Climate Change in the Northwest: Implications for Our Landscapes, Waters, and Communities is a report aimed at assessing the state of knowledge about key climate impacts and consequences to various sectors and communities in the Northwest United States. This report draws on two recent state climate assessments in Washington in...
The data retrieved from gt;momic sequencing techniques provides the raw information required to infer the basis of mutations and their resulting phenotypes, wherein plant ontologies can be utilized in annotating said phenotypes using a common, shared vocabulary. By relating mutant genes of similar phenotypes both within and between plant species,...
Peppermint residue consists of the cooked leaves and stems of the peppermint plant after high-temperature distillation to extract oil. This residue has value as a soil amendment. It is often applied to fallow fields in the fall or sold as a soil amendment to gardeners. Research was conducted to determine...
This project describes the investigation of marine cyanobacteria collected from the Red Sea with an emphasis on the identification and prioritization of biologically active fractions for future purification and molecular structure elucidation of medicinally relevant secondary metabolites.
Five crude extracts of taxonomically unidentified Red Sea cyanobacteria supplied by Egyptian collaborators...
The nasal spray market is growing as rates of use are increasing, however, there has been little research on the topical of how the mechanical properties of nasal sprays affect loading, comfort, and usability. To gather to make these comparisons, the data of 20 participants were gathered by measuring muscle...
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...
The safety of coastal infrastructure has been a concern after the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 and the Great East Japan Tsunami in 2011. The western coast of the United States is also exposed to tsunami hazards due to the Cascadia subduction zone. Therefore, it is critical to design coastal...
Policy and research have increased attention in K12 mathematics education on core mathematical practices such as argumentation, justification, and proof, that are central to students learning and doing mathematics. One reason for this increased focus is the empirical evidence that engaging students in mathematical practices provide more equitable opportunities for...
A unique microreactor-assisted nanomaterial synthesis and printing process was studied for the fabrication of patterned metal oxide nanostructured thin films. The process uses a continuous flow microreactor to control and generate a reactive chemical flux that was transported to a patterned microfluidic channel. The microreactor-assisted nanomaterial synthesis process can generate...
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...
Vortical structures are the driving mechanism of transition to turbulence in porous media requiring adequately resolved observations along with analysis of the scale and energy of flow within the pores. Of specific interest is to understand the vortex dynamics, energy, and turbulent mixing and transport properties in the scale of...
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...
Carbon nanotube (CNT) photodiodes have potential to convert light into electrical current with high efficiency. However, previous experiments have revealed photocurrent quantum yield (PCQY) well below 100%. In this work, we show that axial electric field increases the PCQY of CNT photodiodes. In optimal conditions our data suggest PCQY >...
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 bioavailability of chemical compounds in the marine environment fundamentally influences the growth and physiology of microorganisms. Organic and inorganic chemicals that are produced by some marine plankton can be consumed by other plankton for energy production, growth, or to initiate essential physiological processes. Cultures of the diatom Thalassiosira pseudonana,...
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...
Racehorses are elite athletes that undergo repetitive stresses from jogging, cantering, and galloping exercises, and there is significant evidence that the majority of racehorse musculoskeletal injuries are due to repetitive stress or overuse. Musculoskeletal injuries have negative consequences on the racing industry through the loss of use or death 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...
The number of deaths by suicide each year in the United States is rising. Men, women, and people of all ages die by suicide at high rates. Someone diagnosed with anorexia or bulimia is at significantly greater risk of completing or attempting suicide, making clear the importance of understanding how...
The ubiquity of high quality video and proliferation of mobile devices has contributed to an unprecedented rise in video consumption. HTTP, in conjunction with adaptive streaming, has become the de facto mechanism for delivering the vast majority of video as it readily caters to heterogeneous networks and devices. This dissertation...
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 vertical propagation of Coastal Trapped Waves (CTWs) due to subsurface ridges is explored with the help of linear numerical and analytical models. Results show that submerged ridges projecting from the shoreline can scatter a horizontally propagating single baroclinic mode Kelvin wave into both upward and downward propagating Kelvin wave...
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...
Pseudomonas is a diverse, ubiquitous, and widely studied genus of bacteria. As Pseudomonas species occupy a wide range of niches in the ecosystem, they have made remarkable biological impacts. Better understanding of Pseudomonas biology, genetic diversity, and functional interactions with other organisms and the environment will provide valuable insights into...
In this dissertation, we explored multiple coding techniques to reduce energy consumption, improve performance, and secure wireless sensor networks specifically and ad-hoc networks in general. With the introduction of Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G technologies, wireless sensor networks are quickly emerging as an important and key technology in the...
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,...
During the peripartum period (3 weeks before through 3 weeks after calving, a.k.a. “transition”), high producing dairy cows experience, among others, , oxidative stress and immune suppression that compromise performance and increased incidence of diseases.Among trace minerals, supplementation of Selenium (Se) can help to improve the transition by enhancing glutathione...
Human alteration of natural landscapes leads to biodiversity loss, often from a combination of area effects and fragmentation effects. Smaller habitat patches support fewer species than large ones and incur additional consequences from isolation. Efforts to preempt biodiversity loss from insular habitat fragments are complicated by individualistic species responses and...
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 dissertation focuses on the application of diatom frustules, the biosilica shell of an algae possessing physical and photonic properties capable of enhancing optical signals, for the enhancement of optical sensing. In this work, we incorporate diatom frustules into biosensors for signal enhancement and improved target molecule detection. The potential...
A carefully calibrated primitive-equation model from 41°N to 48°N is used to study the poleward undercurrent off the US west coast. Chapter 2 describes poleward flow over the slope from Eulerian and Lagrangian perspectives. The model is robust, in the sense of several characteristics being qualitatively consistent with observational and...
Implementing multicomponent diffusion in numerical combustion studies is computationally expensive due to the challenges involved in computing diffusion coefficients. As a result, mixture-averaged diffusion treatments or simpler methods are used to avoid these costs. However, the accuracy and appropriateness of the mixture-averaged diffusion model has not been verified for three-dimensional...
Foliar fungi – pathogens, endophytes, epiphytes – form taxonomically diverse communities that affect plant health and productivity. The composition of foliar fungal communities is variable at spatial scales both small (e.g., individual plants) and large (e.g., continents). However, few studies have focused on how environmental factors and host plant traits...
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...
Drought events have been shown to impact species distributions and are predicted to increase in frequency as the climate changes. As this occurs, ecologists predict species distributions will shift dependent upon species ability to track climate. These shifts in species distribution are expected to be particularly acute in arid and...
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...
Metal-insulator-metal (MIM) and dual-insulator MIM (MIIM) devices are used in rectennas, hot-electron transistors, single electron transistors, resistive random access memory (RRAM), and capacitors. The performance of these devices relies heavily on the energy barrier height at each metal-insulator interface. Thus, determination of the in-situ electron energy barrier at each interface...
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,...
Ecological communities are connected in space and time through the transfer of energy, materials, and organisms, together known as ecological subsidies. These ecological subsidies can have substantial effects on community structure, function, and services, especially when the connections are between communities with contrasting productivity. At the ocean-land interface, low productivity...
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 National Park Service has a dual mission of providing public access to exceptional natural resources, but in a manner such that these resources are left “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” Human activities in parks undoubtedly affect wildlife, but the degree to which such activities cause impairment is...
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....
Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models impact our daily lives with applications in natural language modeling, image analysis, healthcare, genomics, and bioinformatics. The exponential growth of biological sequence data necessitates accompanying advances in computational methods. Although deep learning is highly effective for detecting and classifying biological sequences, challenges...
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...
Engineering capstone projects are intended as a bridge from school to professional practice in which students work in teams to use learned knowledge and skills to complete real-world engineering projects. However, while the majority of time in many undergraduate programs is devoted to development of technical knowledge and skills, there...
Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is known as the process of implementation of damage detection and characterization strategy. The method is widely used in modern critical equipment to minimize the risk of failures. While a significant effort has been devoted by researchers for the detection of faults in situations including periodic...
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...
Our goal is to build a system to model the RNA sequences that reveals their structural information by using efficient dynamic programming algorithms and deep learning approaches. We aim to 1) achieve linear-time for RNA secondary structure prediction based on existing minimum free energy models; 2) utilize deep neural networks...
This dissertation is concerned with the behavior of sulfur in intermediate-silicic arc magmas associated with subduction at convergent margins. In particular it focusses on oxidized, sulfur-rich magmas, the conditions at which they might reach sulfate saturation, and implications of sulfate saturation. It is divided into an investigation of natural samples...
Cell migration is fundamental for physiological processes such as immune re-sponses, wound healing and development. It is also a critical characteristic of metastatic cancer cells. An extensive amount of studies have focused on 2D sub-strates in order to understand the mechanism of cancer metastasis. However, much less is known about...
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...
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...
Oregon produces 99% US hazelnuts (Corylus avellana L.), occupying 3% world production. To ensure the quality and food safety of hazelnuts (inshells or kernels), industry and federal standards require freshly harvested nuts to be cleaned and dried to reach a final moisture content (MC) of inshells < 10%, MC of...
Metal-oxo clusters can be described as soluble pieces of metal-oxide frameworks. Currently, metal-oxo clusters are being considered as solution-based precursors for extreme ultraviolet (EUV, 13.5 nm) photoresist materials, which are a crucial component in the fabrication of microelectronic devices. Two different photoresist precursor systems have been investigated – alkyltin clusters...
The act of accessing food is embedded within various systems of power. This dissertation problematizes our understanding of food access for vulnerable populations by making explicit ways that social constructions, including power, affect food access for vulnerable populations. This is accomplished across three manuscripts. The first manuscript presents textual analysis...
Atmospheric fine particulate matter (PM2.5) has been linked to the death of 7 million people per year around the planet. The organic portion of PM2.5 is responsible for increases in oxidative stress, inflammation, mutation and carcinogenesis. Anthropogenic activity releases more organic material into the atmosphere, and has increased the amount...
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...
Teamwork has become a popular operational strategy applied as part of workforce management plans in manufacturing and service industries. Teamwork has been commonly used in organizations to pursue different goals such as increase business operations agility, boost company productivity, improve quality in operations, increase company flexibility, promote collaborative learning, hasten...
Using plant fibers as a potential renewable material to substitute for glass fibers in fiber-reinforced polymer composites has been growing since the late 1990s. Due to high demand, there has been a shift towards ‘green concept’ material in many applications. Numerous secondary plant fibers have been explored as a source...
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...
Exploring bioactive natural products has contributed largely to clinically approved drugs we have been using over the last 100 years. Especially among the anti-infective drugs, around 70% of currently used antibiotics were discovered or derived from microbial secondary metabolites, among them compounds like vancomycin, chloramphenicol, and erythromycin. Facing the unavoidable...
Somatic growth variation manifests from the cumulative effects of a suite of biological, ecological, and environmental processes and can have profound effects on individual fitness and species population dynamics. As ectotherms whose growth dynamics are greatly influenced by environmental factors, sea turtles display considerable variation in somatic growth within and...
Many database users are not familiar with formal query languages, the concept of schema, or the exact content of their database. Thus, it is challenging for these users to formulate their information needs over semi-structured and structured databases. To address this problem, researchers have proposed usable query interfaces over which...
Biogeochemical mechanisms employed by key organisms, or symbiotic associations of organisms, transform the function and structure of their environment through processes recognized as ecosystem engineering. This dissertation seeks to investigate organism-ecosystem interactions that serve globally significant ecological functions in marine systems and impact how systems respond to environmental change. Using...
The atmospheric detection of four radioxenon isotopes (131mXe, 133mXe, 133Xe, and 135Xe) released during a nuclear detonation is a key tool utilized by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) to identify clandestine nuclear weapon testing activity. These radioxenon isotopes all decay via the near-simultaneous release of an electron and a...
We present a deterministic spectral method to predict equilibrium temperature distributions, heat flux, and thermal conductivity in homogeneous and heterogeneous media. We solve the Boltzmann transport equation in a second order spatial, self-adjoint angular flux formulation. We implemented this method into the radiation transport code Rattlesnake, built using the MOOSE...
Western juniper (Juniperus occidentalis) encroachment has been associated with negative ecological and hydrological consequences including reductions in herbaceous production and diversity, deterioration for wildlife habitat, and higher erosion and runoff potentials. As a result, western juniper removal is a common and accepted rangeland management practice. Although studies evaluating the ecological...
Radiation therapy is a sophisticated complex process. Systematic methods are needed to quantitatively evaluate the quality of a complex process and hence radiation therapy treatments. An ideal result for a complex process must be established to determine if the complex process is completed acceptably. For radiation therapy, this can be...
This dissertation presents two qualitative studies investigating expert trauma counselors’ experiences of clinical decision-making and countertransference. Chapter 2, Acutely Alert: A Grounded Theory of Clinical Decision-Making Processes of Expert Trauma Counselors addresses the research question, what are the clinical decision-making experiences and processes of expert trauma counselors? Chapter 3, Exploring...
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 following dissertation consists of six sections: a general introduction, three manuscripts, a general conclusion, and an overall bibliography. The three manuscripts report on: (1) identifying genetic interactions in diverse germplasm developed during introgression of a major gene conferring resistance to stem rust (Puccinia graminis f. sp. tritici), (2) mapping...
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...