The United States (U.S.) has seen dramatic growth in installed wind energy generation capacity in recent years, and that growth is expected to remain strong in the near term. The siting of wind energy facilities poses unique challenges that may be exacerbated by increased buildout. As the number of wind...
The relationship between fire and wildlife habitat is complex. Fires can create favorable conditions for some species and simultaneously extirpate entire populations of other species. Red-tailed hawks choose nesting habitats according to resources available. Natural disturbances such as wildfires change the availability of those resources. In late 2018, the Woolsey...
The project location is a pre-historical gathering site for basketry materials utilized by the Wintun people within the boundaries of the Red Bluff Recreation Area. Due to environmental changes and neglect, the site has fallen into disuse and degradation. The aim of this project is ethnoecological restoration, which varies from...
An Invasive Plant Management Plan developed for Big Sur Land Trust, a non-profit conservation organization located on California's Central Coast, to guide its vegetation management activities and serve as a decision-support tool. The effort included the creation of a digital field data collection tool through Survey123 Connect, survey and data...
Wastewater treatment plants around the world are becoming increasingly at risk of sea level rise impacts as these facilities are typically located in low-lying areas to utilize gravity flow for influent (incoming sewage) and effluent (discharged treated sewage). As these risks become realized, treatment plant managers and decision-makers must know...
Airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) has become a popular remote sensing technology to create digital terrain models and provide forest inventory information. However, little research has been done to investigate the accuracy of using airborne LiDAR to perform measurement tasks common to Forest Engineering. This thesis contains two manuscripts...
Ground-based assessments of foliar diseases including leaf blight are time-consuming and costly. We investigated the potential for using an unmanned aerial system (UAS) in conjunction with a multispectral sensor to determine whether we could more efficiently and reliably detect and quantify leaf blight in Pacific madrones. Our methods included ground-based...
The global positioning system (GPS) has come into widespread use for many forestry applications. However, there is still some uncertainty as to how receivers perform in dense forest, where trees interfere with the GPS signal and increase error. These two manuscripts examine GPS accuracy and overall effectiveness within second growth...
Forests should be monitored and measured frequently to ensure its sustainability and continuity of carbon sequestration. However, conventional monitoring methods are costly and labor intensive. New technologies, such as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) can be used as an alternative method to monitor and measure forests. The objective of this study...
A special case of a parallel multiprocessor scheduling (MP) problem
is investigated. A set of jobs with a known process time and a.resource
requirement is scheduled on machines controlled by processors,and
the total changeover cost between jobs is to be minimized. Each processor
may control up to two machines and...