Societies around the globe are concerned with climate change and supplementing the use of fossil fuels to create cleaner energy. The emergence of marine alternative energy is of scientific, historical, legal, and political interest. The purpose of the three manuscripts comprising this dissertation is to provide research and analysis of...
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...
This study explores the lived experiences of first-year, rural, Oregon students in their initial entry to college. Through qualitative research involving one-on-one interviews with 10 participants, the author examines the transition of rural students into higher education, common experiences of rural students in their first term of college, and perceived...
Irrigated agricultural production in sandy soils presents several unique challenges to growers, including naturally high permeability, low native water retention, as well as high rates of water drainage losses and leaching of chemicals to the shallow aquifers. This study is an initial investigation into water motion in the sandy agricultural...
This is a case study of the cooperative development of an ocean condition forecasting tool by Oregon commercial fishermen, Oregon State University (OSU) scientists, and OSU student software engineers. Ocean condition forecasting models developed by OSU scientists were used to create an online tool to assist decision-making for fishermen. This...
Fungi have long been a prolific source of clinically approved drugs. The antibiotic penicillin, the cholesterol lowering statins, and the immunosuppressant cyclosporine have changed the treatment of human diseases in the last century. Recently, genome analysis of filamentous fungi has revealed that the biosynthetic potential for natural product expression is...
I defend robust realism from arguments that raise epistemological challenges to it based on considerations about either moral disagreement or the genealogy of our moral beliefs. The first argument is the “Argument from Conciliationism,” which contends that the moral disagreements that obtain between moral peers give us reason to believe...
The goal of this dissertation was to improve our abilities in acquiring critical in vivo data by establishing embryo-larva zebrafish as an exemplary model to quantitatively evaluate cancer progression. The living environment that encompasses a tumor has a significant effect on how cancer develops, grows and metastasizes. In order to...