Raspberries are an important commodity worldwide, with the United States (U.S.) leading fourth in global production in 2017. An important factor when shipping propagated Rubus across the globe is the security of clean plant material verified through pathogen detection methods which is vital in preventing disease spread. A raspberry virus...
The archaeological record of the First Americans is known almost exclusively from interior sites located away from coastal margins. While archaeologists hypothesize that early peoples initially migrated into the Americas along the Pacific coast, environmental changes associated with postglacial sea level rise may have destroyed or obscured such early sites....
The Inmaculada Mine is located in the Miocene belt of epithermal deposits that extends from southern Peru to northern Chile and Bolivia. This belt is known for its silver-rich epithermal veins that have been worked since colonial times. The Inmaculada Mine belongs to a mining district that includes, from north...
Newcomers’ seamless onboarding is important for open collaboration communi- ties, particularly those that leverage outsiders’ contributions to remain sustainable. Nevertheless, previous work shows that OSS newcomers often face several barriers to contribute, which lead them to lose motivation and even give up on contributing. A well-known way to help newcomers...
The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill (EVOS) in Prince William Sound, Alaska provided impetus for a great deal of research into the ecosystems of the Northern Gulf of Alaska. Buried within the multitude of resulting impacts, which included hundreds of thousands of oiled seabirds and dramatic ecosystem shifts in the...
At its inception in 1946, the United States’ National School Lunch Program (NSLP) was promoted as a success story; a boon for families navigating poverty, a means of buoying food prices by absorbing farm surplus, and a treatment for hunger in some of our country’s most vulnerable populations. Government subsidies...
The United States (U.S.) has seen dramatic growth in installed wind energy generation capacity in recent years, and that growth is expected to remain strong in the near term. The siting of wind energy facilities poses unique challenges that may be exacerbated by increased buildout. As the number of wind...
Wave energy is a potentially important renewable clean source of energy that can help solve the energy demand throughout the world. A great deal of research has been conducted in the last few decades and it is now reaching the point of full implementation. In order to compete with other...
The lagoons spanning Alaska’s Beaufort Sea coast provide a unique habitat for arctic wildlife. These lagoons and the food webs they support face extreme seasonality with nine months of ice cover followed by a spring thaw that pulses a large amount of freshwater and nutrients into the lagoons. Bacteria link...
International donors play a significant role in the mitigation and prevention of transboundary water disputes and the promotion of cooperation. In doing so, donors can exercise water diplomacy through a wide range of instruments from facilitating or mediating the negotiations to financing capacity building and specific activities in official and...
Sphaerulina musiva is a fungal pathogen that causes Septoria leaf spot and stem canker on susceptible Populus species and hybrids. In this thesis, host and pathogen contributions to Septoria stem canker disease were explored through: 1) a greenhouse study associating Septoria stem canker phenotypes with molecular markers from a genetic...
Cross-laminated timber (CLT) is an attractive building material because it is renewable, promotes fast installation, and possesses a high strength-to-weight ratio. The use of CLT in seismic applications has become increasingly common with the development of post-tensioned CLT rocking wall lateral force resisting systems (LFRS). The CLT pier-and-spandrel system designed,...
As a general solution to the problem of managing structural and content variability in relational databases, in previous work we have introduced the Variational Database Management System (VDBMS). VDBMS consists of a representation of a variational database (VDB) and a corresponding typed query language (v-query). However, since this is a...
International development programs are often implemented with the goal of building community resilience, but without a clear articulation of how this goal will be met, or any consideration of if or why the effort was successful after it has concluded. This thesis considers three different activities implemented by the U....
Disentangling sediment source from sediment transport is a fundamental marine geologic challenge critical to the interpretation of any sedimentary record. The Eirik Ridge, a sediment drift south of Greenland, receives terrigenous sediment primarily from subglacial erosion of south Greenland’s Precambrian bedrock and Paleogene volcanics that outcrop in east Greenland and...
Daily social stressors are important everyday experiences that influence an individual’s daily health and well-being across the lifespan. One pathway through which daily social stressors influence health and well-being is through changes in positive and negative affect. The vast majority of previous research has focused on individual difference characteristics to...
Solar energy systems purchased in the United States have increased tenfold since 2010. As solar photovoltaics (PV) markets expand, solar energy becomes more affordable. In the last five years, the price of solar has decreased by 40 percent. Despite solar PV becoming more affordable and rising consumer demand, between 50...
More and more people have incorporated GIF in their messaging these days and often send gif as a reply. GIF is Graphics Interchange Format and is a short-animated picture without a sound. Searching a trivial gif with a regular emotion is easy to find but if some iconic expression is...
Accurately describing drag and virtual mass forces in two-phase flows is crucial for high fidelity modeling of nuclear thermal hydraulic safety systems. This study compares existing drag coefficient correlations commonly used in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) applications for air bubbles to experimental data collected for ellipsoidal air bubbles of varying...
Proper steep slopes management in urban settings are important to protect human life and property and only becoming more necessary as density of urban populations increases. A low-tech solution to manage slopes is bioengineering, which consists of using plant materials, rock, and soil in various configurations to stabilize slopes. This...
Dual Language Learners (DLLs) represent a substantial subpopulation in United States preschool programs (Aikens, Kinas, Malone, Tarullo, & Harding, 2017). DLLs often come from low socio-economic backgrounds and encounter barriers to academic success (National Academies of Science, 2017; Thomas & Collier, 2002). One consistent predictor of academic success is executive...
Through researching CBOs across Washington, Oregon, Northern California, and British Columbia, it is evident that there are need gaps in the organizational capacity in CBOs and other environmental groups for outreach and communication support to collaborate. A dedicated online space where environmental organizations and other conservation-focused groups can share their...
Human society is in continuous movement, physically or politically, willing or not . With digitalization and global warming, the pace of change has increased, and unpredictability has grown, challenging society and its institutions to evolve within a highly globalized and interactive environment, while facing even higher uncertainty in the future....
Accurate information of power network parameters is essential for performing various power system monitoring and control tasks including state estimation, economic dispatch, and contingency analysis. In this paper, we present a novel approach of power network parameter correction wherein we exploit the sparse nature of parameter errors. Parameter error correction...
Nitrogen is a crucial nutrient required by yeast to successfully complete alcoholic fermentation. In particular, the concentration of yeast assimilable nitrogen (YAN) influences fermentation kinetics and the production of a range of volatile aroma compounds, both desirable and undesirable. YAN is naturally present in the grape, but producers can boost...
The veteran population, about 18.5 million Americans in 2016 (US Census Bureau, 2018), is particularly at risk for mental health problems. As an example, the suicide rate of veterans is about one and a half times higher than the general population (US Department of Veteran Affairs [DVA], 2018b). Another group...
This study utilizes probabilistic surrogate modeling techniques around San Diego Bay with an emphasis on naval infrastructure and operations to evaluate the impact of five global mean sea level rise scenarios (GMSLR). Spatially continuous total water levels (TWLs) are combined with a digital elevation model (DEM) of the region to...
Aluminum and copper and their alloys have been widely used due to relatively high strength-to-weight ratios compared with conventional steels. Processing of these alloys is typically conducted at high temperatures over extended time periods. High-pressure torsion (HPT) is a promising processing technique for introducing significant grain refinement leading to excellent...
Processing of metals through the application of high-pressure torsion (HPT) provides significant grain refinement in bulk metals at ambient temperatures. The ultrafine-grained (UFG) materials processed by HPT generally demonstrate the superior physical and mechanical characteristics. For utilizing the benefit of HPT, the feasibility of conventional HPT processing was demonstrated recently...
Physical disturbance in streams has important effects on the metabolic rates of gross primary production (GPP) and ecosystem respiration (ER). Underlying lithology can control sediment size, amount, and evolution in the stream, influencing substrate stability and its effect on benthic organisms. We assessed the patterns of disturbance and recovery of...
Crowdsourcing is a popular paradigm to address the high demands for labeled data in big data deluge. It aims to produce accurate labels by effectively integrating noisy, non-expert labeling from crowdsourced workers (annotators). The machine learning community has been studying effective crowdsourcing methods for many years, and many models and...
Conventional wastewater treatment facilities using activated sludge, secondary clarifiers, and chlorine disinfection comprise a large portion of urban wastewater treatment practices in the United States. While highly adept at removing chemical, physical, and numerous biological contaminants, these treatment methods are ineffective at removing contaminants of emerging concern, such as antibiotics...
Lead (Pb), copper (Cu), and zinc (Zn) are known to have detrimental effects on aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, and to human health both in rural and urban areas. Heavy metal contamination enters stormwater by atmospheric deposition and by the collection of surface particles during overland flow. Stormwater runoff in urban...
Policy development and decision-making play a critical role in natural resource management in the Pacific Northwest. To realise my internship requirements for the Professional Science Masters in Fisheries and Wildlife Administration, I completed internships with: the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW), Portland State University – National Policy Process...
Hazelnuts (Corylus avellana) produce a prolific growth in the base of the trunk and roots, known as suckers, which are often removed in order to promote the development of a single trunk tree. Sucker removal facilitates cultural practices and mechanized operations, such as weed management and harvest. Sucker presence can...
The United States generates over 70 million tonnes of wood waste annually, with over 27 million tonnes still available for recovery. Current recycling rates for wood waste are in the range of 10% to 15%, which is much lower than other common building materials and indicative of an underutilized resource....
In this work, colloidal PbSe quantum dots (QDs) are shown to be synthesized in a controlled manner by changing the growth time and reaction temperature in a microwave synthesis method. It is explained why quantum dots make such a unique material to create electronic devices and the specific benefits that...
In a power system, operators maintain voltage stability through adequate reactive reserves. Maintaining and accessing an efficient allocation of reactive reserves is prohibitively complex because of reactive line losses, the variety of reactive resources, and either limited or variable reactive outputs from renewable sources. By clustering the system into smaller...
In recent decades, watershed managers have increasingly turned to collaborative models of governance for water resource planning in the Western United States. By involving a wide array of stakeholders in decision-making, these place-based partnerships promise many benefits: better understanding of local needs, increased public support, and reduced conflict. Yet, many...
Myxozoans are an enigmatic group of obligately parasitic, microscopic cnidarians. They diverged from their free-living relatives over 600 million years ago and have highly reduced genomes. However, they have retained nematocyst stinging cells which characterize the phylum Cnidaria. Free-living cnidarians utilize this cellular weaponry for defense and predation whereas the...
The goal of this project was to estimate the total annual cost of salmon recovery efforts throughout the Columbia River Basin from all stakeholders, including direct and indirect costs. How much is spent on salmon recovery efforts each year in the Columbia River Basin? Depending on who you ask, you...
Despite an expansive selection of available thin-layer chromatography (TLC) stationary phases, almost none are well-suited for separation of polar, ionic analytes. This work demonstrated that a highly porous stationary phase layer comprised solely of nanostructured biosilica frustules, isolated from living Pinnularia sp. diatom microalgae, improved TLC separation of the polar,...
Acquiring, maintaining, disseminating, and utilizing quality data is key to adequate understanding and management of ecosystems. Modern remote sensing technology provides us an increasingly cost effective, unique opportunity for acquiring highly detailed information across every square meter of a landscape. The plethora of data available to scientists allows for use...
Microbial communities in aquatic systems are dominant drivers of chemical transformation, including contaminants of emerging concern (CECs). This study quantified shifts in microbial communities and their relationship to shifts in chemical composition in surface waters in the Willamette Valley, Oregon. In addition to bulk chemical composition shifts, the relationship between...
Projected intensification of drought as a result of climate change may reduce the capacity of streams to rear fish, exacerbating the challenge of recovering ESA-listed salmon populations. Without management intervention, some stocks will likely go extinct as stream drying and fragmentation reduce juvenile survival to unsustainable levels. To offset drought-related...
The primary goal of this study is to look at the influence of family communication patterns on behavior and beliefs, specifically in the context of electoral behavior. In order to effectively influence potential voters and increase the likelihood that they intend to vote in federal elections in the long-term, we...
Digital Human Modeling (DHM) is a computational design tool that allows designers to use virtual prototypes of design for exploring ergonomics requirements. DHM brings in the advantage of reducing the time and finances committed to building the physical prototypes as well as minimizing the efforts put on performing human subject...
The benefits of electrification are widely discussed in energy and development literature, but little research to date has studied the impacts of household electricity access on women in particular. Women make up the majority of the world’s poor and are also disproportionately affected by energy poverty because of their social...
Chlorinated solvents are common groundwater pollutants that often exist as mixtures resulting from the use of multiple solvents and their transformation into chlorinated daughter products. These sites are often co-contaminated with the solvent stabilizer 1,4-dioxane (1,4-D), which is not treated by traditional chlorinated solvent remediation techniques. Both 1,4-D and chlorinated...
Heteroaggregation of nanoparticles with naturally occurring colloids has been shown to be an important process in nanoparticle fate and transport in the aquatic environment. The advent of a functional assay to measure heteroaggregation attachment efficiencies has opened the door for further mechanistic studies. It is well known that natural organic...