Women-owned enterprises have boomed significantly during the past several decades. The purpose of this study is to theorize and empirically delineate the connections between female entrepreneurship and community development through the lens of entrepreneurship. Our results indicate that, from the initial creation of these businesses, to their daily operations and resource mobilization through social networks, women entrepreneurs are closely connected to local communities through their business activities. At the same time, as engagement and payback to local communities are fundamental to their professional goals and operation strategies, female entrepreneurship activities have significantly contributed to local communities in a wide range of ways. The dialectical connections between women business owners and their communities have significant potential to be incorporated into community development policies and practices.

This article reflects on six years of community–university partnerships
(CUPs) between the Charlotte Action Research Project (CHARP),
grassroots organizations, and residents of economically challenged
neighborhoods in Charlotte, NC. We share lessons learned in
participatory planning and community development by comparing
experiences in older, urban neighborhoods with those in suburban,
“new poverty landscapes.” We highlight neighborhood typology,
residents’ choices to leave, place attachment, and sociospatial and
geographic context as defining factors within CUPs. A grounded
framework for evaluating CUPs is introduced, and a synthesis of
interviews and CHARP archives provide insight into what to do best,
and in what conditions, in partnership efforts. We conclude that
community-based research should always start by listening and that
sometimes moving to action research makes sense, while at other
times an advocacy research route is more appropriate. We assert that
the most challenged neighborhoods, despite a lack of capacity and
readiness, must not be avoided.

Habitat for Humanity has been in operation since 1976 as a popular
organization that provides housing to low-income families. In more
recent years, the organization has gradually shifted its priorities
toward becoming a more holistic neighborhood stabilization
program, receiving a large amount of federal funding to help
stabilize neighborhoods in the wake of the Great Recession. Very
limited research has been done to assess the effectiveness of Habitat
construction on neighborhood outcomes. This article provides
a quantitative assessment of housing price values in Charlotte,
North Carolina in neighborhoods that underwent a greater than
average amount of Habitat construction compared to a set of
similar neighborhoods with no Habitat activity. Using an adjusted
interrupted time series model, we find little evidence that Habitat
had a substantive impact on housing values compared to control
neighborhoods.

The formation of cracks is a fundamental first step in the physical weathering of rocks in desert environments. In this study we combine new field data from the Mojave (U.S.), Gobi (Mongolia) and Strzelecki (Australia) deserts that collectively support the hypothesis that meridional cracks (cracks with orientations not readily attributable to rock anisotropies or shape) in boulders or cobbles form due to tensile stresses caused by directional heating and cooling during the sun's daily transit. The new studies indicate that rock size, surface age, and latitude play important roles with respect to their influence on rock fracture. Rock size and pavement surface age exert an influence on the development of rock cracks as the average clast size of mature desert pavements may be at or below the threshold-clast size for thermal cracking of rocks. Latitude-controlled seasonal temperature variations play a key role, as demonstrated by: 1) tightly clustered mean resultant orientations that differ by latitude, as predicted in McFadden et al. (2005), and 2) very cold wintertime temperatures and strong diurnal gradients that may favor crack development in wintertime, given the likelihood for strong clast heating during early morning hours. The consistent evidence for meridional cracks in surfaces of diverse age and desert environments, climate, vegetation, and distance of clast transport indicate that directional insolation may play the key role in initially generating and propagating rock fractures, rather than a secondary role as implied in recent field and modeling studies of physical weathering in deserts.

Pollen assemblages, diatom assemblages, and sedimentology, from Cumbres Bog in the southeastern San Juan Mountains of Colorado, provide a record of climate and environmental change since the end of the last glacial maximum (LGM). Cumbres Bog is unusually deep (basal sediments extend 12 m below the surface) for its altitude (~3050 m a.s.l.) and we extracted 7 m core of continuous sediment below ~5 m of water and peat. The resulting record provides strong evidence of: a period of warming immediately after the LGM (~18-13 cal. kyr BP), a cool interval coinciding with the Younger Dryas (~12.8-11.5 cal. kyr BP), a warm stable period from 10 to 6 cal. kyr BP, and a cooler and highly variable climate interval after 6 cal. kyr BP. More specifically, pollen ratios and fossil diatoms indicate that cold periods generally match with previously identified periods of rapid climate change that occurred at 10.6, 8.7-7.9, 7.0-6.9, 5.4-5.2, 3.3-3.0, 2.3, 2.0 and 1.5 cal. kyr BP. This record also adds resolution to previous regional records and indicates that the periodicity of climate variability changed from 2000-3000 years to 700-1100 years around 6 cal. kyr BP and to <500 years after 3.5 cal. kyr BP. Overall, our record provides important, relatively high-resolution paleoclimatic information for this remote region of the southern Rockies.

Effective river management strategies require an understanding of how fluvial processes vary both spatially and temporally. Here, we examine the natural range of variability in the Conejos River Valley, southern Colorado, through documentation of terrace morphostratigraphic and sedimentological characteristics as well as through investigation of sediment contributions from headwaters, hillslopes and tributary streams. Additionally, soil development and radiocarbon ages, together with local and regional paleoclimate reconstructions, were used to infer the range of processes acting in this system.

Relatively few soil chronosequences with good age control exist for Late Pleistocene and Holocene deposits in
the Mediterranean region of Europe, yet surface soils and their young buried counterparts can provide
meaningful information about the timing and processes of landscape response to external forcing such as
climate or anthropogenic change. Here we present the results of a study that examines a well-dated
chronosequence of nineteen soil exposures in surficial deposits ranging in age from hundreds of years to
hundreds of thousands of years located in the Reno River Valley near Bologna, Italy. The soil-forming climate
of the Reno Valley sits on a threshold between that which facilitates the accumulation of CaCO3 and that
which facilitates the translocation and formation of clay minerals and iron oxides. Once formed, secondary
iron oxides are relatively immobile in oxidizing conditions in the soil profile and therefore consistently
record age trends, with Feo/Fed ratios decreasing predictably with soil age for all soils in the chronosequence.
The morphology of secondary carbonate accumulation and its depth of leaching also vary predictably with
soil age, but only for soils younger than about ~12,000 years. In these young soils, horizons that contain
secondary carbonate progress from relatively shallow, Stage I Bk horizons in late Holocene-aged soils to
deeper Stage III Bk horizons in latest-Pleistocene aged soils. In soils older than approximately 12,000 cal ybp,
however, carbonate dissolution during wetter climates and the addition of colluvium and/or dust to terrace
surfaces become important factors in the preservation of carbonate in the profile, and carbonate content is
not predictable by age alone. Without significant depositional additions, these older soils become decalcified.
Pedogenic carbonate precipitated during drier climates is susceptible to dissolution during wetter periods, as
evidenced by discontinuous carbonate coatings on grains in some soils. Therefore overall measurable
pedogenic carbonate content is spatially and temporally variable as a function of input of fresh carbonate and
locally-controlled soil moisture conditions. Particle size does not decrease predictably with soil age for Reno
Valley soils and appears to be strongly influenced by parent material variability in younger soils and by dust
additions in older soils.
Our detailed examination of soil stratigraphy in the Reno Valley revealed evidence of significant aggradation
of colluvium and tributary fans in the middle Holocene between ~6000 and ~4000 ybp. This aggradation
pre-dates Bronze Age agricultural expansion, and appears to be instead attributable to the climate conditions
of the middle Holocene that have been documented elsewhere in Italy for this time period. This study
demonstrates that late Pleistocene and Holocene surface soils in the Mediterranean region of Europe can
effectively help elucidate rates and processes of landscape evolution.

Geomorphic mapping in the upper Conejos River Valley of the San Juan Mountains has shown that three distinct periods of aggradation have occurred since the end of the last glacial maximum (LGM). The first occurred during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition (~12.5-9.5 ka) and is interpreted as paraglacial landscape response to deglaciation after the LGM. Evidence of the second period of aggradation is limited but indicates a small pulse of sedimentation at~5.5 ka. A third, more broadly identifiable period of sedimentation occurred in the late Holocene (~2.2-1 ka). The latest two periods of aggradation are concurrent with increases in the frequency of climate change in the region suggesting that Holocene alpine and sub-alpine landscapes respond more to rapid changes in climate than to large singular climatic swings. Soil development and radiocarbon dating indicate that hillslopes were stable during the Holocene even while aggradation was occurring in valley bottoms. Thus, we can conclude that erosion does not occur equally throughout the landscape but is focused upslope of headwater streams, along tributary channels, or on ridge tops. This is in contrast to some models which assume equal erosion in headwater basins.

Surficial processes acting on post-glacial alpine and sub-alpine landscapes vary at small temporal and spatial scales and are thus often difficult to conceptualize in the context of large-scale landscape evolution models. Soils developing in this setting can thus provide valuable information about landform genesis, sedimentology and age. Relatively few post-glacial chronosequences have been examined in these settings however, particularly for the variety of landforms and parent materials that exist within alpine and sub-alpine environments. Here, we examine a chronosequence of relatively young, post-glacial landforms with varying parent materials and climate histories. We dug and described 39 soil pits in the upper Conejos River Valley of Colorado on a variety of deposits and landforms, including alluvial fans, terraces, colluvium, glacial till, and terminal moraines, and compared soil properties with radiocarbon ages from the area. Our results suggest that some typical chronosequence soil properties (e.g., pH, structure, color) do not correlate with time over short time scales. However, extractable iron ratios (Fe o /Fe d ) show a relatively strong correlation with age across late-Pleistocene and Holocene time scales and maximum profile clay content shows a weak but statistically significant relationship with age. Both of these trends are stronger when examined across a single parent material. Differences in initial parent material texture and dust inputs seem to be the most significant complicating factors over post-glacial time scales. Soil property development through time is most inconsistent in cumulic alluvial fan soils. This observation may indicate that alluvial fans are more responsive to sub-basin scale processes as opposed to fluvial terraces that are more likely respond to processes active across the entire basin. These differences would explain why stratigraphically similar alluvial fans are mantled by soils with varying development. Nonetheless, horizonation, clay content, and extractable iron ratios provide a useful tool for correlating young deposits, assigning ages, and interpreting the geomorphic history of complex post-glacial environments.