The objective of this dissertation was to examine trade-offs and synergies between multiple ecosystem services derived from plantation forests in the coastal Pacific Northwest. I accomplished this in five chapters. In the first chapter I provided background information for the study. In the next chapter I set the context for...
Chinook salmon are widely distributed across the globe with native stocks in the North Pacific Ocean and self-sustained populations introduced to regions in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Pacific salmon are economically and ecologically important to the Pacific Northwest, USA, yet several wild populations are federally listed as endangered or...
This thesis explores the potential applications for 3rd generation activity theory in writing studio spaces, using the Undergrad Research and Writing Studio at Oregon State University as a focal point. David R. Russell, Nedra Reynolds, and Deborah Brandt have all investigated systemic and communal elements in student writing processes, while...
The goal of the first part of this project was to investigate the influence of aggregate source and entrained air on the transport properties of concrete. Currently, there are several ASTM standards available that provide systematic procedures to evaluate mass transport properties of concrete. ASTM C642-13 (ASTM 2013), often referred...
Surface characterization of materials is widely utilized over a range of disciplines and essential to the development of new materials, technology, or processes. Metal oxide nanoclusters have shown promise as potential new generation photoresist materials for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) nanolithography. Organotin clusters have been proposed as potential candidates for resist...
This thesis studies the problem of structured prediction (SP), where the agent needs to predict a structured output for a given structured input (e.g., Part-of-Speech tagging sequence for an input sentence). Many important applications including machine translation in natural language processing (NLP) and image interpretation in computer vision can be...
Members of the family Sciomyzidae, known as snail-killing or marsh flies, are unique amongst insects in that the vast majority of reared species feed exclusively on mollusks and as a result their biological control potential has been well documented in the scientific literature. However, in North America there is a...
Manufacturing process design (MPD) represents a design-oriented approach to manufacturing engineering. In this dissertation, Haynes 230 (H230), a solid solution-strengthened Ni-based superalloy, was chosen to meet the material requirements of a microchannel solar receiver (MSR) needed to increase the efficiency and reduce the cost of solar thermal power generation. An...
Fungi have long been used for discovery of new chemical scaffolds. In the clinical setting, the fungal natural products penicillin, statins, and cyclosporine have revolutionized medicine to treat diseases and infections. In the environment, fungal natural products have been used as herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides to protect crops, livestock, and...
Gifted education has historically involved disproportionate rates of identification and enrollment for both students of color and students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, depriving these groups of more challenging learning opportunities. Giftedness transcends subgroups, spanning all racial, socioeconomic, and disability categories; still, data indicate that Asian and White students are identified...
Lack of access to safe water is the leading cause of mortality in the world; approximately 3.4 million people die every year from waterborne pathogens. Inadequate access to safe drinking water and sanitation has contributed to an annual average of 1,980,000 deaths of children under five from diarrheal disease. Three...
This study aimed to explore the relationship between urinary cortisol levels and proximity-seeking behavior in shelter cats and the impact of socialization programs on these two factors. A Spearman’s correlation test found no correlation between cortisol levels and proximity-seeking behavior in shelter cats. Fisher’s 2x2 tests confirmed that the changes...
The legality of wood products in trade often depends on their geographic origin, creating a need for forensic tools that can verify claims of provenance for wood and wood products. Cedrela odorata L. or Spanish cedar is a target of illegal logging. We developed a 140 SNP Agena™ MassARRAY® assay...
This classification is an update of the 2004 classification of native vegetation of Oregon by Kagan, Christy, Murray and Titus. As before, this classification lists the native plant associations known to occur in Oregon, and includes both successional and climax vegetation types that were part of the presettlement landscape of...
Landslides are a natural hazard that have major societal, economic, and
environmental impacts. The understanding of landslides begins with the observation that
they are a spatial problem. Spatial relationships have historically been explored with
maps, and landslides are no different. Such maps range in focus from inventory maps,
which identify...
Recent changes in legislation restricting lead content in waste streams produced during electronics manufacturing have inspired a strong push to develop alternative lead-free materials systems for piezoelectric applications. One lead-free piezoelectric material system, (100-X)Bi₀.₅Na₀.₅TiO₃-XBi₀.₅K₀.₅TiO₃ (BNKT), has shown promising properties in bulk research, however, difficulties have arisen in the development of...
Junior level physics students are familiar with a few types of vector field derivatives, such as divergence and curl, but are typically unfamiliar with how to take a general derivative of a vector field. Three junior-level physics students were interviewed with the open-ended prompt, “How would you think about taking...
Surface water and groundwater are intimately connected by a two-way flux between the stream and the underlying aquifers; a complicated yet crucial relationship to represent in models. However, the National Water Model currently only considers a one-way flux, where groundwater can enter a stream but cannot return to the aquifer....
Common variable immunodeficiency (CVID) is the most common primary immunodeficiency that is characterized by low immunoglobulin levels in the body. CVID is indicated by failure of b cell differentiation and decrease production of immunoglobulins such as IgG and at least one of IgA or IgM. CVID patients with enteropathy (E-CVID)...
There is significant interest in harnessing the biosynthetic capacities of photosynthetic diatom microalgae for the production of unique bioinspired nanomaterials. Specifically, this research focuses on understanding the photoluminescent properties of diatom biosilica and β-chitin nanofiber production in diatoms. Diatoms are single-celled microalgae that possess intricately patterned biosilica shells called, frustules....
Narratives are central to communication and the human experience. For a computer system to understand a narrative, it must be able to identify the key facts or plot elements that describe what happened or how the world has changed. These element are called events;establishing a document’s events and the relationships...
The advent of deep learning models leads to a substantial improvement in a wide range of NLP tasks, achieving state-of-art performances without any hand-crafted features. However, training deep models requires a massive amount of labeled data. Labeling new data as a new task or domain emerges consumes time and efforts...
Automatic music transcription (AMT) is the task, given an acoustic representation of music, to recover a symbolic notation of the written notes expressed by the sound. Transcribing music with multiple notes sounding simultaneously is difficult for both humans and machines. Much existing work on AMT has focused on suitable acoustic...
Specific energy, defined as the energy consumed by per unit volumetric removal rate, is one of the key metrics used for evaluating the environmental performance of a machining process. Grinding is a traditional machining process, characterized by high specific energy and poor environmental performance. Growing global concerns about climate change...
Wheat (Tritium aestivum) is an extremely important crop worldwide. It accounts for almost one quarter of the calories consumed each day by more than one third of the world’s population, and is grown over more land area than any other crop. Wheat breeding programs constantly strive to increase or maintain...
A long running problem in mathematical biology is the prediction of extinction events, a specialized case of the larger global stability problem found in differential equations and dynamical systems theory. A central technical question is how to introduce the randomness observed in real ecological systems not accounted for in deterministic...
Globally, there are 40 million internally displaced people (IDPs) and 25.4 million refugees as of 2018. Of this global refugee population, 19.9 million are under mandate by UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, while 5.4 million Palestinian refugees are protected by United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees...
Investigation into how animals move within the landscape is important for both understanding of ecological processes and conservation management. Animal movement is important in shaping life history transitions, demographics, individual fitness, and species distributions. However, as landscapes become increasingly affected by human activities, movement becomes important as species navigate landscapes...
Zebrafish are capable of fully regenerating organs and tissue such as their caudal fin, which is similar to a human regrowing an arm or a leg. In contrast, most mammals including humans have a greatly reduced capacity for wound healing. The ability of zebrafish to undergo this regenerative process, called...
Standard geostatistical models used in abundance prediction assume that observed counts on each site are made without error. However, in some wildlife populations, assuming perfect detection of animal or plant counts is unrealistic.
We first construct an adjustment to a finite population block kriging (FPBK) estimator that allows the possibility...
According to the World Health Organization (2019), every 40 seconds, approximately one person from around the world dies from suicide. The highest percentage of adults with major depression and serious thoughts of suicide are between 18 to 25 years of age (Shen & Millet 2003-2012, p. 31). Studies have indicated...
Microchannel high temperature recuperators have the advantage of higher heat transfer coefficients and lower size and weight than traditional high temperature recuperators. However, the industrial application of microchannel recuperators are restricted by the high cost of photochemical machining and diffusion bonding. The objective of this paper is to introduce a...
The current generation of scientists will be asked to mitigate climate change, stall biodiversity loss, and protect ecological communities. These are tasks that require a knowledge of both ecological and social systems to be undertaken successfully. Therefore, my dissertation spans the fields of community ecology and social sciences in an...
Rotating disc electrodes (RDEs) exploit the induced flushing of a radially spun electrode to increase the overall rate of analyte flux to an electrode sensing surface and its resulting signal current (i). Here initial efforts to evaluate a rotating platinum (Pt) microelectrode for efficacy as a rapid in situ dissolved...
Hop, Humulus lupulus L. is a dioecious perennial species. The female hop plant produces flowers that mature into ‘cones’ which are used as a raw material in the beer brewing process to impart bitterness, flavor, and aroma. The craft beer industry in the current global beer market continues to experience...
Microfinance boomed as a development trend in the early 2000s as it was appealing to varying political perspectives and was also seen as a major innovation in poverty reduction policy. Starting with the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1976, microfinance spread to Latin America in the 1980s, and later to...
The increased demand for building materials that are friendly to the environment, along with the latest advances in wood science and technology, which exploit the fiber orientation of wood, resulted in composite wood materials known as mass-timber products. To understand the effects the wood fiber orientation has on the dynamic...
Anatomically correct biota phantom creation has suffered from three primary weaknesses: the models take considerable time to make, are limited in detail by voxel size, and are created and simulated using proprietary software. Presented are trial runs of a new biota creation pipeline, FSOPhantom, that addresses these issues by creating...
The biggest obstacle to a 100% renewable energy utility portfolio is the ability to produce enough electricity to meet peak demand windows, which typically occur in the late afternoon to evening period from 3 pm to 9 pm. A popular policy option to reduce peak demand is time-of-use (TOU) electricity...
The proceeding work is a culminating representation of the practitioner competencies for the field of student affairs. It is a mixed-medium arts-based zine.
As student affairs practitioners, we are uniquely positioned to influence and impact the students we serve. And the ways in which we influence and impact our students...
The workshop was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), OCE Division of Ocean Sciences (Award # 1817257). This report summarizes the key findings, outcomes, and recommendations of the workshop and serves as a draft of the comprehensive roadmap.
Coral reefs have become vulnerable to climate change, with mass bleaching events, the loss of symbiotic algae (Symbiodiniaceae), increasing in both frequency and severity. As climate change continues to threaten the persistence and existence of coral reefs around the world, the biggest question posed for coral reefs is “can they...
Wood plays a key role in modern electrical infrastructure; crossarms and power poles utilize the high strength to weight ratio, availability and low cost of wood to facilitate the access of power to millions of Americans. However, wood presents a variety of challenges as a material. In structural applications, one...
As wolves return to their historic habitats both in Oregon and across the globe, emotions are running high between people either gladdened or disturbed by their homecoming. Prior to colonization, wolves occupied the entire Pacific Northwest alongside Indigenous peoples. However, European settlements that ultimately coalesced to form the state of...
Automated decision aids can improve human decision-making but the benefits are often compromised by inefficient use. The current experiment examined whether metacognition—the ability to assess self-performance—and numeracy—the ability to understand and work with numbers—predict the efficiency of automation use in a signal detection task. Two-hundred twenty-one participants classified random dot...
In order to solve some classic problems in traditional topology optimization, such as unknown material distribution, checker-boarding and curse of dimensionality, this thesis introduces a new method to construct a mechanical structure that can reduce mass and increase stiffness. It uses a graph to represent the skeleton of a structure....
In 1976-77 and 2010, Oregon State University (OSU) excavated portions of the enlisted men’s barracks and privy at Fort Hoskins, a Civil War-era fort. In operation from 1856 to 1865, this fort served as part of a security network to protect and monitor the recently created Coast Indian Reservation. The...
Dilemma zones on the approach to high-speed signalized intersections have been identified as a safety problem that can contribute to rear–end and right–angle crashes. However, in situations when a pair of vehicles is caught in the dilemma zone, it is not well understood how the following vehicle’s headway and classification...
Doxorubicin is a widely used cancer therapeutic, but its effectiveness is limited by cardiotoxic side effects. Evidence suggests cardiotoxicity is due not to doxorubicin, but rather its metabolite, doxorubicinol. Identification of the enzymes responsible for doxorubicinol formation is important in developing strategies to prevent cardiotoxicity. In this study, the contributions...
Rice is an important crop that feeds almost half the world population. As climate change models predict floods, drought and extreme temperatures in rice production areas, the need to better understand the genetic basis of adaptation and tolerance to abiotic and biotic stresses is vital to sustain our food supply....
The research and analysis presented in this dissertation illustrate how individuals enact lived religion as they seek to navigate social inequalities. The enactment of lived religion involves directing attention towards orientations. I use the term orientations in the sense articulated by Ahmed (2004), to allude to how bodies are situated...
Cnidarians and their symbiotic dinoflagellates form a productive mutualism that shapes marine environments. In this symbiosis, dinoflagellate species from the family Symbiodiniacea reside within cnidarian host gastrodermal cells and provide the host with photosynthetically fixed carbon in exchange for host metabolites. This nutritional exchange allows both partners to thrive in...
This proposal describes the design and development of an interoperable application that supports green open access with long-term sustainability and improves user experience of deposit for institutional repository. Background: Ineffective marketing and the lack of author participation are the most significant barriers that hinder green open access. Introduction: Oregon State...
Persistent racial residential and educational segregation in the United States are major sources of institutional racism and inequality. In this essay I focus on the housing search stage, an intermediary between where people say they want to live and where they ultimately end up living. Past research has explored preferences...
A commitment to diversity is now quite common in the missions of colleges and universities. One of the primary barriers to hiring a diverse faculty is the role that implicit bias, or the case of identifying flawed ideas as reliable choices systematically, plays in the search and selection process. At...
Renewable energy policy serves as a tool to combat the hazards that fossil energy sources pose to human health and the global environment. It is also being used to achieve additional social and economic goals alongside environmental policy, namely, bringing equitable liberation to populations disproportionately affected by increasing global temperatures....
The High Plains Aquifer, a natural resource critical to the United States economic, energy and food security, faces significant sustainability challenges in the coming years. This case study aims to identify the main causes and consequences of unsustainable use of the High Plains Aquifer. The agriculture industry plays the largest...
There are currently 43 countries which have adopted some kind of carbon pricing policy – either adopted a carbon tax or entered a cap–and–trade, while the remaining countries have not. This has created significant diversity in the world with regard to climate change mitigation. There is thus a need to...
This qualitative study on the experiences of English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) educators in the process of reclassifying English Learner Students with Disabilities (ELSWDs) from English Language Development (ELD) services in Oregon sought the answers to two questions: (1) Who is making reclassification decisions? and (2) How are reclassification decisions made on behalf of ELSWDs?...
Wearable sensors with an inertial measurement unit (IMU) are popular for indoor positioning and activity pattern detection. The IMUs can be connected to a wireless transmission module, allowing users to monitor and process motion-related parameters remotely. Because of the complexity and uncertainty of signals in indoor environments, a radio frequency...
Spreadsheets are a pervasive technology throughout personal and industrial use. Often times, the user is not the author, contributing to a lack of understanding of the purpose and functionality of a spreadsheet. Furthermore, the lack of understanding is a major reason for mistakes in the use and maintenance of spreadsheets....
Traditional bus-based interconnects are simple and easy to implement, but the scalability is greatly limited. While router-based networks-on-chip (NoCs) offer superior scalability, they also incur significant power and area overhead due to complex router structures. In this thesis, a new class of on-chip networks, referred to as Routerless (RL) NoCs,...
Classic biological control can be a powerful option for those tasked with managing biological invasions; however, some biocontrol releases lead to non-target attack – feeding, damage or development on species other than the target species. The cinnabar moth, Tyria jacobaeae L. (Lepidoptera: Erebidae) was introduced to Western Oregon as a...
Obstetric fistula is estimated to affect 1–2 million women worldwide, predominantly in low-resource countries in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia. The primary intervention for obstetric fistula is surgery, which is described as a relatively simple surgical procedure with an extremely high psychosocial and economic benefit relative to cost. Research addressing...
The Large Wave Flume at the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory houses a piston wavemaker with a built-in active absorption system designed by MTS Systems Corporation. The performance of the active absorption system has not been properly assessed yet. This thesis evaluates the performance of the MTS active absorption system...
Many counties in Oregon were historically dependent on federal timber harvests and associated revenue sharing programs. However, since federal policy changes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, federal timber harvests have decreased. These decreases in federal timber harvests translated to decreases in county revenue from the federal government, which...
Despite advances in treatment, cancer remains among the leading causes of death in the world. Progress in the treatment of metastatic cancers was seen with chemotherapy and radiotherapy, however, the major drawbacks of conventional cancer therapies are limited efficacy and severe side effects. Magnetic fluid hyperthermia (MFH) is a new...
The increasing complexity and connectedness of energy networks has opened pathways for new forms of collaboration with energy consumers. Despite the emergence of the smart grid an array of policy options like demand-side management (DSM), many families continue to disregard daily household energy consumption, particularly during peak-use times of day....
In 2011 the California State University (CSU) system’s overall four-year graduation rate was 16 percent, which is far below the national rate of 26 percent among similar institutions. In response to the low graduation rate, the California legislature passed 2 statutory bills meant to further expand access, while improving college...
Deficiency of selenium (Se) or alpha-tocopherol (E) creates serious health issues in horses. This study evaluated owner supplementation practices and their efficacy at preventing deficiency in a large population of horses. In addition, common clinical signs of horses presenting to a referral institution who had Se and E testing performed...
A central challenge for ecology is to understand the dynamic nature of species interactions. A classic approach to community ecology assumes that individuals within a species are functionally identical and that consumer-resource dynamics can be predicted solely by using species abundances. However, one species can consist of multiple functional groups,...
This thesis investigates how beginning, women farmers, within in a women farmers’ network in the Willamette Valley, Oregon are accessing land and farming information. Using ethnographic, community-based research methods, I ask how land access mediates their ability to care for their land and soil. Are these farmers interested in fostering...
This thesis deals with target localization using multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radars. In the field of communications, navigation, radar, and sensing networks, one of the common and most sophisticated problems is target localization. We develop a target localization scheme in distributed MIMO radar systems using bistatic range measurements. The localization approach...
The trafficking of children is one of the gravest violations of human rights globally today. Every year, hundreds of thousands of girl child are smuggled across borders and sold as mere commodities. There are minimal scholarly works focusing on the girl child and analyzing it from the global trends among...
A series of laboratory experiments were conducted to study the wave field in the inner lagoon excited by ‘long’ incident waves. Three cases were considered: Cases A, B and C presenting incident waves of wavelength with factors of 1, 2 and 2.5 times the width of the reef respectively. The...
Earthquakes are complicated processes varying in time, space and magnitude. The occurrence of a major earthquake event called mainshock is preceded and followed in time by diminishing seismic activities known as foreshocks and aftershocks respectively. The process of identifying mainshocks, aftershocks, and foreshocks in a given earthquake catalog is known...
River plumes discharging into continental shelf waters have the potential to influence patchiness of larval fishes, prey, and gelatinous predators. Using a high-resolution plankton imaging system, we sampled larval fishes, copepods, and planktonic predators (ctenophores, hydromedusae, and siphonophores) across multiple freshwater pulses exiting the mouth of Mobile Bay (Alabama, USA)...
The Champoeg townsite first developed due to its ideal settlement and trade location within the Willamette Valley, becoming the ‘legal birthplace of Oregon’ in 1843. However, by 1860 Champoeg’s significance had begun to decline, and in December of 1861 a devastating flood wiped out the townsite. Archaeological excavations took place...
Highly elastic solutions have been shown to increase contaminant removal from silicon wafers, indicating the possibility for reduced reliance upon hazardous chemicals and expensive technologies during the fabrication of semiconductor devices. The onset of this enhanced removal is explored using rinsing and siphoning experimentswith polymer fluids of high molecular weights...
The Confucius Institutes program is a Chinese organization established in 2004 to provide the world with language instruction and increase cultural awareness. The program forms joint venture business models with universities and schools around the world to establish language and culture centers on their school’s campus (“Constitution and By-Laws”). Over...
Despite a history of leadership and creative approaches to environmental issues, Oregon has struggled to adequately prepare for the current and future impacts of climate change. Oregon faces barriers and limits to understanding, planning, and implementing climate adaptation that can be examined and quantified. Climate change makes for an additional...
When decision makers work collaboratively, their combined performance can exceed the performance of even the best group member working alone. However, despite the potential for performance gains when working in a group, collaborating individuals often show poor coordination and losses of motivation, and are generally inefficient at combining their resources...
Definitions of child poverty and measurement approaches are directly linked to poverty reduction strategies. The definition determines the measure and the measure, in turn, informs policies, which can subsequently reshape measurement approaches. Applying human rights approach and using method of document analysis, this research explores how the conceptualization and measurement...
In this essay I investigate the effect of United States March 2018 steel tariffs on producers’ capital. I use intertemporal event study methodology to appraise the effect of announcement of the tariffs on March 01, 2018 on the stock returns of major US steel companies listed at New York Stock...
There are three chapters of manuscripts in this dissertation and all of them are talking about a specific theme: stochastic control, but with completely different perspectives.
In the first manuscript, we solve the optimal barrier strategy for dividend distribution in a complicated Lévy system. In this system, the capital of...
Teachers may be attracted to the use of a game in a learning activity under the presumption that students will find the game experience to be more “fun” than typical classroom activities. The use of a game in a learning activity should help students attain important learning outcomes and engage...
Timber engineering is currently in the midst of a significant evolution due to the rise of mass timber products, like cross-laminated timber (CLT). Increasing numbers of structural engineers are facing the challenge of designing lateral-force-resisting systems (LFRS) for multistory CLT structures. LFRS solutions such as steel frames, concrete cores, or...
In this two-article thesis, I argue that an opposition to Eurocentrism may be articulated without ethnic or identarian determinisms but through a critical engagement with the categories of ethics and truth in a global frame. I build upon the work of Frantz Fanon and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to accomplish a...
In this dissertation, we use Fourier-analytic methods to study questions of equidistribution on the compact abelian group Zp of p-adic integers. In particu- lar, we prove a LeVeque-type Fourier analytic upper bound on the discrepancy of sequences. We establish p-adic analogues of the classical Dirichlet and Fejér kernels on R/Z,...
Saudi Arabia is one of the most arid countries worldwide with limited surface water sources. In most areas of the country, there are no natural rivers or lakes and precipitation is unpredictable and low. The entire region is susceptible to climate change, especially considering that the country is experiencing unprecedented...
About 1% of U.S. births each year are planned home births (Vital Statistics Reports 2017). Of these, roughly 10% transfer to a higher level of care during labor (Melissa Cheyney et al. 2014), yet their experiences are rarely heard. Storytelling has long been used not only as entertainment, but as...
Ocean acidification (OA) is the result of increasing concentrations of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, leading to a suite of alterations to specific parameters of ocean chemistry, which can negatively impact many marine organisms and ecosystems. Understanding how to measure and monitor the chemistry of OA will require specialized education...
The goal of the work in this dissertation was to identify alternative soil amendments to improve plant growth and yield during establishment of highbush blueberry (Vaccinium hybrid). Woody materials, such as sawdust and wood chips, have a high carbon to nitrogen (C:N) ratio and low water holding capacity, which can...
Developmental mathematics and the completion of degrees have been at the forefront of community colleges in recent years. Positive psychology has given rise to the Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions. The purpose of this study is to study the relationship between positive emotions and developmental mathematics achievement at the community...
The global Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) industry has changed dramatically within the past decade, with expansion outside of its start in Alpine Europe. The societal focus on more sustainable options within the built environment has led to an increased use of mass timber construction and its products including cross-laminated timber. Examining...
Experimental evolution is a tool that allows us to measure changes in populations over time in controlled, novel environments. Microbial evolution experiments use cryopreservation – storage at -80°C in glycerol media – to archive experimental populations. Research with Escherichia coli suggests that cryopreservation conditions can affect cell viability and that...