Climate change will impact the location of suitable habitat for tree species in the Pacific Northwest. Locations that become unsuitable will experience increased levels of tree mortality and diminished levels of tree growth. Understanding how these impacts will spatially manifest is vital for efficient management of natural resources. An invaluable...
The HyperLogLog (HLL) algorithm is used to estimate the cardinality of large sets. This thesis gives a novel analysis of the HyperLogLog algorithm by using techniques from statistics and probability. Initially, closed form bounds for the mean and variance of the max of n independent and identically distributed geometric random...
The United States of America and the world are faced with three massive intertwining challenges at this time: COVID-19, racial inequity, and climate change. As a species, humans must come together and collectively address these challenges to preserve our humanity and make our world a more just and livable place...
Interest is expanding for the potential role of estuaries, particularly seagrass and salt marsh habitats, to sequester carbon, mitigate ocean acidification, and support abundant fisheries. The important functions of estuaries are part of a broader set of ecosystem services, or benefits to humans, which are regulated by ocean and watershed...
Approximately one in six children in the United States has a developmental disability (CDC, 2018). Among a wide variety of interventions that have been developed to support the health, wellbeing, and development of youth with disabilities, Animal-Assisted Interventions (AAI) have become increasingly prevalent. Some AAI involve youth participating with their...
Narratives are central to communication and the human experience. For a computer system to understand a narrative, it must be able to identify the key facts or plot elements that describe what happened or how the world has changed. These element are called events;establishing a document’s events and the relationships...
Diet variation among individuals within populations is widespread. Often diet differences among individuals are attributable to obvious differences among individuals such as age, sex, or morphology. However, growing evidence suggests that individual diet variation is also common among seemingly identical individuals within populations. This phenomenon has been termed individual diet...
Biological invasions and climate change represent two preeminent threats to ecological communities and biodiversity, altering the distribution and abundance of species, disrupting existing species interactions and forming unprecedented ones, and creating novel ecological communities. Many of the most successful invasive species are also ecosystem engineers, species that physically modify the...
Although machine learning systems are often effective in real-world applications, there are situations in which they can be even better when provided with some degree of end user feedback. This is especially true when the machine learning system needs to customize itself to the end user's preferences, such as in...
Natural selection, in its most basic form, is described as a process in which traitsincrease or decrease in frequency depending on their fitness, and only the trait withthe highest fitness will remain in the population. Yet, populations rarely have asingle `optimal' trait. The way natural selection maintains this observed variationwithin...