Contemporary spiritual tourism impacts many stakeholders including environmental ecosystems, tourists, tourist operators, and community members. Increasingly, in the era of the Anthropocene, there is a need for ethical guidance to inform spiritual tourism so as to mitigate social injustice and environmental degradation. This research project investigates the potential for the...
Currently, a popular approach to image classification uses the deep Transformer architecture. In a Transformer, the attention mechanism enables the model to learn efficiently with fewer computational resources than the convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this thesis, we study the sparse attention mechanism widely used in the Transformers developed specifically...
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...
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...
Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) is a powerful resource for coastal and wetland managers and its use is increasing. Vegetation density and other land cover characteristics influence the accuracy of LIDAR-derived ground surface digital elevation models; however, the degree to which wetland land cover biases LIDAR estimates of the ground...
Water and climate change are interconnected with each other. Water is a medium through which the climate change manifests its far-reaching consequences on society. Sustainable water management practices are fundamental in implementing effective climate change adaptation. Given an influential position as global water actors, international water organizations (IWOs) play a...
Water in the U.S. West faces considerable challenges and uncertainties. Climate change has intensified weather extremes, threatening the water sources that support the region’s many stakeholders. Urban water providers are among the stakeholders contending with the challenge of providing reliable water supplies to their growing populations. Recognizing the critical role...
Excavation of pit feature 110 (F110) at the Cooper’s Ferry site (10IH73) in central Idaho provides a unique snapshot of the domestic lifeways associated with the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST). Analysis was conducted of the F110 assemblage to better understand the function F110 served. The contents of F110 include Canis...
The accumulation of fuels in fire prone landscapes, and changing climatic conditions, have resulted in increasingly volatile fire behaviors. As a result, social and operational risk, management expenditures, and budgetary requirements for responsible agencies are increasing. The United States Forest Service (USFS) manages 193 million acres across the United States...
Here the diversity and phylogeny of the genus, Sthereus Motschulsky, 1845, and its nearest associates in the large subfamily Molytinae are explored through molecular and morphological characters. Sanger sequencing of five genes determined that Sthereus is not monophyletic. Instead, the one species in the genus Gastrotaphrus Buchanan 1936, G. barberi...