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 Treasure Valley (TV) of Idaho is an arid valley in the southwest portion of the state that contains the state’s largest city, Boise and surrounding metropolitan area. A regional Urban Tree Canopy (UTC) Assessment was performed for the TV in 2013. This assessment documented 10% UTC for the Treasure...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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:...
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...
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 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...
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.
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...
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...
The United States is at a crossroads when it comes to environmentally sound design. Social and consumer demands are shifting towards more environmentally conscious design and builders are noticing. However, green construction methods can often carry significant opportunity costs. This can lead to a level of “greenwashing” that not only...
To help beautify the open water space in front of the National Aquarium, in 2010 the very first floating wetland islands in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor were deployed. Since then, floating wetlands have sprouted up in other parts of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, including the Bond Street Wharf. The National Aquarium’s floating...
Most database users do not know formal query languages, such as SQL, and prefer to express their information needs using usable query languages, such as keyword queries. Keyword queries, however, are inherently ambiguous and challenging for the database systems to understand and answer effectively. We propose a novel approach to...
In recent decades, the concept of transnational higher education has flourished and international branch campuses (IBCs) have proliferated. Some countries have gone as far as designating areas as education hubs and have attracted foreign universities to operate branch campuses on their soils. While researchers have studied what motivates universities to...
The rapid accumulation of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic waste caused by disposable plastic water bottle use is a worldwide problem that will continue to affect our environment, economy and society unless new methods of reduction and degradation are explored. The large amounts of energy and resources that are required during...
Founded in 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps served as a tool for exposing young adults to work in the environmental field. By creating opportunities during the Great Depression, this program not only generated short-term work experience for its members but provided educational resources to its participants, increasing their employability after...
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) have emerged in the last half century as concerning global contaminants. PFASs have been found in drinking water systems causing negative health impacts for those who rely on this as their primary source of drinking water. PFASs are man-made industrial chemicals composed of carbon chains...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
The interdependences among water, energy and food, are diverse and multidimensional and are referred to as the food-water-energy (FWE) nexus. This nexus approach seeks to understand the complex interactions among these sectors, in order to identify synergies and trade-offs that could serve as the basis for developing effective planning and...
Persistence, the ability for institutions to help students matriculate from their first year to completion, has been a major concern for underrepresented racial minorities (URMs). Among URMs, Black and Hispanic students are the least likely to be retained, graduating at 38 percent and 45.8 percent respectively (Shapiro et al., 2017)....
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...
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...
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...
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...
Food, water, and energy have strong interdependencies; actions in one sector inadvertently affect actions in another sector. Recent literature supports a “nexus” approach, whereby policies related to food, water, and energy are integrated and used in tandem rather than in isolation. Developing a better understanding of the trade-offs between food,...
The Jetson Artificial Intelligence Tool chain (JAI-TC) is a set of packages, APIs and libraries for Artificial Intelligence applications to be deployed on the NVidia SOC, Jetson TX2. JAI-TC automates the installation of these items allowing for a wider set of users to leverage these technologies. Prior to this, the...
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...
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...
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...
South Louisiana has a major coastal erosion problem, exposing coastal communities to storm surge. The state is spending billions of dollars on projects that are not expected to last beyond 20 years. Research indicates that predominate stories influence problem definitions and solutions. Colten (2017) identified a shift in Louisiana's coastal...
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...
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....
Gray wolves (Canis lupus) are the most socially polarizing species listed under the Endangered Species Act. Wildlife management practices at local, state, and federal levels include lethal control to resolve stakeholder and wolf conflicts as a last resort. There is little experimental evidence that lethal control is effective in this...
The overall reduced funding from public education in the United States has sparked a backlash across the country. Citing inadequate resources, low pay, and an inability to control the direction of their classroom, teachers in seven states (West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Colorado, Arizona, North Carolina, and Washington) halted instruction time...
The present study employs a normalized restricted quadratic profit function approach to estimate lumber and plywood supply and Marshallian factor demand elasticities for four region-product combinations in Oregon for the period 1970-2010. The four log demand functions will be employed as the "demand side" of the log market model of...
Washington State fisheries and Washington State Treaty Tribes are becoming increasingly restricted in harvest of wild salmon due to US Endangered Species Act listings of salmon species, marine mammal predation by both ESA listed Southern Resident Killer Whale (SRKW) and US Marine Mammal Protection Act protected pinnipeds, salmon habitat destruction,...
Persistence, the ability for institutions to help students matriculate from their first year to completion, has been a major concern for underrepresented racial minorities (URMs). Among URMs, Black and Hispanic students are the least likely to be retained, graduating at 38 percent and 45.8 percent respectively (Shapiro et al., 2017)....
Many pollinators across the globe are experiencing population threats and declines (Potts et al. 2010). Approximately 85 percent of the world’s flowering plants depend on animals, mostly insects, for pollination (Ollerton et al. 2011). As over 80 percent of the United States population lives in cities (U.S. Census Bureau 2016),...
This report presents an efficient method for semi-supervised video object segmentation – the problem of identifying foreground pixels occupied by a target object. The target is specified by the ground-truth mask in the first video frame. While the state of the art achieves a segmentation accuracy greater than 80%, it...
The Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) is a collection of large-scale restoration projects across the United States that are striving to improve many economic, social, and ecological sustainability issues, including the condition of fish and wildlife habitat. Effectiveness monitoring is a specific type of monitoring that is critically important...
When a catastrophic event happens, senior residents who are physically or mentally disabled, are placed at a much greater risk of injury or death. Researchers in the aftermath of hurricanes’ Katrina, Sandy, and Harvey, consistently record elderly residents presenting the most difficult challenges for emergency personnel during evacuation and post...
The environmental justice (EJ) movement has succeeded in achieving policy change across different levels of government, however, there has been relatively little research to date on the implementation of environmental justice policies at the state level. The state of Oregon provides an opportunity to understand how state-level EJ policies are...
This essay provides an assessment of the human, social and financial resources that Oregon Latino immigrant-serving nonprofits have available to achieve their mission of promoting Latino immigrant integration and civic engagement practices. Under the framework of immigrant integration, this study examines the strategies Latino nonprofits rely upon to achieve their...
Understanding the causal links between riparian forests, streams, and salmonids is important to help understand the likely effects of forest management practices. Previous studies have identified three major causal pathways (Instream Cover, Light, and Hydrology) through which riparian forests influence streams, and ultimately stream fishes. To evaluate the potential importance...
It is generally accepted in stream ecology that habitat heterogeneity and patchiness at multiple scales increases ecosystem resilience through niche diversification. Heterogeneous stream habitats include a complex mosaic of hydraulic features, large woody debris, anabranches, substrata and channel forms - this complexity tends to increase as streams progress towards later...
On June 23, 2016 the United Kingdom (UK) held a vote to determine whether to remain in the European Union (EU) or withdraw. The British exit from the EU, or Brexit, is the antithesis of two centuries of progressive social work theory developed by a series of prominent social workers...
Involuntary movement, also known as forced displacement, has affected millions of people worldwide. At the end of 20th century, approximately 80 million people had been displaced due to hydropower projects, including approximately 22.5 million people in China. Dam-induced migration not only causes material loss, such as loss of homes and...
Point Reyes is a 100-square mile peninsula located on the California coast about 30 miles north of San Francisco. The peninsula, surrounding bays, and neighboring coastal mainland are a unique biodiversity hotspot. The area underwent heavy human use, including ranching and logging, during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Conservation...
The mission of federal fish hatcheries has evolved over decades under budgetary changes and new conservation regulations and policies. I evaluated the US Fish and Wildlife Service Abernathy Fisheries Technology Center, which has experienced this evolution from a production fish hatchery with research programs to a non-production, cutting edge, basic...
Aquifers are a whole lot more than groundwater. Aquifers are composed of many kinds of different resources, including storage space, geothermal energy, surface interactions, and various minerals. However, unlike these resources, groundwater is treated as something different. The transition from groundwater management to groundwater governance expanded the role of social...
Commercial fishing is deeply embedded in the economy and culture of many coastal communities in Oregon. This study examined the impact of the ‘graying of the fleet’ phenomenon (Graying; the increase in the average age of commercial fishermen) on community resilience in coastal communities. This paper utilizes qualitative methods and...
With the need for higher spectral efficiency and data rates the rise of simultaneous transmit-and-receive (STAR) radios is becoming increasingly valuable. While many systems employ two separate channels for transmit and receive to double the data speed, this comes at the cost of doubling the RF band. This same performance...
As climate change forces energy policy to incorporate environmental impacts and fuel diversification into the traditional model of energy security, finding ways to site, develop, and deliver renewable energy has taken on increasing importance across the United States. With no consistent federal framework to implement these changes, much of the...
Smart Manufacturing (SM) is envisioned to make manufacturing processes more efficient through automation and integration of networked information systems. Robotic arms are integral to this vision. However the benefits of SM, enabled by automation and networking, also come with cyber risks.
In this work, we propose an anomaly detection framework...
As the western United States faces warmer and increasingly varied climate conditions, as well as predicted water insecurity, concerns over water quality and water availability are growing. While humans, fish, and wildlife are dependent on clean water for survival in the present, management of water resources needs to consider future...
In this project we study multiple approaches to modeling coupled flow and energy systems, with applications to geothermal fluid flow in geysers. We explore a model from a geophysical point of view, and discuss analysis of a related model. We then focus on our own model which features a free-boundary...
Oregon implemented a series of marine reserves from 2012 through the beginning of 2016 that will be evaluated in 2023. As part of that evaluation, several studies are focusing on the impact of the reserves on coastal communities. This project focused on tribal members with ancestral territory on the Oregon...
My thesis in Environmental Arts and Humanities concerned the idea of animal language, as well as other posthuman ideas around animality and indistinction. I also explored virtual space as it relates to human identity, our notions of reality and perception, and the way contemporary digital artists approach animal subjectivity in...
College students are learning to make increasingly complex financial decisions, facing high tuition and living costs while having limited means to make a living. Studies show that most college students lack sufficient financial literacy. They need a well-designed financial education, especially if they are low-income, first-generation students whose parents are...
Over 90 percent of the soy, cotton, and corn sold in the United States are genetically modified crops (GM crops). However, there was a 209 percent growth in USDA certified organic food from 2005-2015, reflecting a growing interest in non-GMO food. The policy debate over GM crops takes place between...
Historically, rural economic development has focused on attracting outside firms or increasing exploitation of natural resources, often without equitable or lasting returns to the community. The Rural Wealth Creation framework was developed as a systems-based approach to assessing and leveraging local assets for the creation of lasting wealth in communities....
Scholars posit that the successful consolidation of post-communist Central and Eastern European democracies can be linked to their subsequent accession to the European Union (EU). This led observers to assume that the continued democratization of Hungarian society was assured due to their integration into EU institutions. However, since the 2010...
Transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources has been identified by governments throughout the world as a key strategy for reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, enhancing sustainability and resiliency, and supporting local economies. Despite these benefits, this transition has been slow in the United States, causing some...
In 2016, the state of Oregon passed landmark legislation that doubles the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard and eliminates the use of coal-fired electricity for the state’s two major electric utilities by 2030. The legislation was the first of its kind in the country to outright ban the use of a...
Recent reports using data from the 2013-2015 Current Population Surveys reveal that while the overall food insecurity rate in Oregon is 16.1%, single mothers in Oregon experience food insecurity rates as high as 44.1%. This study will portray how household assets and capital relate to food insecurity for single mothers...
In this paper, we discuss two possible modifications to a numerical solution method for a model of microbiologically induced calcite precipitation (MICP). MICP provides a means to seal cracks in the surfaces of geological structures. From a mathematical and computational point of view MICP has very interesting features which make...
As ecoroofs have become more widespread throughout the U.S., it has become increasingly important to understand their structural behavior. The purpose of this research was to investigate the load effects exerted on a roof structure with an ecoroof during rain events and the subsequent drainage period, with the intention of...
In histopathological image analysis, image classification as well as pattern detection play a crucial role in the diagnosis and treatment process since the goal is to not only differentiate cancer types but also identify cancerous manifestations. Fully supervised learning strategies tend to address these problems using manually annotated cancerous regions...
Floods are beneficial to nature but can be destructive to humans. For centuries humanity has attempted to control nature and specifically rivers and their flooding. After looking at a history of river management in the United States, an examination of both the burdens and benefits of flood control policy in...
The Rust programming language is a systems programming language with a strong static type system. A central feature of Rust’s type system is its unique concept of “ownership”, which enables Rust to give a user safe, low-level control over resources without the overhead of garbage collection. In Haskell, most data...
The Marcellus Shale Natural Gas play in Pennsylvania, since its inception, continues to be a source of contention for multiple Pennsylvania stakeholders. The issues that relate to natural gas extraction have seemingly impacted every community within the Marcellus Shale region in some form. As in most common pool resource...
”Until relatively recently, mankind was not aware that there was a separable binocular depth sense. Through the ages, people like Euclid and Leonardo understood that we see different images of the world with each eye. But it was Wheatstone who in 1838 explained to the world, with his stereoscope and...
Energy security is a vital but often unmet requirement for community resiliency. Electricity availability is essential to the functioning of the economy, individual households, and the collective essential services that provide health, safety, and the basic human needs to sustain life. Coastal communities in Oregon face special vulnerability because they...
Collaborative decision-making is often promoted as a means to achieve socially acceptable and enduring solutions to natural resource management issues, and one that holds promise for resolving “wicked” problems. However, success rates for implementation of collaborative recommendations are unknown. This paper explores challenges to collaborative salmon fishery management in Prince...
Urban green space is associated with multiple physical and mental health outcomes. Several benefits of green space, such as stress reduction and attention restoration, are dependent on visual perception of green space exposures. However, traditional green space exposure measures do not capture street-level exposures. In this project, we apply deep...
Data centers have been charged a great amount of electric bill by the power company and demand charge can contribute up to 40% of the electric bill due to the "random" workload. This phenomenon can be avoided by using the existing Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) as the assistant power source...
This paper will focus on the “possible economic, environmental and other effects” as they relate to one former military base (BRAC, 2013). With a focus on natural resource sustainability and stakeholder engagement, the research and findings within this paper will answer the question: How can understanding the process of military...
Severe weather in the United States causes huge insured losses to crop and property frequently.It creates major impact and elicit diverse response in the weather insurance industry. Events like hail, storm, hurricane etc. are more likely to cause catastrophe losses. So it becomes crucial to collect and analyze these extreme...
The problem of supporting more advanced selective undo operations has received a lot of attention. However, selective undo is generally missing in commonly used editors. Moreover, partial selective undo, the ability of undoing just part of some edit so that other edits may be undone, is not supported at all....