Since the 1990s the U.S. and especially the Western U.S. have experienced more intense and costly fires. To help address this problem government agencies are increasingly looking at homeowners in fire-prone landscapes to mitigate fire risk. Part of this effort involves communicating risk and understanding how residents perceive risk. This...
Since the 1990s the U.S. and especially the Western U.S. have experienced more intense and costly fires. To help address this problem government agencies are increasingly looking at homeowners in fire-prone landscapes to mitigate fire risk. Part of this effort involves communicating risk and understanding how residents perceive risk. This...
The purpose of this study is to identify the aspects of successful collaboration within an inter-organizational context. This essay is a case study of a tightly niched network of fire chiefs in central Oregon situated within multiple contiguous boundaries of federal and state agencies, county and municipal governments, industrial forests,...
Disturbance and microclimate interact to play a central role influencing the composition and structure of plant communities. In this thesis, I examined plant community composition and structure twenty years after high severity wildfires with and without post-fire management (salvage logging, fuel treatment, tree planting, and shrub release) under contrasting microclimatic...
As Europeans settled the Willamette Valley in the 1800s, they began to simplify Oregon's largest river contained wholly within state boarders—the Willamette. The river lost miles of channels from dikes, dams, and development. Some channels vanished under concrete. Others became meander scars, or shallow, dry depression in the land where...
This pilot study of South Sister Creek (8 km length) examined stream-scale (i.e., longitudinal trends) and sub-reach scale (less than 100 m) water temperature. Hourly summer temperature time-series data were gathered at four to seven locations along South Sister Creek in 2006, 2012, and 2013 and were used to explore...
The current thesis presents contingent valuation research incorporating social psychological measures that investigates recreationists' willingness to pay recreation access fees at McDonald-Dunn Forest, Oregon. Context is provided through an extensive literature review of recreation fee management, issues and concerns related to recreation fees, recreationists' attitudes toward fees, relevant social psychological...
In the field of natural resource policy and management, community-based collaboration is a strategy that has been growing in scope and usage over the past three decades, and often offers hope in complex, difficult conflict situations. In Oregon's Illinois Valley, where conflicts over natural resource management have been ongoing for...
Relative to other systems in the PNW, the rain-dominated, coastal watersheds of western Oregon have shallow aquifers. Given the seasonality of streamflow and storage limitations in coastal, rain-dominated watersheds, changes in the temporal patterns of precipitation have the potential to magnify the risk of extreme streamflow conditions during both high-...
Hydrological and biogeochemical processes occurring throughout a watershed are typically reflected in stream water chemistry, including in coastal watersheds. While Oregon Coast Range streams have been studied in the past, there is a dearth of knowledge in terms of seasonal temporal trends and spatial variability that this study seeks to...