Drones provide a privileged birds’-eye view for collecting high-resolution imagery formorphometric and behavioral sampling of animals. Biologically meaningful measurements extracted from overhead images require an accurate estimate of altitude, but current commercial drones include inaccurate barometer estimates. Recent proposals for coupling altimeter systems to drones have provided customized, open-source solutions,...
Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is an abnormal part of aging that mainly affects those over the age of 65. The current therapies are only FDA approved for mild to moderate AD symptoms. Cannabidiol (CBD) is a non-intoxicating constituent of Cannabis sativa that has been shown to have beneficial effects on cancer,...
The internationalization brought about by online finding aids and the United States’ expanding diverse population necessitates a renewed focus on representation and accessibility in archival research. The accessibility of archival resources depends on the language in which the content is offered to the public. Throughout the United States, the Spanish-speaking...
Modular construction is increasingly seen as an efficient construction method in terms of time, cost, and energy. The full realization of these advantages partly relies on the efficiency of the production process inside the modular factories, which currently rely on tedious manual monitoring methods or expensive automated techniques. As a...
2020 and 2021 brought the first reported outbreaks of salmonellosis epidemiologically linked to dry bulb onions in the United States. Outbreak investigations were not able to implicate a specific source of the contamination but speculated that contaminated water was a significant contributor. The Produce Safety Rule established minimum standards for...
Kombucha is a fermented sweet tea beverage of Asian origin which has become popular in the West due to its distinct flavor and possible health benefits. Kombucha is fermented by inoculating sweet tea with yeast and bacteria until a pellicle, referred to as a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and...
Nanoparticles are a hugely diverse category of material that have a wide variety of biomedical applications, and developing tools for biological research with high cellular uptake is critical to their effective application. However, rarely is attention paid to the exact mechanism by which this is occurring, with most studies focusing...
As urban populations increase, the presence of well-maintained trees provide a cost-effective solution to combat the effects of climate change, specifically the urban heat island effect. Unfortunately, the associated ecological, social and economic benefits of trees are not distributed equitably in the landscape due to lingering effects of redlining policies....
In recent years, unoccupied aircraft systems (UAS) have become increasingly affordable and straightforward to incorporate in monitoring applications of forested ecosystems. This shift has facilitated interest in using these tools to monitor aspects of forest ecosystems including vegetation health, forest structure and composition, and potential habitat provided by these systems....
Intraseasonal oscillations in the atmosphere-ocean system can affect weather patterns and regional ecosystems. In turn, these oscillations can be affected by climate variability, resulting in additive and/or non-linear responses of regional ecosystems to climate forcing. In the Northern California Current, a strong correlation was identified between the location of the...
The pregnancy and postpartum periods are full of major life transitions. So often, the focus of the literature is about the unborn baby and physical changes a woman experiences throughout this timeframe. Many sources often overlook women’s personal experiences in the perinatal period. Despite an increase in perinatal mood and...
Tsunami inundation of coastal communities can impose a wide array of forces on the
built environment. Forces generated by tsunami-driven debris damming have the potential to
cause failure of coastal structures and further accumulate flow-entrained debris. Since tsunami-resilient design standards were adopted by ASCE in 2016, debris damming considerations have...
Our experiments aimed to investigate responses of the marine cyanobacteria Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus to toxic arsenic species, such as arsenate, and to understand cellular mechanisms that contribute to arsenic tolerance. We used two strains of Prochlorococcus, a high-light adapted MED4 and low-light adapted MIT9313, both axenic, for cultivation experiments. For...
Given the recent attention to dams in developing countries as a means to efficiently utilize water resources, mitigating the negative environmental and social impacts they have on riparian states is of utmost importance. This thesis presents a global review of how basin countries, through international water treaties (IWT), ensure that...
The spring bloom is a key oceanic phenomenon in the Northern Gulf of Alaska (NGA), where it supports the regional ecosystem, fisheries, and CO2 sequestration. Despite its significance, mechanisms that trigger NGA blooms are still debated, largely due to a lack of sufficient data from late winter through spring. New...
Wind energy is one of the fastest growing renewable forms of energy in the United States and the world. However, interactions between wind turbines and wildlife have the possibility to injure animals such as birds and bats. Strategies to assess and minimize wind turbine interactions with wildlife are critical for...
This essay examines community narratives around Keep Virginia Beautiful's Green
Grants initiative. Green Grants is a signature annual program that awards grants to organizations
throughout Virginia in support of projects aligned with one of Keep Virginia Beautiful’s three
pillars: recycling, litter prevention, and community beautification. The primary research
questions are...
As the development, processing, and manufacturing of plastic has improved over the years, so has our amount of plastic waste. Currently, only approximately 9% of post-consumer plastics get recycled. The other 91% is buried in landfills, burned, ends up in the ocean, or is accumulating in communities without access to...
Tooth decay in the form of dental caries and cavities is estimated to be among the most common health conditions globally, with treatment of these oral diseases resulting in a massive, world-wide economic burden. The cause of this demineralization of teeth is rooted in the action of complex microbial biofilms...
Contemporary spiritual tourism impacts many stakeholders including environmental ecosystems, tourists, tourist operators, and community members. Increasingly, in the era of the Anthropocene, there is a need for ethical guidance to inform spiritual tourism so as to mitigate social injustice and environmental degradation. This research project investigates the potential for the...
Two ecologically important lamprey species found in the endorheic Goose Lake Basin face conservation threats; however, relatively little is known about their habitat needs or spatial distribution. Lamprey and their habitat are often found to be patchy; to evaluate these relationships for the lamprey in this basin, I utilized a...
Despite an increase in the number of people who rely on manual wheelchairs, there are still substantial economic barriers to affordable and accessible localization systems. As a result, there is a pressing need to build a versatile yet low cost localization system for manual wheelchairs. Such systems allow users to...
Motion planning is a cornerstone of autonomous robots, enabling robots to safely and efficiently perform tasks such as package delivery, infrastructure inspection, and manipulation. However, as the field of robotics matures, robotic systems are being developed that (1) are challenging to analytically model, (2) require computationally expensive model-based controllers, and...
Aperiodic structures cause significant challenges to subtractive manufacturing methods due to the common features such as inaccessible voids within the structure. Additive man- ufacturing presents an appealing alternative for this purpose. The aim of this research is to test analysis heuristics for validity through application to periodic structures. First, a...
Executive function (EF) is an extensively researched topic as a predictor for academic achievements for children. Delineated as qualities of self-regulation, EF prepares a child to produce successful behaviors for their learning and social environments. Entering school with sufficient self-regulation skills is proven advantageous for scholarly performance. Within the early...
The concepts of cancer and chemotherapy are not unheard of to children, but are often scary and confusing. This paper addresses the need for children’s books on difficult concepts (such as cancer), the creation of a script for a children’s book explaining chemotherapy on a cellular level, the creation of...
This paper examines the invasion of exotic wilding conifers on the native tussock grasslands of Aotearoa New Zealand. The investigation includes two studies and aims to better understand the structure of Pinus contorta seeds across tree crown positions and the viability rates of P. contorta seeds produced during a trees...
At the macroscopic scale, we have pumps that use the classical laws of physics to move liquids at a well defined rate. In the microscopic world, physicists are exploring pumps that make use of quantum mechanical behavior to build analogous pumps for quantum particles. The importance of such “quantum pumps”...
Different educational modalities can affect students in learning challenging engineering concepts. Studies that specifically measure students’ conceptual learning gains have been conducted in face-to-face (F2F) and online modalities, but few direct comparisons have been reported. In this study, we collected data from undergraduate students enrolled in introductory materials science courses...
Community-Engaged Research (CEnR) is a strategy for integrating community needs, priorities, and concerns into the research design, data collection strategies, and subsequent analysis of data. CEnR shares similar properties with both citizen science and community-based participatory research (Woolley et al., 2016). Before the COVID-19 pandemic, CEnR occurred predominantly via face-to-face...
Through a desk-top analysis, this research shows that South African women have gained and utilize specialized skills, behaviors, and adaptations through their daily activities which are useful when applied to water resource management. Further, South African women are shown to build and draw on social capital as a way to...
This paper addresses the high model complexity and overconfident frame labeling of state-of-the-art (SOTA) action segmenters. Their complexity is typically justified by the need to sequentially refine action segmentation through multiple stages of a deep architecture. However, this multistage refinement does not take into account uncertainty of frame labeling predicted...
This thesis aims to explore the effects of organizational and management principles within the context of a student club – an international Formula Student team. Research on the effects of organizational structuring on student club performance tends to be qualitative in nature. While considering the inherent complexity of the human...
The ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) phenomenon serves as a sensitive probe of the effective internal fields in a magnetic material. FMR spectroscopy has consequently become a well-established technique, extensively employed in assessing material properties such as magnetic anisotropy, Landé g-factor, damping parameter, and the magnetoelastic constants of magnetic materials. Determining these...
The corrosion and heat resistance properties of nickel alloys are hallmarks of their importance in infrastructure and industrial catalysis processes, but these properties are highly dependent on the chemical composition of the alloy surface. Density functional theory was used for analysis of surface oxidation of four combinations of chromium and...
The rapid accumulation of plastic waste in landfill, waterways and oceans is becoming a critical problem, one that current recycling technologies are not capable of solving. Recent proposed approaches in the depolymerization of waste plastics employ an Olefin-Intermediate Process (OIP), where feedstocks like polyolefin plastics are ‘activated,’ producing an olefin...
Powder Metallurgy Hot Isostatic Pressing (PM-HIP) is a widely recognized powder metallurgy manufacturing process to produce near-net-shape and net-shape components. During general PM-HIP processes the metal powders are filled within a capsule (die), heated and loaded with high pressure simultaneously, and solidified to form the final product. Due to the...
The experiences of Latinx youth are well-studied in U.S. schools, yet, few studies have focused on their experiences in Community Based Educational Spaces (CBES). CBES continue to be on the periphery of Education research despite the potential affordances of youth-led work in such out-of-school spaces (Baldridge, 2020). At the same...
When pavement markings on roadways are removed, scarring can occur leaving behind traces of where the marking used to be called ghost lines. These ghost lines can confuse drivers on the roadway and divert their attention from the correct lane markings leading them into the false lane. Previous research has...
The Goose Lake Basin, situated on the border of Oregon and California, USA, faces significant challenges from drought, wildfire, and other environmental stressors. This region hosts numerous endemic fish species such as the Goose Lake redband trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss newberri), Goose Lake lamprey (Entosphenus sp.), Goose Lake tui chub (Siphateles...
This study explores how a star CEO winning a prestigious award and prior firm performance relative to competitive aspirations, defined as the performance of industry peers, influence competitor CEOs’ risk-taking. Using a difference-in-differences methodology, we find that when a star CEO wins a prominent award, competitor CEOs increase their risk-taking....
There is significant evidence that an increase in social media usage causes changes to mood and feelings about the self. It has also been found that there is a significant relationship between the extent of social media usage consumption and self-perception. Mimicking social media exposure, I focused on how participants...
The 'Investigating the Relationship Between Social and Sustainable Bonds and Homelessness: A Comprehensive Dataset' provides an in-depth collection of data examining municipal bond issuances and homelessness statistics across various states in the United States. This dataset integrates detailed information on both sustainable and social bond issuances, including issuer names, states,...
The electrical conductivity data of ceramic material at high temperatures can be useful in the application of modeling, solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), and magnetohydrodynamic (MHD). The existing data is considerably lacking at extreme temperatures. Our research focuses on bridging this gap by reporting the electrical conductivity measurements of sets...
With the increased demand for high-quality products, reliable and robust process monitoring has become a key capability for modern manufacturing systems. Through sensors installed in the machinery, the real-time information was measured to assess the state of the processes. The measured data can be used to infer the mechanical, material,...
Sonification, or the “technique of rendering sound in response to data and interactions” [1], is an alternative to visual graphs and has the potential to make data more interpretable and accessible. As a combination of the arts (music) and the sciences (data), sonification is an interdisciplinary tool for connecting people...
The following taxonomic keys are adapted in part from the subgeneric and species descriptions and keys produced by McGinley (2003), Gibbs et al. (2013) and Gardner and Gibbs (2022). Additional identification information was provided by Jason Gibbs, Thilina Hettiarachchi (University of Manitoba), and Joel Gardner (Washington State University). While these...
Distributed version control allows developers to manage software evolution among distributed development teams. But it does not eliminate all consistency and concurrency issues, and instead introduces additional complexity when merging code. And resolving merge conflicts is nontrivial when automated merging fails. In such cases, developers are forced to inspect the...
Managed honey bees (Apis mellifera) play a vital role in pollinating cultivated crops worldwide. Honey bee colony declines reported in the past two decades have been associated with stressors such as pests and diseases, pesticide exposure, and poor nutrition. In the wake of these colony declines, beekeepers have strived to...
This report summarizes findings from three surveys (n=76) and focus groups (n=30) administered as part of the Modeling Zoos and Aquariums as Inclusive Communities of Science (MoZAICS) for Autistic Individuals project. This study was designed to look across the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) field to understand what inclusive...
In some legislative bodies, the use of terms like climate change and global warming is frequently seen as taboo. In the United States, voters who identify as right-leaning have reported little concern about the environment or climate change. This lack of interest is mirrored by Republican legislators who often publicly...
We design a commitment device for college students, “Study More Tomorrow,” conduct a randomized controlled trial testing a model of its takeup, and measure its effect on tutoring attendance and grades. The device commits students to attend tutoring if their midterm grade falls below a pre-specified threshold. Unlike other commitment...
Our study provides a review of theories that were used to study race and racism between 2010 and 2019 in higher education. We conducted a content analysis to identify concepts, statements and models used in higher education studies focused on race and racism in the three most highly read United...
Metric spaces (X, d) are ubiquitous objects in mathematics and computer science that are able to capture pairwise distance relationships d(x, y) between points x, y ∈ X. Because of this, it is natural to ask what useful generalizations there are of metric spaces for capturing “k-wise distance relationships” d(x1,...
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is one of the strongest pieces of legislation enacted for the protection of imperiled species in the United States but has often spurred controversy among resource users for its emphasis on species protection and recovery above all other resource uses. In recent years, the Section...
Research on community forests, primarily governed and managed by local forest users, in the United States is limited, despite their growth in numbers over the past decade. We conducted a survey to inventory CFs in the U.S., and better understand their ownership and governance structures, management objectives, benefits, and financing....
While the practice of polygyny is common in Ghana, little is known about its impact on the use of reproductive health services. The aim of this study was to assess the relationship between polygynous marriage and the utilisation of skilled antenatal care (ANC), assisted skilled birth, and modern contraceptive services...
Many industries in California are difficult to decarbonize, making carbon capture and storage (CCS) essential to reach net zero. California has committed to deliver an enormous 100 thousand tons per year of carbon storage by 2045. Despite much interest in carbon sequestration, there are currently no active geologic carbon capture...
The 24:1 Community is a growing community with ongoing concerns over historical residential segregation, minority-exposure to environmental hazards, and sparse tree canopy coverage. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the current state of the community’s urban forest through an assessment of the urban forest. It also highlights the need...
Improvement behaviors, specifically double loop, have been linked to successful lean implementations. Although the lean literature supports individual cognitive transformation to double loop learning as an important element of lean success, there remains a strategic methodology to achieve sustainable double loop behavior. Perceptions toward behavior and employee satisfaction have been...
1. Multidimensional trait frameworks are increasingly used to understand plant strategies for growth and survival. However, it is unclear if frameworks developed at a global level can be applied in local communities and how well these frameworks—based largely on plant morphological traits—align with plant physiology and response to stress.
2....
Solvent extraction is an integral chemical and biochemical separation process that is drastically intensified in microfluidic systems. A novel high-throughput micro-separator was additively manufactured for the intensification of liquid–liquid separation. The micro-posts array within the flow plate generated a capillary pressure gradient on the non-wetting organic phase, enabling continuous, membrane-free,...
The following pages describe initial findings from the first of four surveys administered in a state of the field study as part of the Modeling Zoos and Aquariums as Inclusive Communities of Science (MoZAICS) for Autistic Individuals project. This study was designed to look across the Association of Zoos and...
The following pages describe initial findings from the first of four surveys administered in a state of the field study as part of the Modeling Zoos and Aquariums as Inclusive Communities of Science (MoZAICS) for Autistic Individuals project. This study was designed to look across the Association of Zoos and...
The following pages describe initial findings from the third of three surveys administered in a state of the field study as part of the Modeling Zoos and Aquariums as Inclusive Communities of Science (MoZAICS) for Autistic Individuals project. This study was designed to look across the Association of Zoos and...
The university library aims to provide university researchers with a trustworthy institutional repository for sharing data. The library sought CoreTrustSeal certification in order to measure the quality of data services in the institutional repository, and to promote researchers’ confidence when depositing their work. The authors served on a small team...
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) systems aim to improve users’ understanding of AI but rarely consider the inclusivity aspects of XAI. Without inclusive approaches, improving explanations might not work well for everyone. This study investigates leveraging users’ diverse problem-solving styles as an inclusive strategy to fix an XAI prototype, with the...
This work explores the mechanical properties of single-phase niobium alloy C103 from room temperature to 600°C for the purpose of expanding safe uses of the material into new applications. The study utilizes a symmetrically notched triaxial tensile specimens to manipulate the internal stress field in order to observe the changes...
Facial recognition has become increasingly important in recent years, due to the wide range of applications it has in fields such as security, surveillance, and human-computer interaction. Three popular methods for facial recognition are the Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Karhunen-Loeve Expansions, which is fundamentally a continuous form of PCA but...
This thesis investigates the effect of participating in political activism on mental health. Participants (N = 187, 72% female, N = 135, 77% female) from an Oregon university were randomly assigned to one of three or four conditions (depending on the study) in which they participated in activism related to...
The accumulation of fuels in fire prone landscapes, and changing climatic conditions, have resulted in increasingly volatile fire behaviors. As a result, social and operational risk, management expenditures, and budgetary requirements for responsible agencies are increasing. The United States Forest Service (USFS) manages 193 million acres across the United States...
Geospatial data analysis is a multifaceted discipline encompassing the collection, processing, and visualization of diverse datasets. It models and delineates the interactions of people, objects, and phenomena within geographical spaces and predicts patterns based on the relationships between different locations. Despite significant advancements in geospatial data engineering and analytics over...
We present student perceptions of a new first-year engineering programming class that was designed by informed research practices. While the College of Engineering at Oregon State University saw a lot of major switching in the first year, there were not many students switching into computer science (CS). This could have...
Wildfires are a recurring disaster that threatens communities living close to forests and result in significant financial losses along with negative environmental effects, especially with the increase of wildfire season length and intensity due to climate change and increasing urbanization. Wildfire events can also have a significant impact on the...
Daikon, mizuna, mizspoona, and komatsuna are novel Asian vegetables for which a market exists in Oregon, especially in the organic sector. However, these crops are currently not grown widely in the area, despite the favorable growing environment of Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Little is known about the appropriate application level of...
Microplastics (MPs) are plastic particles less than 5 mm in diameter. These contaminants are increasingly found in the environment due to increased plastic production, use, and improper disposal. Detecting and measuring these contaminants in the environment has proven difficult, requiring the use of fate and transport models to assess MP...
The enactment of the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010 marked a critical moment in American healthcare history. The ACA introduced Medicaid expansion, a policy designed to extend healthcare coverage to a larger population of low-income Americans. This policy quickly became a topic of debate and led to...
The “why” of any situation is one of the most important questions to ask. Inventors have ideas every day. Some ideas are the brilliant ideas that lead to a better tomorrow. To protect these ideas, inventors turn to patents, a governmental grant of the right to stop others, for a...
Water in the U.S. West faces considerable challenges and uncertainties. Climate change has intensified weather extremes, threatening the water sources that support the region’s many stakeholders. Urban water providers are among the stakeholders contending with the challenge of providing reliable water supplies to their growing populations. Recognizing the critical role...
This research explores the prospects of legislation in Michigan to authorize statewide use of Overdose Fatality Review Teams (OFRTs) to address the escalating opioid crisis. OFRTs consist of multidisciplinary teams that collaborate for overdose prevention. These teams operate on a local to statewide level and are comprised of individuals from...
Septoria canker remains the most important disease of poplars in intensively managed forest plantations. Genetic resistance has long been considered the best way to manage for this disease. Transgenic resistance mediated by RNA silencing against pathogens and pests (HIGS: host-induced gene silencing) has shown promise in other pathosystems but has...
Liquid sodium is a challenging fluid to perform verification and validation for. Its chemical reactivity, large thermal conductivity, and opacity make both modeling and experimental data gathering difficult. Converting the wire wraps of liquid sodium reactor fuel pin geometry into capillaries, and inserting fiber optic temperature sensors, promises to capture...
Access to broadband internet is vital for rural communities in the digital age, but persistent barriers impact adoption and availability. This topic is analyzed through the lens of the Community Capital Framework (Emery & Flora, 2006). By surveying county commissioners, the research aims to better understand rural broadband challenges and...
The cost of long-duration energy storage poses one of the most significant limitations on the penetration of renewables into power grids. Thermochemical energy storage has great potential to reduce this cost through the use of a reversible redox reaction pair that has a high enthalpy of reaction. The chemical nature...
Human-robot teams involve humans and robots collaborating to achieve tasks under various environmental conditions. Successful teaming requires robots to adapt autonomously in real-time to a human teammate's state. An important element of such adaptation is the ability for the robot to infer the tasks performed by their human teammates. Human-robot...
Climate change will require families to withstand and adapt to potentially novel impacts in their forests, requiring both ecological and social resiliency. When facing a future of complex and uncertain conditions, family forest owners need more information on the magnitude and direction of change, which can be best accomplished through...
Streptococcus pneumoniae and Influenza A Virus both primarily infect the upper respiratory tract, with more severe disease occurring during coinfection than would be caused by either pathogen independently. Until recently, characterization of the interactions between these two pathogens has occurred exclusively in the context of a host or using host-derived...
The relationship of running biomechanics, footwear, and injury has been studied extensively in adults. There has been little research on the effects of footwear on running biomechanics in youth.
Given the abundance of images related to operations that are being captured and stored, it behooves firms to innovate systems using image processing to improve operational performance that refers to any activity that can save labor cost. In this paper, we use deep learning techniques, combined with classic image/signal processing...
Although newly independent Central Asian states in 1991, including Kyrgyzstan, started developing their own foreign water policies, Kyrgyzstan’s independence period demonstrated the challenges of determining foreign water policy independently. The conceptual framework of a two-level game was applied in the study to understand and answer the question about how domestic...
The present study was a program evaluation of KidSpirit that investigated how gymnastics coaches’ growth mindsets changed over an eight week period after a training intervention. A mixed-method approach was used to measure growth mindset and self-determination theory (SDT). There were three aims of this study: (1) participants would improve...
Over recent decades, the Bering Sea has experienced oceanic and atmospheric
climate extremes, including record warm ocean temperature anomalies and marine heatwaves (MHWs), and increasingly variable air-sea heat fluxes. In this work, we assess the relative roles of surface forcing and ocean dynamical processes on mixed layer temperature (MLT) tendency...
The use of genetic algorithms to compose music and generate sounds is an area of interest in the artificial intelligence field. Music and instrument sounds have known rules and structures that can be followed which make them well-suited for genetic algorithms. However, genetic algorithms still struggle to generate sounds comparable...
Land management agencies are faced with decreasing budgets and staff, even as acres in need of restoration treatment are increasing. Rural communities in the West are still suffering from sharp declines in timber harvests since the 1990s and are now contending with wildfires that are increasing in size and severity....
Humans have always been fascinated with whales; from prominent features in mythology, to stories of terrifying monsters on the high seas, to globalized utility, to symbolic wildness and radical environmentalism, to figures and statistics, how have human relationships with whales been understood throughout time? Because humans have a need to...
Escalating demand for organic blueberries has driven a significant expansion of northern highbush blueberry (NHB; Vaccinium corymbosum L.) production area. This expansion is particularly pronounced in regions of the Pacific Northwest where native soil conditions are sub-optimal for NHB, notably east of the Cascade Mountain Range of Oregon and Washington,...