With the passage of the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) it has become a civil
rights violation to deny access to persons with disabilities to public transportation. The
ADA requires transit agencies to provide accessible buses or equivalent services to
persons with mobility, sensory or cognitive impairments. This study examines...
The Mount Fubilan Intrusion is part of a geologically young hypabyssal stock in the Star Mountains of Papua New Guinea. This stock was mapped as the Ok Tedi Intrusive Complex and divided into four separate bodies: the Mount Fubilan, Sydney Intrusion, Kalgoorlie, and Ningi Intrusions. Hydrothermal fluids caused alteration of...
Winter wheat is commonly grown in dryland cropping systems in the Pacific Northwest region of semi-arid eastern Oregon. For agronomic, economic, and environmental reasons, it is important to understand the long-term sustainability of such dryland systems. The objective of this study was to evaluate the long-term effects of tillage, nitrogen...
Small herds of cows were observed and spatially mapped over continuous twenty-four hour periods. Treatments were implemented that investigated the effect of water site and supplementation on animal distribution patterns. A series of six observation periods constituted each observation series. Observation series were repeated winter (January) and summer (July) for...
Simple models of transpiration, e.g., the Penman-Monteith equation, treat atmospheric conditions as driving variables. In fact, transpiration modifies temperature and humidity throughout the convective boundary layer, creating feedbacks that stabilize the water use of vegetation. This thesis concentrates on the new empirical relationships proposed by Monteith (1995), for developing simple...
Using GIS, this study creates a predictive model of a distinct population of French-Canadian settlers, highlighting shared environmental characteristics of known sites that may have factored into their decision-making process as they chose locations for their farmsteads. While traditional historic and archaeological research has been conducted on French Prairie, the...
Invasive plant species are expanding and transforming vegetative communities across Oregon and throughout the United States. Over the past three decades remote sensing, geographic information system (GIS), and Global Positioning System (GPS) technologies have been integrated to detect and map the distribution of noxious rangeland plants. This study developed low-cost...
Mountain glaciers are receding worldwide with numerous consequences including changing hydrology and geomorphology. This study focuses on changes in glacier area on Mt. Hood, Oregon and Mt. Rainier, Washington where damaging debris flows have occurred in glaciated basins. Landsat imagery is used to map debris-free ice on a decadal time...
The rural two-lane highway in the southeastern United States is frequently associated with a disproportionate number of serious and fatal crashes. The major research objectives are to investigate the relations between probabilities of fatal crash type occurrence and potential contributing factors from road geometric design characteristics and roadside, environmental features....
The evaluation of pavement condition is an important part of pavement
management. To evaluate a pavement, a distress survey has been performed mainly by
manual field inspections. Several automatic pavement evaluation systems have been
developed to overcome the drawbacks of field inspections. Automated evaluation
systems, however, imply their own limitations...
A simple debris-slide model, employing a digital elevation model (DEM) and geological data, was used in a geographic information system (GIS) to map slope stability in the Andrews Experimental Forest, located in the western Cascade Range in Oregon, USA. To evaluate the contribution of error in elevation to the uncertainty...
I analyzed the relationship between avian abundance and landscape structure at five spatial resolutions for 30 subbasins in the central Oregon Coast Range using remotely sensed data and a geographic information system (GIS). I developed maps of forest successional stages from Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data at a spatial resolution...
An accuracy assessment of two broad-scale vegetation databases for eastern Oregon, both developed from satellite imagery, was performed to assess the usefulness of the databases for forest landscape planning and assessment efforts. The two databases were the Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) vegetation database and the U.S. Geological Survey National...
Elk River is a sixth order stream, draining a 200 square
kilometer basin in the Klainath Mountain province of
southwestern Oregon. Timber harvesting began in the basin
during the 1950's, with peak removal of wood occurring in the
mid to late 1960's. This activity lead to an increase in the...
Tourism has become an important factor in Oregon's and
New Zealand's economies. Both destinations are trying to
attract even more tourists. However, many other destinations
are also competing for a bigger share of the tourism market.
Tourism itself is a multi-faceted phenomenon and the travel
destination decision is of some...
Earthquakes a . tsunamis pose significant threats to port and harbor
communities in the Pacific Northwest. Developing effective mitigation and
preparedness plans requires a comprehensive understanding of community
vulnerability. Research presented here focuses on the vulnerability of ports and
harbors to earthquake and tsunami hazards and includes a regional study...
Map delineations of soil and vegetation for a 14,000
acre (5,800 hectare) site in the Oregon Coast Range were
compared. Research objectives were to ascertain the
types of information that could be extracted from delineation
comparisons and to develop a methodology suited
to this purpose. The latter objective was achieved...
Designing timber harvesting units is a challenging task. The task requires decision making on logging equipment, landing site, cable road profile, road location, and transportation system. Traditionally forest planners have done the task manually. However, the manual method makes it difficult to examine many alternatives and the harvest plans depend...
A land management scheduling model is developed that uses a Tabu search procedure to schedule timber harvests and road management activities, while simultaneously meeting (over time and space) two aquatic goals, and also providing for an even-flow of timber harvest volume. Decision variables include land units and roads, and they...
The systems currently available for forest road design are not capable of making computer-aided design judgments such as: 1) automated generation of alternative grade lines, 2) optimizing vertical alignment, 3) minimizing total cost of construction, maintenance, and transportation costs, and 4) aiming for least environmental impacts. In recent years, advances...
Water right marketing and transfers represent a resource reallocation
strategy that has received considerable attention in the American West owing to
nearly full appropriation of water in the region. Several western states permit
transfers between different uses and places of use thus allowing water to move to
higher-value economic activities....
Oregon's beaches were designated public recreation areas by the 1967 Beach Law. These beaches and adjacent shorelands experience erosion and other hazards due to winter storm waves, weathering, and geologic instability. Sea cliff recession threatens older development and inadequate construction setbacks create hazards for new buildings. The typical hazard response...
The diffusion of livestock guarding dogs into American agriculture provides an example of a developed nation adopting a peasant husbandry practice. Guarding dogs, associated with transhumant husbandry, have been used to protect sheep and other livestock from predators in Eurasia for 2000 years. However, they were virtually unknown by Anglo-American...
The goal of this dissertation is to develop a chronology of the retreat of the southern margin of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet (SIS) during the late Pleistocene using surface exposure dating with cosmogenic 10Be. A sequence of seven prominent moraines in northeastern Europe (the Leszno Moraine, the Pomeranian Moraine, the...
In 1976, cultural resource technicians for the Rogue River National Forest located a prehistoric archaeological site, 35JA85, while performing a survey for the proposed J. Herbert Stone Nursery. The site, situated next to Jackson Creek in the Bear Creek Valley southwestern Oregon, is approximately three miles northwest of Medford, and...
The dissertation introduces community-based adaptive watershed management (CAWM) as a holistic conservation framework. The CAWM
framework integrates social and ecological suitability to achieve conservation outcomes. The core theoretical concepts consist of adaptive management, adoption-diffusion,
symbolic interactionism, community-based conservation, spatial analysis and watershed management. The CAWM framework is applied to the...
Archaeological research in the lower Rogue River Basin between Galice Creek on the middle Rogue River and Gold Beach at the mouth of the Rogue has been minimal. Tlegetlinten (35CU59), a site located at the confluence of the Rogue and Illinois rivers is one of only three sites that have...
Fire history and fire regime were interpreted from tree ring analysis of 4320 stumps at 178 sites in a 25 by 55 km area in the central Oregon Coast Range. A total of 27 fire episodes were identified in a 516 year period, with sizes estimated at 18 to 544...
This study examined patterns and controls on 35-years of forest succession following logging in the 236 ha South Umpqua Experimental Forest within the Umpqua National Forest in southwestern Oregon. Prior to logging, the overstory in all three watersheds (~50% cover) was composed of Douglas-fir (30-40% cover), grand fir (2 to...
Coral reefs around the world face numerous threats, both natural and
anthropogenic, including pollution, natural disasters, invasive species, habitat destruction,
and destructive methods of fishing. Given enough time, coral can recover from natural
disasters, but anthropogenic threats decrease corals’ ability to recover from things such as
hurricanes. It is difficult...
An Internet Map Server (IMS) web site was constructed with the goal of
helping middle- through high-school students learn about ocean processes. This IMS was
developed in conjunction with the activities of the Science & Math Investigative
Learning Experience (SMILE) program, and for eventual use with the Oregon Coastal
Atlas,...
Spatialization is an innovative way to expand searching capabilities for a
marine/coastal reference database by using a metaphorical map framework to establish
a sense of place for non-spatial information. Spatializing the Catalogue of Oregon
Marine and Coastal Information (COMCI), a coastal reference database, enables the
marine and coastal resource community...