Focus is published by Oregon State University College of Forestry. Our goal is to keep Forestry alumni, friends, faculty, staff, and students informed about the College of Forestry and its many activities and programs.
Focus is published by Oregon State University College of Forestry. Our goal is to keep Forestry alumni, friends, faculty, staff, and students informed about the College of Forestry and its many activities and programs.
Grain is produced on upwards of 100,000 acres in the Klamath Basin including nearly 50,000 acres within the Klamath Reclamation Project. Susceptibility to late spring frost has historically limited winter cereal production and spring cereals have accounted for the majority of production. Klamath Basin Research & Extension Center (KBREC) cereal...
The information in this report is for the purpose of informing cooperators in industry, colleagues at other universities, and others of the results of research in field crops. Reference to products and companies in this publication is for specific information only and does not endorse or recommend that product or...
Since its inception in 1985, the Tri-State variety development program has primarily focused on the development of processing and dual-purpose (process and fresh) russets. Recent breeding efforts have focused more on improving genetic resistance to various pests and diseases as a means of lowering production costs. During the past decade,...
This issue is packed with new information from various research trials conducted here in Oregon, whether it is from vineyard plots, the wine lab, or the growth chamber, results are likely to have impact on vineyard and winery production here in Oregon. James Osborne, Enology Extension Specialist, opens this month’s...
The Columbia River Gillnetter is the pilot of the Lower Columbia River commercial fishing industry, keeping fishermen and the public in touch with today's important issues.
Crops were grown at the experimental farms using accepted cultural practices (within the limits of experimentation) or trials were conducted on growers' fields. Most experiments were designed as randomized complete blocks with three to five replications. Herbicide treatments were applied uniformly with CO₂ precision plot sprayers. Unless otherwise indicated, preplant...
Many high school teachers are prohibited from interacting with students in social media sites despite the fact that the majority of teenagers actively use them. The first opportunity most students have to interact with instructors in an online environment is in higher education. University and college librarians can take the...
The Columbia River Gillnetter is the pilot of the Lower Columbia River commercial fishing industry, keeping fishermen and the public in touch with today's important issues.
Sclerotinia sclerotiorum (causal agent of white mold) can cause serious economic losses in snap bean production as well as many other crops. Spores are produced in apothecia (mushroom-like structures) that develop from over-wintering sclerotia in the soil. Sclerotia are long-lived, durable hyphal survival structures produced by the fungus and they...
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...
Because of their new independent status as young adults, undergraduate college students are at a crucial point in the development of significant health behaviors, especially as related to physical activity. Unfortunately, in the United States, there is clear evidence that the lifestyle choices college students make are not always healthy...
The growth of a plant’s root system is essential for its survival. Preliminary observations suggest that a protein complex called the exocyst may play a role in the development of the root system by facilitating the growth of roots and root hairs. Previous work discovered a protein that potentially interacts...
Declines in glacier area and volume are widespread. These changes will have important hydrologic consequences since glaciers store tremendous amounts of fresh water and buffer seasonally low flows in many densely populated regions. In this thesis I focus on a region that is hydrologically vulnerable to glacier change, namely the...
Question: Most results of restoration efforts are species-specific and/or site-specific and therefore are not general enough to be easily applied to other species and other sites. Our research addresses the issue of species-specific results by investigating the feasibility of using plant traits instead of taxonomic species to characterize species responses...
Native prairies, which once dominated the landscape of the Willamette Valley, are considered among the rarest of Oregon's ecosystems and are in critical need of conservation. One of the largest remaining parcels of native upland prairie, Butterfly Meadows (Benton County), is being invaded by Brachypodium sylvaticum (false brome). This site...
This white paper outlines interim guidance for development of Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife habitat mitigation recommendations associated with renewable energy development and associated infrastructure or other landscape scale industrial-commercial developments in greater sage-grouse habitat in Oregon. This guidance is interim until empirical data are available that quantify the...
Prior to settlement in the 19th century, greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus; hereafter referred to as ‘sage-grouse’) inhabited 13 western States and three Canadian provinces, and their potential habitat covered over 1,200,483 square kilometers (km) (463,509 square miles (mi)). Sage-grouse have declined across their range due to a variety of causes...
Objective: To examine the associations between the 2008 economic collapse in Iceland and smoking behaviour at the national and individual levels.
Design: A population-based, prospective cohort study based on a mail survey (Health and Wellbeing in Iceland) assessed in 2007 and 2009.
Setting: National mail survey.
Participants: Representative cohort (n=3755)...
Flow and temperature are strongly linked environmental factors driving ecosystem processes in streams. Stream temperature maxima (T [subscript max_w]) and stream flow minima (Q[subscript min]) can create periods of stress for aquatic organisms. In mountainous areas, such as western North America, recent shifts toward an earlier spring peak flow and...
We present the geomorphology of the Eastern Samoa Volcanic Province, covering 28,446 km², and depths ranging from ~50-4000 m. A new compilation of available multibeam data reveals 51 previously undocumented seamounts, and delineates major submarine rift zones, eruptive centers, and volcanic plateaus. Moving from a regional to local scale, and...
Density-independent and density-dependent variables both affect the spatial distributions of species. However, their effects are often separately addressed using different analytical techniques. We apply a spatially explicit regression framework that incorporates localized, interactive and threshold effects of both density-independent (water temperature) and density-dependent (population abundance) variables, to study the spatial...
All major web mapping services use the web Mercator projection. This is a poor choice for maps of the entire globe or areas of the size of continents or larger countries because the Mercator projection shows medium and higher latitudes with extreme areal distortion and provides an erroneous impression of...
Concurrent satellite-measured chlorophyll (CHL), sea surface temperature (SST), sea level anomaly (SLA) and model-derived wind vectors from the 13+ year SeaWiFS period September 1997 – December 2010 quantify time and space patterns of phytoplankton variability and its links to physical forcing in the Pacific Ocean. The CHL fields are a...
We present a novel approach based on fibre-optic distributed temperature sensing (DTS) to measure the two-dimensional thermal structure of the surface layer at high resolution (0.25 m, ≈ 0.5 Hz). Air temperature observations obtained from a vertically oriented fibre optics array of approximate dimensions 8 m x 8 m and...
The early Pliocene warm phase was characterized by high sea surface temperatures and a deep thermocline in the eastern equatorial Pacific. A new hypothesis suggests that the progressive closure of the Panamanian seaway contributed substantially to the termination of this zonally symmetric state in the equatorial Pacific. According to this...
Equilibrium climate sensitivity of the Community Climate System Model, version 4 (CCSM4) is 3.20 degrees C for 1 degrees horizontal resolution in each component. This is about a half degree Celsius higher than in the previous version (CCSM3). The transient climate sensitivity of CCSM4 at 1 degrees resolution is 1.72...
Climate changes in the Pacific Northwest, USA, may cause both retreat of alpine glaciers and increases in the frequency and magnitude of storms delivering rainfall at high elevations absent significant snowpack, and both of these changes may affect the frequency and severity of destructive debris flows initiating on the region's...
Basal melting of ice shelves around Antarctica contributes to formation of Antarctic Bottom Water and can affect global sea level by altering the offshore flow of grounded ice streams and glaciers. Tides influence ice shelf basal melt rate (w(b)) by contributing to ocean mixing and mean circulation as well as...
While neutral theory and models have stimulated considerable literature, less well investigated is the effect of topology on neutral metacommunity model simulations. We implemented a neutral metacommunity model using two different stream network topologies, a widely branched network (wide tree) and a narrowly branched network (high tree), both represented as...
The neon isotope compositions of basalts from the Northwest Lau Back-arc Basin reflect three-component mixing between an ocean island basalt (OIB) mantle hotspot component, mid-ocean ridge basalt (MORB) mantle, and atmosphere. Our study confirms that a mantle hotspot signature is present in the neon isotopes of both the Rochambeau Rifts...
A wide variety of different rock types were dredged from the Tonga fore arc and trench between 8000 and 3000 m water depths by the 1996 Boomerang voyage. ⁴⁰Ar-³⁹Ar whole rock and U-Pb zircon dating suggest that these fore arc rocks were erupted episodically from the Cretaceous to the Pliocene...
Seamounts are a ubiquitous feature of the seafloor but relatively little is known about their internal structure. A seamount preserved in the Franciscan mélange of California suggests a sequence of formation common to all seamounts. Field mapping, geophysical measurements, and geochemical analyses are combined to interpret three stages of seamount...
We have applied a normalized difference algorithm to 8 day composite chlorophyll-a (CHL) and fluorescence line height (FLH) imagery obtained from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer aboard the Aqua spacecraft in order to detect and monitor phytoplankton blooms in the Oregon coastal region. The resulting bloom products, termed CHL[subscript rel]...
Packets of nonlinear internal waves (NLIWs) in a small area of the Mid-Atlantic Bight were 10 times more energetic during a local neap tide than during the preceding spring tide. This counterintuitive result cannot be explained if the waves are generated near the shelf break by the local barotropic tide...
Strongly bimodal, basalt-rhyolite volcanism of the High Lava Plains Province of Oregon followed the Middle Miocene flood basalts of the Pacific Northwest and extends to recent time. During the 8 m.y. of volcanism recorded in the central High Lava Plains, in western Harney Basin, three distinct mafic magmatic trends originate...
A method is presented for estimating bathymetry in a river, based on observations of depth-averaged velocity during steady flow. The estimator minimizes a cost function that combines known information in the form of a prior estimate and measured data (including measurement noise). State augmentation is used to relate the measured...
Interaction between mixed layer baroclinic eddies and small-scale turbulence is studied using a nonhydrostatic large-eddy simulation (LES) model. Free, unforced flow evolution is considered, for a standard initialization consisting of an 80-m-deep mixed layer with a superposed warm filament and two frontal interfaces in geostrophic balance, on a model domain...
Understanding groundwater conditions in the upland parts of volcanic island aquifers is critical for sustainable groundwater development in these resource-limited environments. Yet groundwater conditions in such settings are generally difficult to characterize because of sparse well drilling (high cost and/or limited access). Information needed for resource evaluation includes upland depth...
Characterizing the vigor of magmatic activity in Yellowstone requires knowledge of the mechanisms and rates of heat transport between magma and the ground surface. We present results from a heat flow study in two vapor dominated, acid-sulfate thermal areas in the Yellowstone Caldera, the 0.11 km² Obsidian Pool Thermal Area...
As a quantitative test of moored mixing measurements using [subscript χ]pods, a comparison experiment was conducted at 0°, 140°W in October–November 2008. The following three measurement elements were involved: (i) NOAA’s Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) mooring with five [subscript χ]pods, (ii) a similar mooring 9 km away with seven [subscript...
The daytime evolution of warm cloud microphysical properties over the southeast Pacific during October–November 2008 is investigated with optical/infrared retrievals from the Tenth Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-10) imager. GOES-10 retrievals, produced at NASA Langley Research Center, are validated against in situ aircraft observations and with independent satellite observations. Comparisons...
During the last glacial period atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature in Antarctica varied in a similar fashion on millennial time scales, but previous work indicates that these changes were gradual. In a detailed analysis of one event we now find that approximately half of the CO₂ increase that occurred during...
The high accumulation rate and negligible amount of melt at Eclipse Icefield (3017 m) in the Saint Elias Range of Yukon, Canada, allows for the preservation of a high-resolution isotopic and glaciochemical records valuable for reconstruction of climatic variables. Each of the three Eclipse ice cores have a well-constrained depth–age...
The rare earth elements (REEs) with their systematically varying properties are powerful tracers of continental inputs, particle scavenging intensity and the oxidation state of seawater. However, their generally low (similar to pmol/kg) concentrations in seawater and fractionation potential during chemical treatment makes them difficult to measure. Here we report a...
Sensor design and mission planning for satellite ocean color measurements requires careful consideration of the signal dynamic range and sensitivity (specifically here signal-to-noise ratio or SNR) so that small changes of ocean properties (e.g., surface chlorophyll-a concentrations or Chl) can be quantified while most measurements are not saturated. Past and...
The debate over a coastal migration route for the First Americans revolves around two major points: seafaring technology, and a viable landscape and resource base. Three lake cores from Sanak Island in the western Gulf of Alaska yield the first radiocarbon ages from the continental shelf of the Northeast Pacific...
We describe a new algorithm for robust principal component analysis (PCA) of electromagnetic (EM) array data, extending previously developed multivariate methods to include arrays with large data gaps, and only partial overlap between site occupations. Our approach is based on a criss-cross regression scheme in which polarization parameters and spatial...
The variation of the sea surface sensible heat flux is investigated using data from the Gulf of Tehuantepec Experiment (GOTEX) and from eight additional aircraft datasets representing a variety of surface conditions. This analysis focuses on near-neutral conditions because these conditions are common over the sea and are normally neglected,...
We used split-beam acoustic techniques to observe free-swimming of jumbo squid Dosidicus gigas during 4 cruises in the Gulf of California. Four-dimensional spatio-temporal data revealed that at night in shallow water, jumbo squid were using ascending, spiral-like swimming paths to emerge from extremely dense aggregations, and were likely foraging on...
Using stable isotope analyses of N and C we present preliminary evidence of marine-derived nutrients from introduced Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha Walbaum) in stream food webs of Laguna Los Patos, NW Patagonia. Similar to values reported within Chinook salmon's native distributional range periphyton and aquatic insects are the trophic levels...
Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) instability, characterized by the distinctive finite-amplitude billows it generates, is an important mechanism in the development of turbulence in the stratified interior of the ocean. In particular, it is often assumed that the onset of turbulence in internal waves begins in this way. Clear recognition of the importance...
We report a decadally resolved record of atmospheric CO₂ concentration for the last 1000 years, obtained from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide shallow ice core. The most prominent feature of the pre-industrial period is a rapid ∼7 ppm decrease of CO₂ in a span of ∼20–50 years at...
Turbulence controls the composition of river plumes through mixing and alters the plume's trajectory by diffusing its momentum. While believed to play a crucial role in decelerating river-source waters, the turbulence stress in a near-field river plume has not previously been observationally quantified. In this study, finely resolved density, velocity,...
In the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG), the regular occurrence of summer phytoplankton blooms contributes to marine ecosystem productivity and the annual carbon export. The mechanisms underlying the formation, maintenance, and decay of these blooms remain largely unknown; nitrogen fixation, episodic vertical mixing of nutrients, and meso- (<100 km) and...
Vegetation at the aquatic–terrestrial interface can alter landscape features through its growth and interactions with sediment and fluids. Even similar species may impart different effects due to variation in their interactions and feedbacks with the environment. Consequently, replacement of one engineering species by another can cause significant change in the...
Air was sampled from the porous firn layer at the NEEM site in Northern Greenland. We use an ensemble of ten reference tracers of known atmospheric history to characterise the transport properties of the site. By analysing uncertainties in both data and the reference gas atmospheric histories, we can objectively...
The major evolution of the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Atmosphere Model (CAM) is used to diagnose climate feedbacks, understand how climate feedbacks change with different physical parameterizations, and identify the processes and regions that determine climate sensitivity. In the evolution of CAM from version 4 to version 5,...
In this study, we examine salinity stress tolerances of two populations of the invasive species New Zealand mud snail Potamopyrgus antipodarum, one population from a high salinity environment in the Columbia River estuary and the other from a fresh water lake. In 1996, New Zealand mud snails were discovered in...
Interleaving motions on a wide, baroclinic front are modeled using a second-moment closure to represent unresolved fluxes by turbulence and salt fingering. A linear perturbation analysis reveals two broad classes of unstable modes. First are scale-selective modes comparable with interleaving as observed in oceanic fronts. These correspond well with observations...
Better fisheries management is often given as one justification for research on improving forecasts of fish survival. However, the value gained from expected improvements in forecast skill in terms of achieving management goals is rarely quantified as part of research objectives. Using Monte Carlo simulations of population dynamics, we assessed...
An approach to climate change feedback analysis is described in which tropospheric relative humidity replaces specific humidity as the state variable that, along with the temperature structure, surface albedos, and clouds, controls the magnitude of the response of global mean surface temperature to a radiative forcing. Despite being simply a...
Cloud radars at X, Ka and W-bands have been used in the past for ocean studies of clouds, but the lack of suitable stabilization has limited their usefulness in obtaining accurate measurements of the velocity structure of cloud particles and the heights of cloud features. A 94 GHz (W-band) radar...
The impacts of North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on Great Lakes ice cover were investigated using lake ice observations for winters 1963–2010 and National Centers for Environmental Prediction reanalysis data. It is found that both NAO and ENSO have impacts on Great Lakes ice cover. The...
Simple parameterizations of dune erosion are necessary for forecasting erosion potential prior to an oncoming storm. Dune erosion may be parameterized in terms of the elevation of the total water level (composed of surge, tide, and wave runup) above the dune base and period of exposure of the dune to...
The quantification and description of sea surface temperature (SST) is critically important because it can influence the distribution, migration, and invasion of marine species; furthermore, SSTs are expected to be affected by climate change. To better understand present temperature regimes, we assembled a 29-year nearshore time series of mean monthly...
This paper examines the effect of “stencil width” on surface ocean geostrophic velocity and vorticity estimated from differentiating gridded satellite altimeter sea surface height products. In oceanographic applications, the value of the first derivative at a central grid point is generally obtained by differencing the sea surface heights at adjacent...
We demonstrate a surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrate by integrating plasmonic-active SiO₂ nanotubes into Si₃N₄ gratings. First, the dielectric grating that is working under guided mode resonance (GMR) provides enhanced electric field for localized surface plasmon polaritons on the surface of metallic nanoparticles. Second, we use SiO₂ nanotubes with...
Natural disasters including hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, and fires often involve substantial physical and mental impacts on affected populations and thus are public health priorities. Limited research shows that vulnerable populations such as the low-income, socially isolated migrant and seasonal farmworkers (MSFW) are particularly susceptible to the effects of natural...
Workshop goals: 1. Learn how to deliberately construct and plan your research process. 2. Learn how to identify and explain the use of both broad searching and narrow searching strategies. 3. Learn how to locate library and writing center support resources.
Workshop Outcomes: 1. Use one source to find other "recommended sources in at least two tools. 2. Distinguish between cited sources and citing sources. 3. Be able to conduct a "cited reference search".
Dr. Cable Green lectures on the topic of "Expanding the open agenda: From open access to an open education" on Friday, October, 26th 2012 in the Library Main Rotunda during Open Access Week 2012.
Dr. Cable Green is the Director of Global Learning for Creative Commons and an expert in...