Valerie S Banschbach

University of Portland | UP · Department of Environmental Studies

In the Environmental Studies Program at Roanoke College, we engaged students in learning about the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), a controversial, proposed fracked natural gas transportation mechanism slated to run 303 miles from Northwestern West Virginia to Southern Virginia. The MVP has become emblematic of environmental justice battles, both b...

Where are entomologists trained in the United States? The answer to that question is clearly entomology graduate programs at research universities that produce scientists entering academia, industry, and government agencies. Look a little further back along that pipeline, however, and those research universities do not hold the same significance in...

Sandplain Pine-Oak-Heath forest is one of Vermont’s most threatened natural communities due to fire suppression and land development. We studied the ant community in the largest remaining tract of sandplain forest in the state of Vermont, at the Camp Johnson Army National Guard Base, in Colchester. We investigated the long-term impacts of controlle...

Ants have emerged as a useful bioindicator taxon, yet ant communities have not been widely explored in agro-ecosystems where ants may serve important roles as bioturbators and predators of pests. To investigate the impacts of farming on ant communities, we censused ants in rice paddies in which synthetic pesticides and herbicides were utilized vers...

We developed an interdisciplinary course connecting the science of animal cognition and emotion with ethical reasoning for the general education curriculum at Roanoke College. The course engages students in considering familiar animals, their pets, first, followed by a broader phylogenetic range of species. Students learn about cultural views of an...

We present a nested case study that highlights the pedagogical opportunities and challenges of implementing a single teaching case, the Mountain Valley Pipeline, across multiple courses and in co-curricular activities within an interdisciplinary Environmental Studies program. Our pedagogy focused on connecting environmental changes, including clima...

This chapter describes our motivations for assembling this volume, as well as the structure of the sections and key content of each chapter of the work. In this introduction to the volume we highlight the varied author perspectives, disciplinary and interdisciplinary, academic and activist, that illuminate the usefulness of pipeline controversies,...

The proliferation of pipelines to transport oil and natural gas represents a major area of contestation in the landscape of energy development. Battles over energy pipelines pit private landowners, local community representatives, and environmentalists against energy corporations and industry supporters, sometimes drawing opposition and attention f...

This book explores interdisciplinary approaches to animal-focused curriculum and pedagogy in environmental education, with an emphasis on integrating methods from the arts, humanities, and natural and social sciences. Each chapter, whether addressing curriculum, pedagogy, or both, engages with the extant literature in environmental education and ot...

At least since the mid-1990s, environmental education researchers have challenged the anthropocentrism and humanism of the field with their compelling portrayals of animals as subjects in a wide array of educational settings, including classrooms and informal spaces. Published during the early stages of what is now referred to as the “animal turn”...

We developed an interdisciplinary course connecting the science of animal cognition and emotion with ethical reasoning for the general education curriculum at Roanoke College. The course engages students in considering familiar animals, their pets, first, followed by a broader phylogenetic range of species. Students learn about cultural views of an...

Our symposium presents new interdisciplinary approaches to building understandings of nonhuman animals and to investigating our relationships with animals. We present ideas for curriculum and pedagogy, engaging with the extant animal-centered education literature, focusing on interdisciplinary teaching about animals. We ask how we can produce curri...

The moral status of non-human animals and human-animal relationships is rarely foregrounded in environmental education, even in work focused upon conservation or ethics (Spannring, 2017). Yet, questions about the moral status of animals provide opportunities to connect science with the humanities in the study of environmental ethics, exposing stude...

Questions about the moral status of animals provide opportunities to connect science with the humanities in the study of environmental ethics. We developed an interdisciplinary course focusing on ethical reasoning about animals for the inquiry-based general education curriculum at Roanoke College. In the course, students begin with consideration of...

Disturbance caused by a controlled burn could alter the behavior, species composition and abundance of foraging ants. We censused ants at tuna and jelly baits (n = 30 baits of each type) in early June, 2013, in an area of the Vermont Army National Guard Base in Colchester, subjected to a management burn in May 2013, and in an unburned area of the s...

Determining how ant communities are impacted by challenges from habitat fragmentation, such as edge effects, will help us understand how ants may be used as a bioindicator taxon. To assess the impacts of edge effects upon the ant community in a northern temperate deciduous forest, we studied edge and interior sites in Jericho, VT, USA. The edges we...

Business administration and biology seniors at Saint Michael’s College, Colchester, VT, worked together to develop environmentally oriented business plans as part of collaborating capstone seminars for their majors. Students prepared start-up business proposals for the Enterprise Plan Competition, a business plan contest at Saint Michael’s College...

ABSTRACT This article provides both an experiment and a framework for discussion that students can use to compare the efficiency of producing ethanol by using corn versus sugarcane as a raw material. Key Words: Ethanol production; sugarcane; corn; energy efficiency.

Debris dropping behavior by ants during foraging has been labeled alternately as tool use or a protective behavior. To address this controversy, we investigated the circumstances under which the common forest ant Aphaenogaster rudis drops and retrieves debris in the forests of Vermont, in the U.S.A. We tested the hypotheses, first, that debris drop...

We manipulated availability of food and nesting sites in one population of the forest ant Myrmica punctiventris. The manipulations produced significant changes in relatedness structure, reproductive allocation, and response to hierarchical selection. Food availability appeared to have a consistently stronger influence on these aspects of social org...

Nest locutions of the forest ant Myrmica punctiventris (Roger) were mapped over the course of 2 growing seasons as part of an experiment documenting effects of food and nest site availability on social structure. Artificial hollow sticks made from dowels were used to supplement natural nest sites and to track the location of M. punctiventris nests....

We studied food limitation as a proximate determinant of resource allocation in social insect colonies by repeating a held experiment that had previously produced negative results. A series of plots was supplemented with food in Vermont, USA, and others were left as controls. After two years of the food supplementation, all plots were excavated and...

{Summary: We measured nest temperatures and performed laboratory and field experiments that determined thermal preferences of the forest ant Myrmica punctiventris Roger. We tested the hypothesis that the seasonal cycle of colony splitting (polydomy) that this species undergoes allows it to warm the brood, enhancing reproductive output. This ant spe...

For social insect species, intraspecific variation in colony social structure provides an opportunity to relate the evolution of social behavior to ecological factors. The species Myrmica punctiventris is a cavity-dwelling forest ant that exhibits very different colony structures in two populations in the northeastern United States. Combined data f...

Differences in colony structure between two populations of the forest ant, Myrmica punctiventris, have had dramatic consequences on allocation to growth and reproduction. A population in Vermont, in which colonies have a single, once-mated queen, shows no evidence of inbreeding or population subdivision and has allocated 25% of sexual reproduction...

Nest site choice by cavity-dwelling ants of north temperate deciduous forests was studied at two sites in the northeastern United States. The two numerically dominant ant species in these communities, Myrmica punctivenris and Leptothorax longispinosus, chose different cavity sizes in experiments employing artificial nest sites. These preferences fo...

Certain colours associated with floral food resources are more quickly learned by honey bees (Apis mellifera) than are other colours. But the impact of colour, and other floral cues, on bee choice behaviour has not yet been determined. In these experiments, colour association and sugar concentration of reward were varied to assess how they interact...

Risk-sensitive foraging theory predicts that animals under energetic stress will prefer variable over constant food resources as a means of avoiding starvation. The foraging worker honey bee from a colony deprived of food should prefer to feed on variable flowers. Individual bees were given repeated binary choices between variable (10% and 30% mg s...

I examined the effects of flower color and different nectar concentrations on honey bee choice behavior to develop a protocol to determine honey bee response to variance in nectar concentration. Some birds, fish, mammals, and invertebrates adjust their response to variance when their energy budgets are altered. Theory proposes that this behavioral...

I studied water bird use of two lakes in the Claremont-Upland area to determine what physical, chemical, and biological aspects of these lakes provide suitable water bird habitat and food resources. I censused the Bernard Field Station Lake in Claremont and a gravel pit freshwater area in Upland from 10/85 to 3/86 for water bird use. I also mapped...