Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is a holistic approach to education that seeks to create a better world for this generation and the next. The aim of ESD is for students to gain knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that will shape the planet for a sustainable future. The United Nations has adopted 17 Global Goals as a "universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030” (United Nations Development Program, 2020, para. 1). Models for sustainability look very different depending on where one lives. The context of this work is Alaska, and more specifically the Fairbanks North Star Borough. The purpose of this project is to build a website resource to aid teachers in developing a mindset toward ESD and provide locally relevant resources and curriculum aligned with the United Nations Global Goals. This project is guided by the question of how Indigenous Ways of Knowing & Culturally responsive practices can be incorporated into curriculum development alongside district standards and ESD competencies. The methods of this project seek to engage students by incorporating real-world challenges and authentic experiences into core subject areas allowing students to connect classroom learning to real life, and thus creating engaged citizens. The aims are for students to become environmentally aware, while developing life-skills including leadership, communication, collaboration, and management. By developing a sense of place and equipping students with environmental knowledge and skills they can excel at living lives which further humanity while caring for and respecting our planet and it's resources.

Alaska Native art is legally defined as art created by a member of a state or federally-recognized tribe of Alaska Natives or a certified non-member artisan (Indian Arts and Crafts Act). Yet this legal definition does not reference the cultural expression and application of creative skill that makes Alaska Native Art a strategic expressive resource. Alaska Native Art is a cultural resource that impacts indigenous economies, cultural social networks, natural resource utilization, and political engagement. Through the creation of native art, an individual not only expresses their culture but also becomes engaged in the natural resource utilization and management in Alaska. However, the link between natural resource management and customary material harvest and utilization has been historically underappreciated primarily due to regulatory ambiguity and broad nature of artistic creation. The harvest and use of these customary materials are governed by multiple state and federal laws across diverse management agencies. State and federal natural resource management agencies possess different interpretations for who may harvest natural resources for art, definitions of significant modifications of natural materials to create art, and priorities governing urban and rural access. Each agency applies different administrative codes to determine proper permitting for both personal artistic creation and the manufacture of marketplace authentic Alaska Native Handicrafts. However, this ambiguous labyrinth of regulation is constantly changing and adapting to new federal and state laws, treaties, and court rules. It is the responsibility of the native artist to navigate this complicated mosaic of regulatory authority to harvest natural materials for art. Yet the foundation from which an artist begins navigating regulatory authority is often inadequately defined. It is the purpose of this MFA thesis is to provide an artist’s perspective on native art materials and resource management in Alaska

The emergence of simple Internet of Things (IoT) devices has habituated the ability to efficiently collect data and communicate information between devices with ease. Similarly, Software Defined Radio (SDR) has compacted radio communication into a USB dongle capable of receiving radio signals from most radio transmitters. In this approach, the ease of IoT device communication and versatility of SDR data collection and transmission techniques is combined to monitor building thermal decay. The system developed to collect thermal decay data is adapted from the Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) IoT architecture and is designed to facilitate variable size collection environments and real-time data visualization. This paper will outline the implementation and capabilities of the collection system and highlight alternate applications and hardware implementations of the underlying framework.

Arctic communities are experiencing dramatic effects of climate change and bioaccumulation of contamination and are also on the front line of expansion via the fossil fuel extraction industry. The Inupiaq culture provides a strong and clear example of harmonious living with one’s surroundings on Alaska’s Arctic Slope (hereafter referred to as Arctic Slope), yet recent community efforts to reduce waste or pollution or come together to address our role in this time of climate change have been short-lived. This applied community development project addresses the need for grassroots organizing within the Arctic Slope to address and react to issues of land, air, and water on a community level. The title of this research is: Kitkut ukua Siļaliñiġmiut? Who are the people of the land, air, and sea (of the Arctic Slope)? This is a self-reflective inquiry from within the community that aims to uplift Inupiat history and cultural perspectives and develop more effective strategies to collaborate to be better stewards of the environment. This project was guided by the Indigenous consciousness-raising theory and an Iñupiaqatigiigñiq framework, inspired by Topkok’s Inupiat Ilitqusiat (2015). The literature/narrative review comprises an overview of Iñupiaqatigiigñiq, or the Iñupiaq value system, as it relates to Indigenous knowledge. It also includes current and historical perceptions of ecological stewardship and environmentalism on the Arctic Slope, and barriers to social change in contemporary institutional representation. Community-based participatory research and strength-based methodology were utilized to inform data collection, which included a survey as well as a series of community dialogues with a variety of Arctic Slope stakeholders. Community perspectives regarding ecological sustainability were elicited using talking circles and group visioning around these questions: Sumik iļisimavisa Iñupiaqatigiigñiq suli nunalu, siļalu, taġiuglu? What do we know about Iñupiaqatigiigñiq and land, air, and water? Suniaqsimaavisa atusiullaaluta nakka qatilluta? What more can we do (to be better stewards) today as individuals and as communities? Data was analyzed using triangulation and thematic analysis techniques. The themes that emerged from the data were shared and then reshared to the larger community via social media, one-on-one outreach to smaller groups, and a community presentation. This project has resulted in both a data set and a framework for continued community-building and information-sharing around land, air, and water stewardship initiatives. The foundation for a regional grassroots coalition has been established via the collaborative development of a website and social media presence. It is my hope that this project will also inform the development of an after-school youth engagement program that could propel a grassroots network of people working together to foster greater stewardship of the land, air, and water.

This is the fifth part of a five-step tutorial on setting up the software for participation in the Alaska's Digital Archives project. It describes how to add the files (images, audio, documents, etc.,) to a project in preparation for attaching descriptive metadata to those files. Part 1 is the steps that must be complete prior to installing the software, Part 2 is installing the software, Part 3 is Creating a project, Part 4 is Setting up a project.

This is the third part of a five-step tutorial on setting up the software for participation in the Alaska's Digital Archives project. It describes the steps that must be completed to create a project: the function within the ContentDM software that allows you to attach metadata to files. Part 1 is the steps that must be complete prior to installing the software, Part 2 is installing the software, Part 4 is Setting up a project, Part 5 is Adding files to a project.

This is the first part of a five-step tutorial on setting up the software for participation in the Alaska's Digital Archives project. It describes the steps that must be completed before downloading the software. Part 2 is installing the software, Part 3 is Creating a project, Part 4 is Setting up a project, Part 5 is Adding files to a project.

This project examines thermokarst initiation through the application of random forest models. Thermokarst initiation marks the start of the formation of thermokarst features. Changes in landscape, due to the thermokarst process, can result in changes in wildlife habitat, as well as energy, carbon and water fluxes. Random forests are an ensemble learning technique that combines the results of many independent decision trees to create results that avoid the overfitting in regular decision trees. Random forests were trained against an existing thermokarst initiation model. Results showed that random forests were useful in this context. Random forest hyperparameters were also examined through a multiparameter sensitivity analysis.

Textile manufacturers produce large amounts of wastewater every year as a result of global demand. Waste dyes are highly resilient against physical processes, insoluble in water, and resistant to detergents. Carcinogenic and mutagenic effects are linked to these dyes, making them a large health hazard. Current dye removal methods are highly complex and inefficient. Thus, a new means of removing textile dyes from wastewater is needed. Nanomaterials are one such possibility, since they exhibit traits unique from bulk materials. One key trait is their surface area to volume ratio. Since the materials are so small, they’re almost able to be considered two dimensional in certain instances. A high surface area is closely linked to adsorption potential, making nanomaterials a promising candidate for dye removal. This project has two portions: material synthesis and adsorption testing. Material synthesis sets up the adsorption testing phase by fabricating enough nanomaterials for testing. The nanomaterials used for this project are MIL-53 (Al) and graphene oxide (GO). MIL-53 (Al) and GO were chosen since they exhibit good stability in water and effective geometrical structures for water filtration. Synthesized composites of the two materials varying in mass of GO will be tested as well. Adsorption testing uses slightly acidic (pH 5.6) methyl blue and methyl orange solutions of varying parts per million (PPM) concentrations. The tests examine effects of initial concentration, duration of exposure, and temperature effects on adsorption potential. Nanomaterials reached equilibrium adsorption after 12 hours of mixing. Most materials efficiently removed up to 90% or greater of dye particles in solutions with initial concentrations of 100 PPM for both dye colors. Increased temperatures reduced adsorption potential of nearly all materials tested for both dye colors.

The production of heavy oil resources is becoming more prevalent as the conventional resources of the world continue to deplete. These heavy oil resources are being produced from horizontal wells and need to be transported in pipeline to processing facilities as a two-phase flow. Two-phase flow is important to the oil industry with the general focus being placed on light oil or water and gas flows. With little work having been done on two-phase heavy oil flow this study will examine these two-phase flows by recreating experimental data generated for heavy oil and air flow in a 1.5-inch diameter pipe and expand this data to include larger 2.875-inch and 3.5-inch pipes. A computational fluid dynamics model was generated to mimic the 1.5-inch diameter pipe used in the experiments. This model was validated for laminar and turbulent flow by using the same heavy oil properties from the original experiment and air respectively. The model was then run to simulate the given two-phase oil-air flows provided from the experimental data for the flow velocities that had pressure drop and liquid holdup data available. The two-phase results were compared to both the experimental data and the Beggs and Brill values for both pressure drop and liquid holdup. A 2.875-inch and 3.5-inch model were generated and the same process was followed for laminar and turbulent validation and then with a subset of four two-phase flow velocities. Without the availability of experimental data for the two larger size pipes the two-phase results were only compared to the Beggs and Brill values. Overall the results showed a good correlation to the laminar and turbulent flow in all three models with the turbulent flow showing the largest error for the pressure drop when the flow was in the laminar to turbulent transition zone for Reynolds numbers. The two-phase results showed to be in between the experimental and Beggs and Brill method values for the original 1.5-inch model and showed that as the gas flow velocity increased in the system the error grew for all three models. Given that the Beggs and Brill method values were generated based on experiments for water-air flow in a 1.0-inch pipe the values for the pressure drop in the 2.875-inch pipe and the 3.5-inch pipe were not unexpected and seemed to match well with an extrapolation of the experimental values. This study shows that a model can be generated to examine the two-phase flow behavior in horizontal sections of well and in pipelines on a computational basis. While these models are time consuming to generate and run with the increase in computing capacity available easily they can become more suitable than generating experimental setups for finding the same information. There will need to be more work done on heavy oil two-phase flow and additional experiments run for larger size pipes and two-phase flow to help tune these models but they do show promise for the future.