City Backdrop: Television and its Gentrifying Influence on a City\u27s Black Community

This paper will focus on the issue of race representation in television and its implications to real life communities in the cities featured in television. Scenes from the comedy show Portlandia will be examined to determine the effects the show has on the black community of Northeast Portland, Oregon. Characters from HBO’s Treme will also be analyzed to assess the show’s claim of representing the struggles of locals in a post-Katrina New Orleans. The lack of diverse representation throughout Portlandia’s eight seasons has caused the show to help to fuel the gentrification in the city. Viewers of the show are left unaware of the city’s Northeast black community. As a result viewers moving into Portland as a result of Portlandia are unknowingly harming the black community of the Northeast area. In contrast to the black Portlanders, Treme locals suffers not from a lack of representation in Treme but from misrepresentation. Several of Treme’s main characters are privileged whites lack the ability to convincingly represent the neighborhood’s struggles post-Katrina. Likewise, Treme’s storylines of the local black characters leave much unsaid, and as a result fail to contextualize the issues that are represented. Both Portlandia and Treme display how, intentional or not, television’s lack of representation and misrepresentation can have negative impacts on the lives of minority residents within a city

Evaluating Modeling Approaches for Phytoplankton Productivity in Estuaries

Phytoplankton comprise the base of the food web in estuaries and their biomass and rates of growth (productivity) exert a bottom-up control in pelagic ecosystems. Reliable means to quantify biomass and productivity are crucial for managing estuarine ecosystems. In many estuaries, direct productivity measurements are rare and instead are estimated with biomass-based models. A seminal example of this is a light utilization model (LUM) used to predict productivity in the San Francisco Estuary and Delta (SFED) from long timeseries data using an efficiency factor, ψ. Applications of the LUM in the SFED, Chesapeake Bay, and the Dutch Scheldt Estuary highlight significant interannual and regional variability, indicating the model must be recalibrated often. The objectives of this study are to revisit the LUM approach in the SFED and assess a chlorophyll-a to carbon model (CCM) that produces a tuning parameter, Ω. To assess the estimates of primary productivity resulting from the models, productivity was directly measured with a 13C-tracer at nine locations during 22 surveys using field-derived phytoplankton incubations between March and November of 2023. For this study, ψ was determined to be 0.42 ± 0.02 (r2 = 0.89, p < 0.001, CI95 = 319). Modeling productivity using an alternative CCM approach (Ω = 3.47 × 104 ± 1.7 × 103, r2 = 0.84, p < 0.001, CI95 = 375) compared well to the LUM approach, expanding the toolbox for estuarine researchers to cross-examine productivity models. One practical application of this study is that it confirms an observed decline in ψ, suggesting a decline in light utilization by phytoplankton in the SFED. This highlights the importance of occasionally recalibrating productivity models in estuaries and leveraging multiple modeling approaches to validate estimations before application in ecological management decision making