The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is the governing body for collegiate athletics and has regulated the activity of student-athletes with the primary goal of preserving amateurism. In recent years, the restrictions of this principle have been challenged in court. The Supreme Court case NCAA v. Alston (2021) challenged the...
This dissertation uses manipulative experiments to explore amphibian-Bd infection dynamics. Although there has been almost two decades research since the discovery of Bd, many questions still remain regarding what conditions mediate chytridiomycosis virulence. My research shows how certain host and pathogen factors can influence disease virulence. Identifying how host and...
Biodiversity losses in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine systems are accelerating at a global scale and the most threatened vertebrate taxa are those associated with freshwater habitats. The causes of biodiversity losses are often complex and include synergistic effects of natural and human-induced stressors, such as habitat loss and fragmentation, urbanization,...
The vast majority of terrestrial plant species live in symbiosis with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). AMF and plants live in complex networks, with roots of individual plants hosting multiple AMF, and single AMF colonizing multiple plants concurrently. Through the exchange of resources, the two partners of this symbiosis can have...
This thesis describes investigations of marine algal secondary metabolites, with particular interest in their biomedical and agrichemical potential. Invaluable in such pursuits have been the access and application of advanced spectroscopic techniques, such as NMR, and the ability to assess the biological activity of the algal samples in a variety...
Breeding Port-Orford-cedar for resistance to Phytophthora lateralis, a causal agent of root disease, begins by screening, through artificial inoculation, phenotypically resistant trees selected from natural stands. The successful program selected tolerant or resistant POC parent trees for the purpose of disease management. Candidate resistant POCs were used in my dissertation...
Parasites are unique study organisms for evolutionary ecologists. Yet, molecular ecology studies on parasites have lagged far behind those on free-living organisms. The goal of the review in Chapter 2 was to illustrate areas of research that may be of particular interest in relation to the parasitic life style and...
This thesis summarizes work completed over the previous four years primarily focusing on chloroplast phylogenomic inquiry into the genus Pinus and related Pinaceae outgroups using next-generation sequencing on Illumina platforms. During the time of our work, Illumina sequence read lengths have essentially been limited to 25 to 100 base pairs,...
Treating durable, second-growth or plantation-grown material with supplemental chemicals could improve durability while enhancing the uniformity of the products. To test this hypothesis, the effect of two candidate biocide treatments on the durability of teak, redwood, and western redcedar was assessed in a ground proximity field test established in Hawaii....
The Demonstration of Ecosystem Management Options (DEMO) study is a large-scale, multi-year, interdisciplinary project examining the effects of various levels and patterns of green-tree retention on multiple forest features. Six retention levels and patterns were examined and replicated across six blocks of predominately Douglas-fir forested land in western Oregon and...