The diverse lichen flora of the Pacific Northwest is being impacted by
population growth and by forest management practices. Accumulating information
about our lichen flora will improve our conservation strategies. This dissertation first
collects information to improve our understanding of how lichen communities vary
among forests of differing structure, and...
Distributed version control allows developers to manage software evolution among distributed development teams. But it does not eliminate all consistency and concurrency issues, and instead introduces additional complexity when merging code. And resolving merge conflicts is nontrivial when automated merging fails. In such cases, developers are forced to inspect the...
The overall concept of reducing laboratory operations to a scale that fits on a single microfluidic chip has been an attractive area of research over the last several decades. Despite a surge in research, few commercial success stories have been written. Lab-on-a-chip technologies have the capability to be cost effective...
This dissertation examines the impact of the German naturalist and literary figure Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s ideas on twentieth century Anglophone plant morphology and biology. Goethe interpreted the organ forms of flowering plants as metamorphoses of each other. His literary, historical, and philosophical writings suggest themes of alienation from and...
Species are one of the foundational units upon which entire fields of scientific inquiry are built. Discovering and documenting the planet’s biodiversity remains one of the grand challenges of science. A proper conceptualization of species provides a critical framework for diverse fields such as biophysics, biochemistry, agriculture and pharmacology, and...
Medical professionals experience higher rates of burnout than other professions due to the highly stressful nature of their environment. In 2018, 94 percent of physicians reported experiencing burnout – characterized by emotional fatigue, and feelings of depersonalization and low personal accomplishment – at some point in their careers. As emotional...
Marine natural products possess an abundance of diverse chemical scaffolds with unique biological activities. By targeting unusual or unique microbial environments within varying marine ecologies we can continue to discover novel chemistry with potentially new molecular targets. The research presented here is focused on exploring unusual chemical ecologies and the...
More than 1500 species of plants and animals in the United States are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The U.S. Departments of Interior and Commerce are required, under Section 4(f)(1) of the ESA, to develop recovery plans for ESA-listed species under the respective agency...
Since at least the 1970s, rural areas in the western United States, as elsewhere across the country and world, have been subject to social, economic, and political forces that have resulted in novel demographic and land tenure trends when compared to previous decades. Collectively, these processes of restructuring have created...