One in four Ecuadorians do not have access to health services; while more than two-thirds have no health insurance and insufficient resources to pay for the health care services they might require. The following three studies examined utilization of health care services using Andersen’s Health Care Utilization Behavior Theory. Secondary...
St. Lawrence Island, Alaska is home to two Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS) under remediation by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers since 1985. After more than two decades the local residents continue to be concerned about inadequate site characterization and cleanup. During the summer of 2005, I collected ethnographic...
This dissertation uses a new methodological approach for an in-depth analysis of three cartographic works. Studies within the discipline of the history of cartography have followed various methodologies throughout the past century. This dissertation argues that in order to come to a more complete understanding of how maps were produced...
The Tobin Range of central Nevada lies in the Basin and Range extensional province near the transition between more extended terrane (>50%) to the south and east, and generally less extended terrane to the north and west. Geologic mapping, 40Ar/39Ar dating and whole-rock geochemical analysis were employed to establish the...
This study aimed to connect habitat and landscape scale variation, through time and space, to wildlife population dynamics. I studied African buffalo (Syncerus caffer) group size according to habitat structure, landscape heterogeneity, forage quality, and water availability in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Game Reserve, South Africa. I used two approaches to study grouping...
The study examines the effect of forest clearance on fire occurrences in major islands of Indonesia, namely: Borneo, Sumatra, Sulawesi and Irian Jaya. The working hypothesis of the study is that forest clearing is a necessary predecessor for extensive fires to occur. The study is designed to test the idea...
Geochemical characterization methods are commonly used in the reconstruction of prehistoric raw material use and procurement systems. Trace element studies of lithic source material and artifacts, specifically those made of obsidian, can reveal important information about the environmental and cultural factors which influence the prehistoric distribution of raw material. The...
Resource managers of Oregon’s tidal wetlands require an improved GIS layer for management of existing tidal wetland habitat and areas considered for tidal wetland restoration. A reconnaissance project was initiated, such that interpretations of remote sensing data, the National Wetland Inventory, Oregon Estuary Plan Book and additional management tools were...
The working hypothesis for this study is that the introduction of GIS technology into the ancient procedures of map-making has changed the map-making context sufficiently to require a revision of the way we think about, learn from, and use maps, specifically in the public involvement process in natural resource management....
Old-growth in the Pacific Northwest is generally defined as trees that are more
than 200 years old. A great deal of analysis and discussion about old-growth forests in
western Oregon, however, has focused on the relatively widespread 400 to 500 year
age class of primarily Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) trees. The...
In unstable landscapes, modern pedological research explores the role of soils as products and indicators of geomorphologic change. Understanding the dynamics of hill slope pedogenesis is especially important in regions with limited, poor, or threatened soil resources. The island of Cyprus, situated in the eastern Mediterranean, is claimed by many...
This dissertation primarily uses observations made during the 2005 Kashmir earthquake relief effort and available disaster literature to address problems that impede effective and efficient disaster preparedness and response. Three manuscripts form the body of the dissertation. The manuscripts are thematically linked through the Emergency Management Cycle. Each manuscript examines...
To date, the use of oceanographic data in fisheries management has been limited by the scarcity and the difficulty of accessing complete oceanographic datasets. Consequently, fish stocks are managed with limited knowledge about the habitat where fish live and incomplete understanding of what oceanographic conditions affect their populations. With the...
This study examined two neighborhoods in San Francisco with similar earthquake-induced ground failure history -- the Marina District and the South of Market Area (SoMa) -- in the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The earthquake struck shortly after 5 pm on October 17th, 1989 and registered 6.9 in...
Although the Pacific Northwest has the least proportion of non-native plant species in relation to other regions of North America, exotic species continue to spread into mountainous areas, including the Cascade Range. In a forested landscape, road networks can act as corridors for exotic plant dispersal and establishment, helping species...
Satellite remote sensing is an effective tool for mapping snow covered area. However, complex terrain and heterogeneous land cover, due to vegetation and patchy snow cover, present challenges to snow cover mapping. This research compares two techniques for mapping snow covered area: binary and enhanced fractional snow cover mapping techniques....
Several state and federal agencies have identified Oregon's coastal wetlands as
priority areas for conservation, and in some cases have specifically singled out
nontidal (mostly palustrine) wetlands as a major concern. Recent research has
highlighted the need to study and manage wetlands from a regional perspective that
considers the distribution...
This study demonstrates the utility of combining available scientific data with local ecological knowledge in a Geographic Information System (GIS) to support community-based fisheries management. The approach used provides both the framework for capturing important ecological, economic and social information relevant to marine fisheries management, and also offers coastal citizens...
This study demonstrates the utility of combining available scientific data with local ecological knowledge in a Geographic Information System (GIS) to support community-based fisheries management. The approach used provides both the framework for capturing important ecological, economic and social information relevant to marine fisheries management, and also offers coastal citizens...
Bankfull discharge is an important indicator of streamfiow and affects
physical instream habitat. Geographic Information Systems (G IS), hydrologic
modeling, and statistical analysis were utilized to assess the relationship of
bankfull discharge recurrence intervals and land use / land cover watershed
wide and for stream adjacent buffers and bands of...
We took the back-propagation algorithms of Werbos for recurrent and feed-forward neural networks and implemented them on machines with graphics processing units (GPU). The parallelism of these units gave our implementations a 10 to 100 fold increase in speed. For nets with less than 20 neurons the machine performed faster...
The leasing of submerged and submersible lands is emerging as a new marine conservation method. Using a geographic information system, this study: (1) examines the suitability of estuary tideland sites for conservation leasing in Lincoln County, Oregon, and (2) explores the relationship between adjacent terrestrial land use zones and the...
The 14-km long Netarts Littoral Cell, located on the northern Oregon coast, experienced episodic erosion as a result of the severe 1997-98 El Nino and 1998-99 La Nina. The erosion events led to the development of a unique partnership bridging scientists, stakeholders, and various planning agencies. To address these erosion...
Multibeam sonar data was collected on Nehalem Bank, off of the Oregon Coast with the purpose of increasing the spatial resolution of our knowledge of the area and delineating seafloor habitats. The system used was the Kongsberg Simrad EM-300 operating at 30 kHz. The data set collected includes both topographic...