Coastal cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii clarkii) and cottids (Cottus spp) commonly co-occur in headwater streams in western Oregon. Little is known about the comparative trophic ecology of these species or how they respond to seasonal scarcity of resources. In this study I evaluated the seasonal variability in diets and consumption...
Given the many significant roles that bacteria play in modern food manufacturing, it is crucial that we have a fundamental understanding of how bacterial communities assemble and behave in the food manufacturing environment. The focus of this dissertation was to investigate both the spatial and temporal distributions of microbial communities...
The furanyl diterpenoid family of natural products has drawn the attention of both synthetic organic chemists and pharmacologists due to their complex structural architectures and diverse biological activity. Among them, wortmannin has been most extensively studied for biological activities. All these furanyl diterpenoids consist of a highly strained naptha[1,8-bc]furan core,...
Software testing is of critical importance for the success of software projects. Current inefficient testing methods often still take up half or more of a software project's budget. Automatic test data generation is the most promising way to lower the software testing cost. Manually creating testing data is expensive and...
During heel-toe running, the vertical ground reaction force (VGRF) profile has both impact and active peaks. Although the mass-spring model (a single mass and a linear spring) is simple and useful to predict running characteristics, its simulation of VGRF profiles produces only a single peak rather than the double peak...
Domesticated forms of wheat exhibit traits that have increased their adaptation
to cultivation by humans. Some of the most critical adaptive differences involve
changes to morphological features that make the crop easier to harvest like ear rachis
stiffness (brittle to non-brittle rachis) and the ease with which the seed is...
Hybridization, polyploidy, and apomixis have made phylogenetic estimation in Rubus challenging. I used target capture to sequence approximately 1000 low copy nuclear loci and the chloroplast genome for 94 accessions representing the genus Rubus and distributed worldwide. Species phylogenies were estimated using two coalescent based methods, ASTRAL-II and SVDQuartets, and...
During the Late Pre-Hispanic period, settlements in Northern Highland Ecuador were organized under a number of chiefdoms. While a basic hierarchical political system is described in the ethnohistoric literature, the nature of the interactions between specific settlements has remained unknown. This study utilizes two methods for describing the degree and...