Seafood is one of the most diverse and highly traded natural resources worldwide. Widespread evidence of increased seafood fraud and IUU fishing has placed enormous pressure on industry and governments to determine the authenticity, safety, and sustainability of seafood. The recently established US National Ocean Council has addressed several gaps...
The magnitude of global AIS data exceeds the capability of conventional in-browser graphic rendering technologies like Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and Canvas. Normal practices of rendering AIS data in browser will either suffer from low frame rates or will have to limit the total number of visual elements. In this...
Coastal communities throughout the US West Coast and elsewhere are facing the daunting task of preparing for climate change impacts, particularly the hazards from increased flooding and erosion. With sea-level rise, changing storminess patterns, and possible changes to the frequency and severity of major El Niño events, communities are already...
Despite its promise as a potentially beneficial new source of energy, the ocean-based renewable energy industry is still in its infancy, and like any new idea there are many unknowns with the potential to affect both people and our natural environments. A permit for marine renewable energy (MRE) must cut...
Ice core records provide us a way to investigate past climate and look in detail at past atmospheric conditions. With, on average, higher CO2 concentrations in the Greenland record, the focus of this project was on the potential mechanisms responsible for the higher CO2 concentrations in the Greenland ice core...
Marine sediments are one of the largest habitats for microbial life on earth. These microorganisms play critical roles in biogeochemical cycling both within the subsurface and between the sediment and water columns. However, microbial communities in sediments are highly heterogeneous and the factors defining microbial community structure and metabolic function...
Childhood cancers are rare diseases that affect 188 children in Texas for every million born. Leukemia is the most common childhood cancer and accounts for roughly one third of childhood cancer cases. However, it is estimated that only 10% of childhood cancer cases can be explained by known risk factors....
In this thesis, high resolution ocean models are used to evaluate and forecast coastal ocean variability in two different applications. In the first study, the 2-km resolution ocean circulation model for the Eastern Bering Sea is utilized to understand whether slope-interior exchange along the path of the Aleutian North Slope...
Managing multiple ecosystem services (ESs) across landscapes presents a central challenge for ecosystem-based management, because services often exhibit spatiotemporal variation and weak associations with co-occurring ESs. Further focus on the mechanistic relationships among ESs and their underlying biophysical processes provides greater insight into the causes of variation and covariation among...