant room for improvement to meet BPR. Strengths were identified in the development of the EAP to include policies regarding environmental illness, cardiac arrest, and catastrophic neck injuries; however, areas of improvement are warranted in documentation, mitigation of risk, and emergency medical conditions. Additional investigation is necessary to determine to what extent athletic trainers use BPR to develop their EAP as well as to identify any barriers that exist that prohibit implementation.

Access to water defines the arid American West and water management is an explicit effort to balance competing water uses. Differing water uses highlights the complexities in water management, and water conflicts will only increase as the climate continues to change. In Montana, the potential for decreasing mountain snowpack and thus less reliable irrigation capacity and river flows during the late summer months could have devastating economic, environmental, and cultural consequences. The need for water rights holders to have certainty about the quantities of water that will be legally available from year-to-year is clear. However, to have certainty, tribal and non-tribal, state-based water rights need to be integrated to ensure administration and enforcement are accurate and equitable.

Tribal water rights are rooted in indigenous sovereignty as well as treaties between Indian Tribes and the U.S. federal government. The case of Winters v. United States (1908) formally recognized tribal water rights, where the Supreme Court ruled that when the federal government set aside land for the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, it impliedly reserved sufficient water from the Milk River to fulfill the purpose of the reservation. Tribal water rights, which are federal reserved rights, sit in tension with basic the basic principles of western water law. The legal doctrine of prior appropriation defines state-based water rights, where first in time is first in right, and the date of initial water use determines the superior right.

In 1979 Montana began a general stream adjudication to quantify all water rights, which ignited conflict and management impasses from both Tribes and existing non-tribal, state-based water rights holders due to the clash of appropriated rights, federal reserved rights, and values for water use. The state established the Reserved Water Rights Compact Commission to negotiate Tribal water rights and avoid the looming threat of litigation. However, despite the success of the commission, current research and judicial opinions suggest that difficult and persistent questions remain regarding how to quantify tribal water rights and how to integrate tribal compact rights and non-tribal, state-based water rights.

To assess where the current water governance system breaks down and leaves questions related to the integration of tribal compact rights and state-based water rights, this presentation will summarize the findings from a series of key informant interviews conducted with tribal lawyers, state administrators, legislators, lobbyists, hydrologists, landowners, and irrigators from across Montana. In addition, this presentation will describe recommendations for policymakers about the best ways to address water conflicts going forward. The results of this work are relevant to water users, the State of Montana’s Water Policy Interim Committee, as well as to Tribal Nations facing similar situations in Montana and beyond.

The Magdalena river basin (MRB) occupies 24% of Colombia’s national territory and is home to 77% of its people and the 80% of the nation’s GDP. Colombia’s geography in the northern Andes combines steep mountains with ample precipitation, creating an environment that is, on the one hand, ideal for hydroelectric development, but on the other hand leads to intensely eroded landscapes and sediment-rich rivers. The dams and reservoirs associated with hydroelectric development interrupt the natural flow of large rivers and block passage of sediment, causing loss of aquatic habitat, incision of the river bed, and other downstream environmental impacts.

Colombia’s electricity demand is increasing. With numerous hydropower projects currently planned or under construction across the MRB, there is a need to gain a greater understanding of how sediment moves through the basin. One important element that has yet to be explored in depth is the amount of sediment generated by erosion that will eventually reach the river and be exported from river basins (i.e., sediment yield).

Because field data on landscape and river processes in the MRB are limited, modeling to estimate erosion and sediment yield is needed. In the MRB modeling techniques can be applied to estimate sediment yield on a range of scales using existing geospatial data and other parameters derived from the literature. These modeling techniques are built on statistical methods linking observable characteristics of the landscape to sediment yields at a specific location in the basin. This level of specificity allows the user to investigate how erosion varies across the basin and how specific factors may influence sediment yield.

This project tests two existing sediment-yield models. Inputs to these models are derived from publicly available geospatial data including digital elevation models (DEM), geologic maps, climate data, remote sensing and published characteristics of large reservoirs in the river network. These models will be used to estimate sediment yield in the Sogamoso, Saldaña and Alto Magdalena sub-basins of the broader MRB. These basins either have existing hydropower projects or have hydropower potential. Comparisons will be made between modeling results to quantify how sediment yield and erosion varies across the broader MRB and the quality of each model in predicting sediment yield. Validations of both models will be made with data from gauging stations in all three study areas as well as geochemically derived erosion rates in the Sogamoso basin.

A study evaluating the applicability of established models has not been published for the MRB. The results of this work are valuable in constraining values for sediment yield in the basin. Additionally, evaluating the efficacy of these models is valuable in developing tools and methodologies that will help us gain a greater understanding of how rivers work in mountainous tropical basins.

Agricultural systems can be understood as social-ecological systems (SES), in which humans and the natural world interact with and influence each other. Elements of SESs, which include ecological, cultural, economic, and governance components, are considered together and integrated as one system rather than simply separate components of the whole. The study of SES focuses on the feedback loops and the synergies among the interacting elements, emphasizing the complexity and non-linear relationships of the system. Research regarding SES has increased over the past several decades as our ecological, political, and economic systems have become more global and more connected.

The concept of resilience within SES has gained considerable attention in recent years. Resilience is generally defined as the system’s ability to absorb and adapt to stressors while still maintaining a similar functioning state. Agricultural systems in the United States are facing major current and future challenges, including climate change, resource availability, economic market instability, and an aging workforce. These challenges could severely impact our food supply and result in far-reaching consequences, such as price increases and food shortages. Because of these major challenges, social-ecological resilience within agricultural systems is a critical concept to study, analyze, and understand.

However, despite the abundance of research on social-ecological resilience, there are relatively few studies that attempt to understand resilience within a particular context. Numerous papers attempt to define or determine measurement parameters for resilience; however, this fails to recognize the context-specific nature of resilience and instead attempts to apply a rigid framework to resilience research.

My research will fill this gap by providing a place-based case study of resilience in a rural agricultural community in Montana known as the Fairfield Bench. Farmers on the Fairfield Bench mainly grow malt barley for major brewing companies and are facing a number of challenges, including an aging irrigation infrastructure, climate change, unstable markets, and water quality concerns. In this study, I will use a social-ecological systems framework developed by Elinor Ostrom to identify and analyze the multiple interacting variables that exist on the Fairfield Bench. I will identify three key variables that are experiencing challenges or disturbances and use these variables as discussion points in interviews with malt barley farmers. Through these interviews, I will gather qualitative data that will identify the capacities for resilience that exist in this social-ecological system from the perspective of the farmers that live on and work the land. These capacities may include resources, assets, or abilities that the farmers possess that enable them to respond to and persist in the face of disturbances or challenges within the social-ecological system. By taking a place-based and contextual approach, I will explore how resilience on the Fairfield Bench is shaped by the dynamic processes of this agricultural system and extend the existing research that attempts to understand the concept of social-ecological resiliency in practice. In the presentation, a review of the relevant literature and methods for data collection will be presented and discussed.

As both world population grows and diets change, global food demand is expected to double by 2050. However, as regional climates shift, changes in average weather conditions will likely have significant consequences for croplands. Thus constraining the impact the climate has on croplands is an essential task of the 21st century.

Heat and drought metrics have already been correlated with county level wheat yield data and suggest vulnerabilities to both high temperatures and lack of rainfall. Mechanistic models also suggest vulnerabilities to lack of moisture and high temperatures. Most of the empirical studies utilize county or larger scaled data. However, field scale yield data is becoming more popular because of potential spatial heterogeneity across county scales. A likely trade off is that it may be harder to extrapolate to larger (i.e. country, continental, or global) scales. Here, we utilize a remote sensing metric, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index(in lieu of yield data), which quantifies how much green light the satellite receives. We use Landsat’s 30m resolution, thereby keeping similar resolution to field scale studies but being able to sample anywhere across the globe. We hypothesize that wheat in the 21st century grown in the western U.S. is primarily constrained by lack of water, both the supply and demand. And as such, we utilize metrics such as vapor pressure deficit and cumulative dry days to pull out more nuanced effects weather may have on wheat’s greenness. Furthermore, we hypothesize that not all wheat growing regions will have the same sensitivity to changes in meteorological variables. Thus, we utilize a self organizing map and k means approach to cluster agro-climatological regions and compare their relative meteorological sensitives. We find that North Eastern North Dakota is rather resilient to changes in water supply and demand and that Eastern Montana is much more vulnerable. We also find that areas with lots of irrigation (i.e. Western WA, South East Idaho) are somewhat buffered from drought, but by no means completely. These findings can offer nuance to discussions on farmer adaptation, water resource planning, and help further constrain mechanistic crop models.

Groundwater flow and transport within fractured rock systems has important implications for evaluating available subsurface water resources, the design of nuclear waste disposal systems, and identifying the role of groundwater in mountainous regions. The relative amount of water moving through a fractured zone compared to the surrounding rock matrix is often unknown. A principal uncertainty in simulating groundwater flow and solute transport within fractured rock is the characterization and explicit expression of the effective fracture parameters. Hydrogeologists have extensively utilized ‘apparent’ groundwater mean ages derived from environmental chemical tracer data to constrain subsurface flow and transport models. However, deriving a groundwater mean age from environmental tracer concentrations is ambiguous and uncertain. In this study we develop a 3D groundwater flow and solute transport simulation of the Bedrichov Tunnel in the Czech Republic to directly investigate the utility in utilizing environmental tracer concentrations, rather than inferred groundwater mean age, to constrain estimates of effective fractured rock parameters. The Bedrichov Tunnel simulation is on a portion of the tunnel that contains a single major fracture that has associated fracture discharge, stable isotope, and tritium measurements that span multiple years. Fracture and distributed tunnel discharge measurements, apparent ages of fracture discharge derived from environmental tracers, and the multiple environmental tracer concentrations are used to constrain the range of effective fracture and solid matrix parameters that control flow and transport to the Bedrichov Tunnel. We investigate the differences in estimated effective fracture parameter uncertainties when using environmental tracer concentrations and mean groundwater age to separately constrain the Bedrichov Tunnel groundwater flow and solute transport model. It is hypothesized that higher parameter uncertainties will be associated when groundwater age is utilized due to the bias and uncertainties associated with inferring a mean groundwater age from environmental tracers. This work will provide information on methods to assimilate and evaluate the information content of environmental tracer data in groundwater flow and transport models that can facilitate more accurate predictions of future subsurface hydrology conditions.

The focus of river restoration and management has shifted from local, site-specific projects to more holistic watershed-scale management. Consequently, tools that help to provide an understanding of river systems as a whole are necessary for managers. Of particular importance for river management is the concept of sediment balance: the balance between the supply of sediment from the surrounding watershed to the river system, and the ability of the river’s flow regime to transport that sediment. Alteration of either of these components by modification of the river or its surrounding watershed can lead to sediment surplus or sediment deficit, both of which can change the shape and function of a river. River floodplains play an important role in sediment balance, and various mechanisms allow rivers to store sediment, or recruit sediment from floodplains. Existing frameworks for quantifying sediment balance conditions and sediment movement through watersheds are generally applied to large areas and do not provide significant mechanistic information regarding channel-floodplain sediment exchange and transport. Others are detailed numerical models that do provide this information, but require extensive calibration of parameters that are difficult to measure, and can only be applied at individual reach scales. A need exists for a modeling framework that provides some mechanistic information, but can be generalized and readily applied to broader spatial extents. To address this gap, I developed a model that is driven by spatial data that represents actual conditions in real rivers. The model simulates the evolution of sediment balance conditions resulting from flow events in a watershed, accounting for various types of disturbance such as dams, wildfires and impacts from land uses such as agriculture. It also accounts for channel-floodplain sediment exchange, using proxies for mechanisms that are easily obtained from widely available datasets (e.g. digital elevation models). To visualize how sediment balance conditions propagate through river systems in response to flow events, the model can simulate either real (based on river gage data) or hypothetical floods. The model was calibrated using field data collected at various sites in the Santa Clara River (SCR) watershed of Southern California. It was then applied to the SCR to simulate how a flood event during February of 2017 affected sediment balance conditions. This model can serve as a valuable tool in planning and implementing river restoration projects by providing contextual information on specific project sites. By accounting for connectivity and propagation of disturbance throughout the basin, potential impacts to restoration projects and sites can be accounted for, and predictions made about how river structure may change through time.

El Eternauta, an Argentinian science fiction graphic novel written in the 1950s by Hector Germán Oesterheld and illustrated by Francisco Solano López, tells the story of a man named Juan Salvo who, along with his friends, must fight to survive a radioactive snow and an extraterrestrial invasion of Buenos Aires in the 1960s. Due to the increasingly political tone of the remake (1969) and sequel (1975) to El Eternauta, as well as the life path of Oesterheld, who joined the leftist militia los Montoneros and was disappeared by the Argentinian dictatorship, critical readings of this text often interpret the fictitious resistance to the alien invasion as a symbol of the radical insurrection of the 1970s (despite the possible anachronism of that timeline with regard to the first Eternauta). The focus on the author and the narrative has resulted in dearth of scholarship examining the tremendous work of Solano López. This project approaches the relationship between image and text by using Thierry Groenstein’s theory of braiding, which is a kind of visual motif that links a series of repeated images throughout a graphic novel. Each term in a series echoes the preceding ones, creating a citational effect that enriches the story with an additional layer of meaning. In El Eternauta, the braiding of various characters’ hands produces two visual theses: one, that hands, useful in life and a distinct loss in death, are a metonym for the body, a resource as fundamental to the resistance, solidarity and humanity as the mind; and two, hands are a way to understand our humanity as a link not only among ourselves but to all citizens of the universe.

Overview and Purpose: Mindfulness-based practices have gained popularity since the introduction of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR; Kabat-Zinn, 1994). Over the years, mindfulness has been used with a variety of psychological disorders, such as anxiety and depression (e.g. Desrosiers, Vine, Klemanski, & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2013). Additional research suggests that mindfulness can be used in non-clinical populations to increase psychological well-being (Brown & Ryan, 2003). School-based interventions have shown positive outcomes for elementary-age students, such as decreased depressive symptoms, decreased aggression, greater empathy, and emotional control (Schonert-Reichl, Oberle, Lawlor, Abbott, Thomson, Oberlander, & Diamond, 2015). Kielty, Gillam, Staton, and Curtis (2017) found that classroom-based mindfulness interventions increased the likelihood that children would use mindfulness-based coping strategies (i.e., mindful breathing) when faced with strong feelings. However, schools often report limited time and resources to introduce mindfulness interventions. Thus, brief interventions may be considered for implementation within the schools. Because of the range of applications for mindfulness, the purpose of the current presentation is to present the results of a research study examining a brief (5-minute) intervention of mindfulness. A second goal is to show how the results from the research study can be used to inform school-based mindfulness practice and provide participants with research-based mindfulness strategies that can be easily implemented in schools.

Method: Participants were randomly assigned to receive either a mindfulness intervention, ruminative intervention, or no intervention. Interventions were adapted from Huffziger and Kuehner (2009) and Lyubomirsky, Kasri, and Zehm (2003). Participants were presented a series of 20 statements to read at their own pace, for five minutes. Statements were designed for the induction of a cognitive state, which was either ruminative or mindful in nature. All participants completed a stress-induction, which increased self-reported arousal. Baseline arousal was then compared to arousal levels after the brief intervention period.

Results: To determine if mindfulness and rumination interventions differentially effected emotion regulation, state affect was compared between T1 (pre-stress induction), T2 (post-stress induction), and T3 (post-mindful/rumination intervention). A repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted for the measure of arousal to compare the effect of the interventions. Change in arousal was significantly influenced by intervention group (i.e. mindfulness or rumination), F (2, 63) = 3.92, p < 0.03. Results also revealed that participants who received the mindfulness intervention reported a decrease in arousal from T2 (post-stress induction) to T3 (post-intervention), with an effect size of d = -1.16. The difference in effect size on arousal between the mindfulness intervention and the rumination intervention indicated that mindfulness is more effective at reducing arousal levels. Results suggest that the mindfulness intervention group had a larger effect on change in arousal, and that mindfulness-based interventions are useful to reduce strong emotions. This presentation will highlight the implication of these results for the implementation of effective school-based mindfulness interventions and how these interventions can help reduce arousal levels and promote emotional regulation in school-age children. Additional resources will also be provided to accommodate mindfulness interventions to the specific needs of a school.