At frequencies exceeding 1-2 GHz, the substrate network models used in substrate coupling simulation must account for the reactive nature of the substrate. Unlike at low frequencies, where the purely resistive substrate models can be validated through DC resistance measurements, these high-frequency models, comprising reactive components, must be validated through...
The detection of motor faults at their incipient stage is of prime importance to any industrial plant. The introduction of adjustable speed drives has improved the control and the efficiency of induction motors, however, this has changed the nature of motor faults and how they can be detected.
Current signature...
Spacecrafts experience radiation in the course of their operation
and all electronic equipment on board these spacecrafts has to
be designed to withstand the effects of this radiation.
This thesis describes the effects of total ionization dose (TID)
and single event transients (SET) in phase-locked loops - an
important circuit...
Circuits operating outside the earth’s atmosphere are more vulnerable to cosmic radiation and require special design consideration. The purpose of this work is to explore methods of mitigating the effect of radiation in phase locked loop (PLL) circuits. Several voltage controlled oscillators (VCOs) and two complete PLLs are designed and...
The design of a 10-bit pipelined charge redistribution DAC employing MOSCAPs biased in their accumulation mode is presented in this thesis. A switched capacitor filter and output buffer have also been designed for the system. The effect of MOSCAP nonlinearity on the performance of the pipelined charge redistribution DAC has...
Digital phase-locked loops (PLLs) have been receiving increasing attention recently due to their ease of integration, scalability and performance comparable to their analog counterparts. In digital PLLs, increased resolution in time-to-digital conversion is desirable for improved noise performance. This work describes the design and simulation of a stochastic time-to-digital converter...
End-user programmers, because they are human, make mistakes. However, past research has not considered how visual end-user debugging devices could be designed to ameliorate the effects of mistakes. This paper empirically examines oracle mistakes mistakes users make about which values are right and which are wrong to reveal differences in...
Previous research has revealed gender differences that impact females’ willingness to adopt software features in end users’ programming environments. Since these features have separately been shown to help end users problem solve, it is important to female end users’ productivity that we find ways to make these features more acceptable...
A large number of sequential decision-making problems in uncertain environments
can be modeled as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In such settings, an agent
can observe at each time step the state of the environment and then executes an
action, causing a stochastic transition to a new state of the environment...
Ultra-wideband (UWB) radio is the transmission of data using an extremely wide bandwidth and very low power spectral density. In this thesis, the mereits and challenges of UWB architectures versus conventional narrowband architectures will be compared. Pulsed UWB systems can be implemented with very simple architectures. These advantages make UWB...
A discrete trap model is developed and employed for elucidation of thin-film transistor (TFT) device physics trends. An attractive feature of this model is that only two model parameters are required, the trap energy depth, E[subscript T], and the trap density, N[subscript T]. The most relevant trends occur when E[subscript...
Recently, continuous-time ΔΣ modulators are appearing increasingly often in both the literature and the marketplace due to their features of inherent antialiasing and relaxed requirements for opamp and so on. However, several nonideal factors such as clock jitter, excess loop delay, inter-symbol interference and so on, degrade the SNR performance...
This thesis presents a Z-parameter based model to predict the substratenoise coupling between two contacts in a heavily doped substrate for frequenciesless than 2 GHz. The empirical model is scalable with contact size and spacingsbetween the contacts and model parameters can be readily extracted from simu-lated or measured data. The...
There is a large and growing market for portable consumer audio products
with very small size. As the size of these products is reduced, the area occupied
by batteries becomes significant and hence limits the number of batteries to one.
In order to build such small products, high levels of...
Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco), a shade intolerant species, and western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla (Raf.) Sarg.), a shade tolerant species, were compared to learn more about the temporal pattern of release from suppression in both species, whether hydraulic architecture or photosynthetic capacity constrain release and how wood functional properties change...
Paclitaxel is a very important anticancer drug commonly called Taxol®.
We know from previous work (Hoffman, et al., 1998) that Taxol exists in filbert, Corylus avellana L. material. Quantification of Taxol in filbert plant material is painstaking and hitherto was accomplished by rapidly processing single batches in a complicated procedure...
The purpose of this thesis is to explore dependency speculation in Dynamic Simultaneous Multi-Threading (DSMT). DSMT is a microprocessor architecture which attempts to extract Thread Level Parallelism (TLP) from single-threaded programs at run-time. This is accomplished by running multiple iterations of program loops in parallel. The DSMT architecture was originally...
Functional programming is concerned with referential transparency, that is, given a certain function and its parameter, that the result will always be the same. However, it seems that this is violated in applications involving uncertainty, such as rolling a dice. This thesis defines the background of probabilistic programming and domain-specific...
Experiments were conducted to determine the influence of cultural management practices on weed growth in nursery containers. Experiments 1 and 2 evaluated the effects of dolomitic lime rate and application method on substrate pH, creeping woodsorrel (Oxalis corniculata L.) establishment in containers, and growth of azalea (Rhododendron ‘Rosebud’) and pieris...
Continuously tunable diode laser sources coupled to single-mode fiber are useful sources for fiber Bragg grating (FBG) strain sensors. This paper describes the
development and fabrication of such a device. An introduction is given describing
applications of tunable lasers and some of the different methods of creating a tunable
diode...
Fire is a major disturbance process in many forests. Long-term studies of the biogeochemical effects of fires, especially on soils, are very rare.
Consequently, long-term effects of fire on soils are often hypothesized from
short-term effects. In a chronosequence study, I studied 24 western Cascades
(Oregon) forest stands thought to...
This research was designed to broaden the understanding of how timber-harvest affects aquatic macroinvertebrates in perennial and intermittent headwater streams. This study compared emergent and benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages from 20 headwater streams in the central Oregon Coast Range that varied by harvest condition and flow duration. Through comparison of the...
Previous research in South Fork Hinkle Creek suggested that coastal cutthroat trout exhibit an aggregated spatial pattern across multiple spatial scales. To evaluate the persistence of the observed abundance patterns and identify factors that affect those patterns, half-duplex passive integrated transponders (PIT-tags) were implanted in 320 coastal cutthroat trout (>...
Pinyon-juniper woodlands throughout the western U.S. have expanded rapidly following European settlement during the late 19th century. In central and eastern Oregon, western juniper (Juniperus occidentalis var. occidentalis Hook.) encroachment has been previously documented in the sagebrush steppe and upper elevation aspen communities. While these vegetation changes and dynamics have...
Habitat loss causes a reduction in available resources for wildlife, alters the configuration of remaining habitat, and may isolate wildlife populations. White-breasted nuthatches (Sitta carolinensis) are experiencing long-term population declines in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, where they are historically associated with oak woodlands. As secondary cavity-nesters, white-breasted nuthatches may...
Mycobacterium avium is an intracellular pathogen that is associated with disseminated
infection, especially in patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). It
appears that patients with AIDS acquire M. avium mostly through the intestinal tract,
and that bacteria enter the intestinal wall at the terminal ileum. Previous studies have
found that...
This thesis presents a comparison of time-domain and frequency-domain algorithms for phase noise calculation in oscillators. Floquet theory provides the mathematical foundation for these calculations and the numerical methods employ perturbation projection vectors (PPVs). The PPVs are an estimate of an oscillator's sensitivity to noise.
The in-house circuit simulator SPICE3...
Canopy gap formation is a major factor contributing to maintenance of overstory species diversity and stand structure in forests and may be integral to development of understory shrub and herb layers as well. Acknowledgement of gap formation as a fundamental feature of natural forests has led to consideration of gaps...
Biological agents and their products commonly cause foodborne illnesses. In the United States it is estimated that there are over 76 million cases of foodborne illnesses each year, resulting in an economic loss of approximately $40 billion. These high figures demonstrate the need for bioassays that display a rapid and...
For the first objective of this thesis, we attempt to understand the role of water flow and directionality in determining steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss) and spring/summer and fall Chinook (O. tschawytscha) migration patterns within the Columbia River Estuary and plume by integrating recent advances in biotelemetry and environmental observation and forecasting...
Recent studies of headwater streams have demonstrated their importance to overall watershed biodiversity, nutrient cycling, and energy flux. However, little attention has been paid to long-term effects of forest harvest on macroinvertebrate communities in headwater streams. This study investigated headwater stream macroinvertebrate communities in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Oregon,...
Riparian zone vegetation can influence terrestrial and aquatic food webs through variations in the amounts, timing, and nutritional content of leaf and other litter inputs. Differences in vegetation composition and density, as well as riparian topography, may modulate the strength and quality of these inputs. Changes in inputs to small...
The objectives of this project were to determine the effects of harvest maturity, packaging, and storage conditions on subsequent fruit quality of Actinidia arguta ‘Ananasnaya’ and to investigate the use of edible coatings to improve fruit quality and storage life. The influences of harvest maturity (6.0, 8.7, 9.1, and 15.1%...
Radiotelemetry was used to study the seasonal movements and habitat use of adult westslope cutthroat trout Oncorhynchus clarki lewisi in Roberts
Creek and Rail Creek, headwater tributaries of the John Day River, Oregon,
from September 2000 to December 2001. The objectives were to (1)
describe adult cutthroat trout life history...
Previous observations of light levels and phytoplankton abundances along the Oregon coast demonstrated that phytoplankton attenuated light sufficiently to potentially limit the growth of intertidal macrophytes and therefore structure local intertidal communities. Inspired by this observation, in spring 2004, I initiated a study to quantify the direct and indirect benthic...
This thesis focuses on two aspects of transparent electronics, SnO₂ transparent thin-film transistors (TTFTs) and transparent circuits. Both depletion- and enhancement-mode SnO₂ TTFTs are realized. The maximum effective mobility for the depletion- and enhancement-mode devices are 2 cm²V⁻¹s⁻¹ and 0.8 cm²V⁻¹s⁻¹, respectively. A variety of techniques to decrease the carrier...
The impact of forest roads on the hydrology of forested watersheds has long been studied. While forest roads have been reported to alter storm runoff at the road segment scale, the potential for changes to be detectable at the small watershed scale has been debated. The purpose of this study...
The effect of incorporated sawdust, sawdust mulch and nitrogen (N) fertilizer rate on soil nutrients and other properties, N uptake, and plant growth in a young blueberry planting on a silt loam soil type was studied in 2004 and 2005. ‘Elliott’ highbush blueberry plants were established on raised beds that...
North American sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) ecosystems are suffering from
reductions in habitat extent and quality. Only about 50% of sagebrush remains
from pre-settlement conditions, and much of the remaining habitat is
fragmented or degraded by invasive species, fire suppression and overgrazing.
Sagebrush-obligate species are experiencing population declines as a result...
Research was conducted in the field and greenhouse to determine if a
kaolinite-based particle film, Surround®, would reduce colonization and early season
feeding damage in cucurbits by the Western Striped Cucumber Beetle, Acalymma
trivitattum (Mannerheim). Greenhouse studies were designed to determine effect of
particle film on cucumber dry weight production...
This study investigated whether a device commonly used to measure settlement of mussel larvae for ecological studies, the Tuffy™, functions uniformly whether placed in a bed of filamentous algae or on bare rock. During the summers of 2004 and 2005, the number of mussel larvae settling on Tuffys in patches...
This thesis presents new, compact configurations for RF/microwave bandstop and lowpass filters for embedded passive applications. A simple design methodology is presented for designing the folded-transmission line filters on a microstrip platform. Unlike the conventional stub-loaded filter designs, the proposed folded-line filters will have practical dimensions for a wide range...
Elevated groundwater nitrate (NO3
-) concentrations in the Southern Willamette
Valley (SWV) caused the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (ODEQ) to
declare a Groundwater Management Area (GWMA) in Spring, 2004. To better
understand direction of groundwater flow, groundwater age, and nitrate transport
pathways of the SWV we developed a steady-state...
I measured responses of free-ranging Rocky Mountain elk (Cervus elaphus) to recreational disturbance at Starkey Experimental Forest and Range, Oregon from April to October, 2003 and 2004. Resting, feeding, and travel activities of 13 cow elk were recorded at 5-minute intervals using Actiwatch™ motion sensors. Elk were subjected to four...
Rotifers and brine shrimp (Artemia) are important prey items for rearing marine fish larvae. Their availability in the water column may be reduced when they are transferred to larval rearing tanks at lower temperature. In this study, Brachionus rotundiformis (SS-type) and Brachionus plicatilis (L-type) were semi-continuously cultured and fed on...
This thesis presents a channelized digital receiver design for UWB sytems in a multipath indoor environment. The UWB technology has been used for commercial and military purposes due to a number of advantages such as low-power consumption, noise-like and carrier free. The energy of UWB signal is spread over a...
An acceptable microparticulate diet for marine fish larvae may be defined as an artificial diet that contains, retains, and delivers the required nutrients to support survival and growth. Factors affecting ingestion rate of prey items by fish larvae include environmental factors such as light intensity, prey/background contrast, possible chemical cues,...
Molecular genetic and enzymological techniques have been employed to study antibiotic biosynthesis. In this thesis, we studied the formation and modification of the nonproteinogenic amino acid enduracididine (End), which exists in two important antibiotics, mannopeptimycins (MPPs) and enduracidin.
Sequence analysis of the MPP gene cluster revealed that the product of...
Conventional register files spread porting resources uniformly across all registers. This paper proposes a method called Asymmetric Clustering using a Register Cache (ACRC). ACRC utilizes a fast register cache that concentrates valuable register file ports to the most active registers thereby reducing the total register file area and power consumption....
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...
Despite the importance of tropical forest ecosystems in the global carbon cycle, there have been few studies of carbon dynamics in this biome. The magnitude of carbon stocks in the tropics and their changes over time are poorly known since ground-based observations are lacking. In this study, total carbon stocks...
Ceratomyxa shasta is a myxozoan parasite of salmonids and requires the freshwater polychaete, Manayunkia speciosa to complete its life cycle. The parasite’s distribution is currently limited to the Pacific Northwest region of North America and has been reported to cause substantial losses of both wild and hatchery salmonids. The spatial...
Growing societal demand for forest products is pressuring managers to increase productivity from a finite land area, and it is expected that increased supply will come mostly from expansion of intensively managed stands. The USDA Forest Service and numerous collaborators created the Long-Term Soil Productivity (LTSP) network of research sites...
Structure-forming invertebrates belong to a polyphyletic group of primarily sessile and sedentary megafauna that can significantly enhance the complexity of physical habitats. A number of these organisms, including cold-water corals and sponges, are known to be slow growing and vulnerable to physical disturbance. In addition, as filter feeders, these invertebrates...
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...
Thermohaline interleaving is an important mechanism for laterally fluxing salt, heat, and nutrients between oceanic water masses. Interleaving is driven by a release of potential energy resulting from the vastly differing diffusivities of heat and salt in seawater. The flows are composed of stacked intrusions that flux more buoyant and...
The objective of this research is to determine the correlation of lacustrine micro-fossils in Lake Tanganyika to changes in climate and lake levels during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene.
Lake Tanganyika is the second deepest and one of the oldest lakes in the world. The horst and graben geometry...
Curricular models and teaching techniques that support college students as the primary authors of their writing-across-the-curriculum experiences remain largely unexplored. This thesis addresses that research gap by investigating the use of a start-of-term writing self-assessment and goal-setting questionnaire (STQ) for upper-division undergraduates taking writing-intensive (WI) college courses in their majors....
We hypothesized that calpain activity is elevated in response to muscle damage. To test this hypothesis, we examined the degradation of α-fodrin into its 150 and 145 kDa fragments following either 20 eccentric or isometric contractions. In addition, experiments were performed in the presence or absence of E-64-d, a calpain...
The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a disability awareness unit implemented into secondary level physical education curricula, on acceptance and knowledge of students without disabilities. One hundred twelve students in the 7th and 8th grades participated in this study. Predetermined classes of students were randomly...
Protein secondary structure prediction plays a pivotal role in predicting protein folding in three-dimensions. Its task is to assign each residue one of the three secondary structure classes helix, strand, or random coil. This is an instance of the problem of sequential supervised learning in machine learning. This thesis describes...
Magmatic sulfides from Yerington, Nevada, and Yanacocha, Peru, were analyzed by laser ablation-inductively coupled mass spectrometry (LA-ICPMS) and electron microprobe to determine copper, gold, and silver concentrations and ratios in order to examine the relationship to the metal content of related magmatic-hydrothermal ores. The magmatic sulfides occur in plutonic rocks...
The goal of this research was to characterize thermal habitat requirements for juvenile redband steelhead trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss gairdneri) in the South Fork John Day River (SFJD), Oregon using physiological indicators of fish condition. Physiological indices of fish condition measured were whole body lipid content and heat shock proteins, specifically...
The goal of this research was to characterize thermal habitat requirements for juvenile redband steelhead trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss gairdneri) in the South Fork John Day River (SFJD), Oregon using physiological indicators of fish condition. Physiological indices of fish condition measured were whole body lipid content and heat shock proteins, specifically...
I studied small-mammal communities and their response to grazing in mixed-conifer forests and oak woodlands in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in southern Oregon. My objectives were to (1) compare small-mammal communities among forest types and grazing intensities, (2) identify riparian affiliated species, and (3) describe microhabitat associations. Over two years,...
This study investigated variation in xylem anatomy, hydraulic properties, and the relationship between anatomy and properties within Douglas-fir trees at multiple scales. The hierarchical scales in the study included fertilization treatments (fertilized and unfertilized), trees within the treatments, and positions within the trees. Tracheid diameter, tracheid length, percent latewood, number...
An empirical statistical model is developed that relates the non-tidal motion of the ocean surface currents off the Oregon coast to forecasts of the coastal winds. The empirical statistical model is then used to produce predictions of the surface currents that are evaluated for their agreement with measured currents. Measurements...
Growing emphasis on ecosystem and landscape-level forest management across North America has spurred an examination of alternative management strategies which focus on emulating dynamic natural disturbance processes, particularly those associated with forest fire regimes. This topic is the cornerstone of research in the Blue River Landscape Study (BRLS) taking place...
The purpose of this study was to explore, from current Native American and Alaskan Native undergraduate students, what their experiences were as first year college students on the Oregon State University campus. In addition, it was important to learn how these experiences contributed to their success, satisfaction or dissatisfaction, and...
Stream temperature, as an important component of stream ecosystems, can be affected by forest harvesting through removal of riparian shade and changes in hydrology. Riparian Management Areas
(RMAs), as implemented through the current Oregon Forest Practice Rules, are designed, in part, to maintain stream temperature following forest harvesting. However, effectiveness...
Remote areas are frequently homes to regional subpopulations of endangered green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) and their essential habitat. Local communities are often the users and primary stewards of this valuable and charismatic resource. Recognizing this, a Hatohobeian community group in Palau has engaged in longterm monitoring and conservation management...
Heavy timber framing relies primarily on bracing to withstand lateral loads due to earthquakes and wind events. Bracing configurations in heavy timber framed buildings vary widely and include cross bracing, knee bracing, and other geometries. Many heavy timber frames constructed during colonial American times are still standing, exceeding the expected...
Groundwater nitrate contamination is a well-documented issue in the Southern Willamette Valley (SWV) of Oregon, as a Groundwater Management Area (GWMA) has recently been declared. As a GWMA, groundwater nitrate monitoring must occur until regional concentrations are below 7 mg/L NO3-N. However, the presence of temporal variability can make it...
An experiment was conducted with 27 multiparous Holstein and 27 multiparous Jersey cows to determine if nicotinic acid (NA) supplementation during the prepartum phase of the transition period decreases lipolysis and improves dry matter intake and to determine if Holstein and Jersey cows respond similarly to NA supplementation. Cows were...
The microbial loop plays a crucial role in remineralization of organic matter and fuels recycled production in the aquatic environment. The capability of microbes to utilize particular compounds can be examined through their ectoenzyme (found outside the cell) activities using fluorogenic substrate analogs. These catalysts hydrolyze polymers otherwise too large...
Popular applications such as P2P file sharing, multiplayer gaming, videoconferencing, etc. rely on the efficiency of content distribution from a single source to multiple receivers. Most users of these applications are on the widely prevalent source constraint networks such as the Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) and wireless networks. Overlay multicast...
This thesis focuses on the application of the cosmogenic nuclide Beryllium-10 (10Be) in an effort to better constrain the thickness history of the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet (FIS) at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and into the Holocene, as well as begin to answer the long-standing question regarding the age
and...
There is a continual interest in developing robust, flexible, durable, lightweight, waterborne polymer barrier coatings which are increasingly resistant towards both chemical warfare agents as well as an ever growing number of toxic industrial chemicals. In this study, barrier films were prepared with poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVOH) and varying amounts of...
As broadband Internet becomes widely available, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications over the Internet are becoming increasingly popular. Such an example is a video multicast application in which, one source streams a video to a large number of destination nodes through an overlay multicast tree consisting of peers.
These overlay multicast-based applications,...
Pygmy rabbits (Brachylagus idahoensis) in Oregon and Washington are a sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata spp.) obligate species of concern because of declining populations and extirpation from much of their range. Efforts are underway to establish a captive bred population of the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit in Washington state for reintroduction into...
Myxobacteria represent an interesting class of Gram-negative soil bacteria. These bacteria utilize organic materials from the environment as a food source by the action of their extracellular hydrolytic enzymes. They grow vegetatively in the presence of adequate nutrients. During starvation conditions, however, they aggregate and form multicellular structures called fruiting...
Smart weapons promise to provide leap ahead capability with regard to accuracy and engagement range for medium and large caliber projectiles. One of the most critical components of a smart weapon system is its sensor suite that provides position, orientation, and velocity information as the projectile flies down range so...
This thesis presents a domain specific visual language designed to allow coaches to create content that exhibits the complex 2D interactions observed in the game of American football. Coaches can visually program the content by using symbols and drawing primitives similar to those that they currently use to design static...
Large barite (BaSO4) structures mark cold seeps in the southern San Clemente Basin. Barium flux to San Clemente sediments is two to three times greater than fluxes measured in surrounding California Borderland basins. Analyses of sediment trap material, water column samples, sediments and pore water indicate that expected bariumbearing mineral...
1-km MODIS observations of ship tracks off the west coast of the U.S. are used to characterize changes in cloud visible optical depths, cloud droplet radii, cloud cover fraction, and column cloud liquid water amount as low-level marine clouds respond to particle pollution from underlying ships. This study re-examines the...
Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) display the greatest variability of return times to freshwater of all Pacific salmon. Differential return times to freshwater have segregated populations of Chinook into two broad types or runs, fall and spring, named for the time of year in which they migrate to freshwater. Migration time...
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...
This thesis develops a geology training manual for the Interpretation staff of Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve (CRMO) in southern Idaho. The manual will help the staff convey geologic principles to park visitors who are experiencing a landscape formed by volcanic processes. Basic geology and the most...
We present an approach for generating a character’s response in anticipation of an impending impact. Protective anticipatory movement is built upon several simple actions that have been identified as response mechanisms in monkeys and in humans. These actions are parameterized by a model of the interaction based on the approaching...
The northern goshawk (Accipiter gentilis) is a species of concern in the western United States due to its association with mature structural stage forests. I employed a use-versus-availability study design to quantify the vegetative, physiographic, and landscape variables associated with goshawk breeding habitat selection in the San Juan Mountains of...
Riparian areas are eco-tones where aquatically- and terrestrially-derived insect biomass is exchanged between habitats, presenting consumers with new sources of energy, and resulting in a reciprocal subsidy. The relative contribution of energy exchange and the
resulting impacts on vertebrate riparian consumers, such as fish or birds, remains poorly understood. We...
An analytical model is developed to address the question of how different disturbance
regimes affect the mean and variance of landscape carbon storage in forest ecosystems. Total landscape carbon is divided into five pools based on the processes from which they are derived and based on their temporal dynamics. Formulae...
Animal signaling systems frequently utilize multiple traits to produce and transmit a signal. These system elements may span multiple levels of organization. Functional integration of these traits may be expected to generate concordance in evolutionary pattern among system elements, such that evolutionary change in one system component is correlated with...
Power reduction can be achieved at many different levels, such as architecture, algorithm, logic, and transistor levels in circuit design. This thesis focuses on low power scheduling at the algorithm level. We present a latency-constrained scheduling and a latency and resource constrained scheduling, which minimize power consumption for the resources...
Light-frame construction practices and materials have changed greatly
over the past 100 years. Contemporary research has focused on modern construction; thus, we know a great deal about the behavior of modern lightframe buildings under lateral forces. However, there are many light-frame buildings that were built prior to the introduction of...
Accurate scaled modeling and simulation are critical to advancing ocean wave linear generator buoys. A 100th scaled model of ocean wave generator buoy systems is analyzed by solving the Navier-Stokes equations. These equations are numerically solved using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) by implementing the front capturing method. In this thesis,...
Marine sediments exceptionally rich in organic carbon, known as black shales, occur globally but intermittently in well correlated Cretaceous successions. The presence of black shales indicates that sporadic, ocean-wide interruption of normal respiration of marine organic matter during oxygen-deficient conditions has occurred. Submarine volcanism on a massive scale, related to...
Natural events such as wildfires, floods, and storms can significantly alter the short-term structure and functioning of natural systems. Recreation in wilderness areas is one instance in which individuals are directly exposed to post-disturbance landscapes. Consequently, public land managers may be faced with a different set of challenges stemming from...
Historically, least terns (Sterna antillarum) were one of the most common tern species in North America. However, population declines have resulted from direct and indirect anthropogenic pressures on their breeding and foraging habitat. Three subspecies of least terns have been described within the United States: California least tern (S. a....
Traditional application of Voronoi diagrams for space partitioning creates Voronoi regions, with areas determined by the generators’ relative locations and weights. Especially in the area of information space (re)construction, however, there is a need for inverse solutions; i.e., finding weights that result in regions with predefined areas. In this thesis,...