Variation in cheese quality due to geographic location is important to cheese producers, consumers, and retailers on a global level. Understanding the impacts of geographic location of cheese plants may be useful to businesses for marketing, cost reduction, and quality improvement. Many aspects of variation due to geography have been...
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...
Consumers are increasingly turning to farm direct foods for personal reasons, such as fresh and healthy food, and for public reasons, such as supporting local and rural economies and reducing the environmental impact of their food choices. As a result, farmers’ markets and other direct farm marketing has increased substantially...
Agricultural tile drainage is one of the major causes of increasing nitrate (NO3-) concentrations in surface water bodies thanks to the usage of nitrogen fertilizers and manure. Denitrifying bioreactors are constructed at the edge of agricultural lands in order to remove NO3- from drainage water through labile carbon substrates intended...
Wave energy is one of the most promising renewable energy sources. Thus, research in this field has increased substantially over the last decade. However, significant costs associated with development and maintenance have so far impeded the implementation of commercially viable projects. Furthermore, the hydrodynamic interactions between water and prototypes meant...
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 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...
Removing nitrogen from wastewater is critical to avoid eutrophication of receiving waters. Due to its potential economic benefits, the use of anammox bacteria to remove nitrogen from wastewater is gaining in popularity. Anammox bacteria utilize NO₂- to oxidize NH₄+ to N₂. However, anammox bacteria are sensitive to a wide variety...
Environmental DNA (eDNA) detection of aquatic invasive species is at the forefront of aquatic conservation efforts because of decreased costs, increased response times, and increase of sensitivity for intercepting invasions with low density populations. Developments in eDNA technologies have improved detection probabilities for rare, indicator, and invasive species over the...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) used to exist along coastlines throughout much of the North Pacific Ocean. During the Maritime Fur Trade, sea otters were extirpated from much of their historic range, including Oregon. There is renewed interest in reintroducing sea otters to Oregon. Managers seek improved understanding of the potential...
Although deep reinforcement learning agents have produced impressive results in many domains, their decision making is difficult to explain to humans. To address this problem, past work has mainly focused on explaining why an action was chosen in a given state. A different type of explanation that is useful is...
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...
Although there is a substantial body of work on the inclusion of women in traditionally male-dominated processes of water management and water governance (Earle & Bazilli, 2013), these efforts have mostly been concentrated in the Global South and women are still lacking in positions with decision-making power, making water governance...
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...
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....
“Water security” is an umbrella term that explains a wide arrange of concerns over water despite the absence of agreement on its definition and use. Attaching the term “security” to “water” has often been regarded as an act of securitizing water, but its versatile application implies the need to carefully...
The short-term duration of most ecological studies can make it difficult to capture the long-term dynamics of ecosystems and populations. Infrequent or high-impact events can be missed, or erroneously documented as baselines. Long-term ecological research enables a deeper understanding of complex processes, provides a foundation for future insights, and can...
Deep Learning methods have been gaining a lot of significance for various Biomedical applications for diagnosing several types of diseases. Two applications considered here are: 1) Diabetic Retinopathy Detection and 2) ECG signal Classification (or Arrhythmia Detection). Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a major cause of blindness in Diabetic patients, and...
Freshwater systems are an important component of the global carbon cycle as they outgas disproportionately large quantities of carbon compared to the terrestrial landscape. Of particular importance are headwater streams, which represent roughly 90% of the channel network by length and have been conservatively estimated to outgas roughly 36% of...
Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is among one of the largest and most important staple food crops in the world. One of the most productive growing potato regions is the USA is the Oregon and Washington Columbia Basin. Both states produce approximately 26% of the USA potatoes in the market. In...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
The United States currently has no infrastructure to provide a fast neutron flux for research purposes. With the increased interest in Sodium Fast Reactor (SFR) technology, this type of infrastructure is necessary for further development of key components such as Versatile Test Reactor. The purpose of this research is to...
Basin-wide approach in managing water resources is believed to be the most effective way in addressing upstream and downstream flows. However, this poses certain challenges as water basins tend to be transboundary and include a plethora of stakeholders and their interests. In order to avoid conflictive and rival behavior riparian...
According to a number of scholars in transboundary water management, mistrust is considered to be one of the main obstacles to cooperation, especially for the exchange of hydrological data and information between newly-independent riparian states. The research presented here is focused on identifying the ways in which trust and mistrust...
Ensuring long term water security is the essential pathway towards development, prosperity, and stability in Afghanistan. However, the country is faced with water challenges that can be ascribed to governance failure at multiple levels of governance rather than to the resource base itself. Hence, studying the water governance system in...
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...
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,...
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...
The Eastern black rail (laterallus jamaicanesis) is the smallest of the rail species and facing catastrophic decline throughout its home range. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the black rail population has decreased as much as 90%, leading to its proposed Federal listing as threatened under the Endangered...
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...
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...
Through well designed tree placement, redundant use of simple technologies, and stewardship, trees grow. Over time, they mitigate stormwater flooding and enhance livability. This paper offers insights into precipitation patterns, and how small scale redundancy can help build the urban tree canopy. It is specifically geared toward issues in the...
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...
A growing body of literature associates transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) identity with adverse mental and emotional health outcomes. Only a handful of studies have been conducted using population-based samples of adolescents to study mental health outcomes in TGNC youth (e.g., Eisenberg et al., 2017; Perez-Brumer, Day, Russell, & Hatzenbuehler,...
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....
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...
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...
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....
RNA structure prediction is a challenging problem, especially with pseudoknots. Recently, there has been a shift from the classical minimum free energy-based methods (MFE) to partition function-based ones that assemble structures based on base-pairing probabilities. Two typical examples of the latter group are the popular maximum expected accuracy (MEA) method...
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...
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...
The City of Pittsburgh, formerly the capital of the American steel industry, suffered economic and social collapse in the late 1980s and 1990s. Since then, it has experienced an economic renaissance supported by the tech and medical care industries. However, despite the surprising recovery of the city, collapsed tax bases...
Using robotics in education allows students to become familiar with multiple topics in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). With the use of robotic educational tools in the 8th – 12th grade classrooms, such as Sphero, Anki Cozmo, and Lego Mindstorms, few devices allow students to build the robots’ electrical...
According to the Girls’ Opportunity Index formulated by Lenhardt, et al, (2016), Brazil is the least favorable country in South America to succeed being born a woman, ranking the 102nd position out of 144 analyzed countries. This macro-level statistic speaks to the present landscape of gender inequality, shaped since the...
Environmental crime around the world, such as trafficking in illegal timber, is directly related to political instability. Traffickers exploit weak, fragile, and chaotic political circumstances to illegally extract high-value commodities, challenging the extent to which conservation goals are achievable in resource rich developing countries. Rosewood is the largest traded endangered...
Vibration of nuclear fuel rods is an area of significance for the long-term safe operation of any nuclear power plant. One mechanism of vibration, flow induced vibration (FIV), must be quantified when designing a new core, such as a sodium fast reactor which employs helically-wrapped wire spacers. Experimental work undertaken...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Reestablishing native perennial vegetation in annual grass-invaded rangelands is critical to restoring ecosystems, especially following wildfires. Controlling invasive annual grasses is essential to increasing revegetation success; however, pre-emergent herbicides used to control annual grasses prohibit immediate seeding due to non-target herbicide damage. Thus, seeding is often delayed one year following...
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...
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...
Movement pattern detection can be applied in a variety of applications such as assisting independent living of seniors at home, behaviour understanding in surveillance systems, sports analytics, and robotics. This project develops a scheme that fuses information from different sensors to detect movement patterns. This report contains three main parts:...
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...
The structure of food webs and how they relate to community stability has been an important debate in ecology. Specifically, predictability of web shape and how it influenced by surrounding landscapes is one of the main goals of such discussions. Headwater streams provide a study template that is of interest...
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...
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...
Climate variations within the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem (CCLME) have impacts on marine fish populations. It is proposed that these impacts will be reflected in recreational fishing catches which is explored in this study. A Pearson correlation analysis compares data from El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events and upwelling...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The rapid population growth in large urban cities has led to an unprecedented increase in both the number and the diversity of wireless devices and applications with varying quality of service requirements in terms of latency and data rates. LinkNYC is an example of an urban communication network infrastructure, which...
How should reinforcement learning (RL) agents explain themselves to humans not trained in AI? To gain insights into this question, we conducted a 124 participant, four-treatment experiment to compare participants’ mental models of an RL agent in the context of a simple Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game. The four treatments isolated...
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...
Marine programs, particularly those related to marine conservation, utilize a suite of tools to offset the negative consequences of human activities on marine environments. However, among others, limited funding can represent a challenge for these programs in terms of achieving their desired outcomes. Using systems and organizational theory, this study...
People like going on trips with friends and tend to plan their trips well in advance to have the best possible experience of a destination and get the most out of the places they visit and/or the activities they plan to partake in. Right now, the Internet provides a wealth...
Gasoline direct injection engines, with downsized boosted technology, present a promising option for enhancing power density and reducing fuel consumption for next-generation engine designs to meet stringent fuel economy and emission standards. However, these developments in the low-speed and high-load operating regime are challenged by the occurrence of a new...
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,...
The Columbia River Basin historically supported abundant populations of Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) but, largely due to anthropogenic influence, many populations are now listed as threatened or endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Habitat restoration efforts have been a critical component of salmon recovery plans. However, although the importance...
European Hazelnut (Corylus avellana L.) is an important crop in the Pacific Northwest where around 5% of the world's hazelnuts are produced. Hazelnut production in the Pacific Northwest is threatened by eastern filbert blight (EFB) caused by the pyrenomycete Anisogramma anomala. Host resistance is a useful strategy to control disease,...
The California Current Ecosystem (CCE) is a dynamic marine ecosystem from which many socioeconomically important fisheries species are harvested. In this thesis, a genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) approach was used to examine genomic variation in an early life stage of the Dungeness crab (Cancer magister), which constitutes the most valuable single-species commercial...
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...
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...
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 shallow aquifer in Southern Willamette Valley (SWV) has high levels of nitrate, and we are exploring the time trends in nitrate, and the hydrologic and land management factors that contribute to this problem. Nitrogen (N) inputs to farmland from fertilizer is thought to be the primary source of nitrogen...
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...
The Panamint Valley fault zone (PVFZ) is an active, dextral-oblique normal fault that partially accommodates dextral shear across the Eastern California Shear Zone (ECSZ). The fault system has a complex geometry, characterized by a relatively high-angle dextral oblique normal fault in the south and a low-angle detachment system that accommodates...
Modifications of an ocean model are described, as the objective for which the model was used changed to study the kinematics and dynamics of an eastern-boundary poleward undercurrent.
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...
In recent years, multiple historic and contemporary timber buildings have been instrumented with sensors to monitor the performance of wood products and novel engineering systems. While literature states the potential of structural health monitoring (SHM) data to inform decision-making process of key stakeholders in the architects, engineers, contractors and manufacturers...
Data acquisition (DAQ) systems are a necessary component for products whose outcomes depend on collected information throughout its operation. Current systems are directed towards users utilizing custom hardware, software, and requiring its user to have high-level skills in coding and system setup; but with the increasing interest in renewable energy,...
New MS in CS students in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science school at OSU are required to file their Program of Study by the end of their 2nd term. Many of them, especially international students, are in a totally new ecosystem, so they find it overwhelming to choose the...
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...
As the sources of our electricity shift from centralized and carbon emitting, to a portfolio of distributed, clean-energy sources, the wave energy converter (WEC) has become a topic of exploration and development for providing coastal communities electric power. Part of this trend has included an effort to create open source...
In today’s world, we are highly dependent on software systems together with devices for almost every task in our day to day life. Software system upgrades are released whenever it is necessary to accommodate the ever-changing user’s needs. The devices we use to run the software systems might be of...
A massive reduction in historic populations of Olympia oysters (Ostrea lurida), the only native oyster found on the west coast of North America, has contributed to a loss of ecosystem and cultural services once provided by this species. Resource management agencies and environmental organizations are working to protect and enhance...
Understanding the dynamics of seasonal epizootics of vector-borne pathogens infecting multiple host species presents several challenges. The transmission potential of competent hosts depends on factors influencing the contact rate between hosts and vectors. Feeding preferences of vectors can determine which host species drive the prevalence of infection throughout the overall...