The black-footed ferret is a meso-predator within the Great Plains region of North America. Before the 1900s, black-footed ferret populations were self-sustaining in large ecological patches throughout the geographical range of the Great Plains. During the 1900s, various factors such as the systematic extermination of prairie dogs (the primary food...
Given the recent attention to dams in developing countries as a means to efficiently utilize water resources, mitigating the negative environmental and social impacts they have on riparian states is of utmost importance. This thesis presents a global review of how basin countries, through international water treaties (IWT), ensure that...
Motion planning is a cornerstone of autonomous robots, enabling robots to safely and efficiently perform tasks such as package delivery, infrastructure inspection, and manipulation. However, as the field of robotics matures, robotic systems are being developed that (1) are challenging to analytically model, (2) require computationally expensive model-based controllers, and...
Aperiodic structures cause significant challenges to subtractive manufacturing methods due to the common features such as inaccessible voids within the structure. Additive man- ufacturing presents an appealing alternative for this purpose. The aim of this research is to test analysis heuristics for validity through application to periodic structures. First, a...
This paper addresses the high model complexity and overconfident frame labeling of state-of-the-art (SOTA) action segmenters. Their complexity is typically justified by the need to sequentially refine action segmentation through multiple stages of a deep architecture. However, this multistage refinement does not take into account uncertainty of frame labeling predicted...
When pavement markings on roadways are removed, scarring can occur leaving behind traces of where the marking used to be called ghost lines. These ghost lines can confuse drivers on the roadway and divert their attention from the correct lane markings leading them into the false lane. Previous research has...
The Goose Lake Basin, situated on the border of Oregon and California, USA, faces significant challenges from drought, wildfire, and other environmental stressors. This region hosts numerous endemic fish species such as the Goose Lake redband trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss newberri), Goose Lake lamprey (Entosphenus sp.), Goose Lake tui chub (Siphateles...
The following taxonomic keys are adapted in part from the subgeneric and species descriptions and keys produced by McGinley (2003), Gibbs et al. (2013) and Gardner and Gibbs (2022). Additional identification information was provided by Jason Gibbs, Thilina Hettiarachchi (University of Manitoba), and Joel Gardner (Washington State University). While these...
In some legislative bodies, the use of terms like climate change and global warming is frequently seen as taboo. In the United States, voters who identify as right-leaning have reported little concern about the environment or climate change. This lack of interest is mirrored by Republican legislators who often publicly...
This work explores the mechanical properties of single-phase niobium alloy C103 from room temperature to 600°C for the purpose of expanding safe uses of the material into new applications. The study utilizes a symmetrically notched triaxial tensile specimens to manipulate the internal stress field in order to observe the changes...
In a recent effort to strengthen active preservation strategies, Oregon State University Libraries committed to conducting a multi-part annual preservation assessment for our institutional repository, focusing on the sustainability of file formats. This spring we conducted the first assessment, gathered a lot of data, and uncovered a few holes in...
A variety of important machine learning applications require predictions on test data with different characteristics than the data on which a model was trained and validated. In particular, test data may have a different relative frequency of positives and negatives (i.e., class distribution) and/or different mislabeling costs of false positive...
Oregon's estuaries are important ecosystems for scientific study. Consequently, knowledge of what research has been conducted helps us identify benchmarks and plan new projects. A comprehensive bibliography of published research, technical reports, local documents, and data sets is one means of recording this knowledge. For these reasons, the Guin Library...
Oregon's estuaries are important ecosystems for scientific study. Consequently, knowledge of what research has been conducted helps us identify benchmarks and plan new projects. A comprehensive bibliography of published research, technical reports, local documents, and data sets is one means of recording this knowledge. For these reasons, the Guin Library...
Oregon's estuaries are important ecosystems for scientific study. Consequently, knowledge of what research has been conducted helps us identify benchmarks and plan new projects. A comprehensive bibliography of published research, technical reports, local documents, and data sets is one means of recording this knowledge. For these reasons, the Guin Library...
Oregon's estuaries are important ecosystems for scientific study. Consequently, knowledge of what research has been conducted helps us identify benchmarks and plan new projects. A comprehensive bibliography of published research, technical reports, local documents, and data sets is one means of recording this knowledge. For these reasons, the Guin Library...
Oregon's estuaries are important ecosystems for scientific study. Consequently, knowledge of what research has been conducted helps us identify benchmarks and plan new projects. A comprehensive bibliography of published research, technical reports, local documents, and data sets is one means of recording this knowledge. For these reasons, the Guin Library...
Oregon's estuaries are important ecosystems for scientific study. Consequently, knowledge of what research has been conducted helps us identify benchmarks and plan new projects. A comprehensive bibliography of published research, technical reports, local documents, and data sets is one means of recording this knowledge. For these reasons, the Guin Library...
Oregon's estuaries are important ecosystems for scientific study. Consequently, knowledge of what research has been conducted helps us identify benchmarks and plan new projects. A comprehensive bibliography of published research, technical reports, local documents, and data sets is one means of recording this knowledge. For these reasons, the Guin Library...
Resident and migratory avifauna in the Willamette Valley, Oregon are heavily influenced by winter conditions and habitat characteristics, especially those of wetlands. As such, it is important to monitor avian communities and environmental factors at wetland sites within the Willamette Valley during winter. Using data from standardized avian point-count surveys,...
Many academic libraries have a strong commitment to open scholarship articulated in strategic planning goals, values statements and policy documents. These ideals exist next to a scholarly communication landscape dominated by corporate publishers, paywalls and licensing agreements that center subscriptions and title lists. Our organizational structures, reflected in our budgets...
Oregon State University Libraries and Press is invested in providing high quality research data repository services through the OSU institutional repository, ScholarsArchive@OSU. As the product owner for ScholarsArchive@OSU and the lead of the OSULP Research Data Services program, respectively, we present the following report assessing that quality based on widely...
The Andrews Forest Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site has a long-term partnership with the University of Oregon Environmental Leadership Program (ELP), providing service-learning opportunities for undergraduate students to facilitate field trips for middle school students to the Andrews LTER site. Undergraduate students develop field trip lessons based on Andrews Forest...
One of the most economically important genes in squash (Cucurbita spp.) is the B gene which conditions precocious depletion of chlorophyll in preanthesis fruit. The B genes are found naturally occurring in at least three of the five domesticated species of Cucurbita, including C. pepo, C. maxima and, most recently...
Estimating how large instream wood (LW) may impact local hydraulics is critical both for mitigating flood hazards and for ensuring intended habitat benefits of the LW are produced. In practice, the design of forms such as LW is limited by a lack of mechanistic tools for estimating how LW features...
Using supervised machine learning (ML) to train a computer vision model typically requires human annotators to label objects in images and video. Given a large training dataset, this can be labor intensive, presenting a significant bottleneck in the model-development process. LabelFlicks is an open-source desktop application that aims to address...
An Evaluation Report for the Oregon Department of Education.
In collaboration with classroom teachers and WRAP personnel we developed and implemented a survey to collect baseline data on the science and arts teaching practices for ALL elementary teachers. This included “regular” classroom teachers (those teachers with an assigned physical classroom...
Beginning in 2020, the International Maritime Organization International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) required vessels to comply with new sulfur air emission standards in Sulphur Emission Control Areas (Baltic Sea, North Sea, and off the coasts of the US and Canada) by: 1) using 0.1% sulfur...
Background:
The number of people diagnosed with chronic physical conditions is increasing in the United States. Chronic mental illnesses are also common in the country. Low-income women and those on Medicaid bear a disproportionate burden of chronic conditions and these conditions significantly contribute to obstetric morbidity. Prioritizing preventive measures and...
Hydrogels have been attractive for use as a medium in porous flow studies,
but have always been limited in this role because of their poor mechanical properties.
This project analyzes and tests two recently developed hydrogels,
poly(methacrylamide-co-methacrylic acid) (PMM), and a heat-treated long chain
PVA hydrogel. Particle image velocimetry (PIV)...
Mechanisms of aging and age-related diseases are not completely understood in humans. Studying model organisms like Drosophila melanogaster, also known as the common fruit fly, can help humans better understand the aging process and diseases related to aging. From previous studies demonstrated in Drosophila, an accelerated aging model has been...
In eastern Washington and western Oregon, southwest-northeast striking thrust faults and folds of the Yakima Fold and Thrust Belt (YFTB) and northwest-striking dextral strike-slip faults accommodate north-south contraction resulting from clockwise rotation of the North American Plate. Though present to the east and west of the Cascade Range, the connectivity...
Rhizopus microsporus is a globally ubiquitous opportunistic human and plant pathogen that is known to harbor endosymbiotic bacteria. Differences between populations of clinical and environmental R. microsporus isolates have yet to be assessed on a global scale. Whole-genome sequence data were used to explore fungal biology and to assess potential...
The gut microbiome of all mammals is composed of a diverse commune of microorganisms including bacteria, fungi, archaea, protozoa and viruses 1. Studies have shown a symbiotic relationship between the gut microbiome and host physiology, with there being implications in health and disease progression 2. In captive animals, there has...
Wildfires can create alternative pathways for forest development, and wildfires have expanded in size, frequency, intensity, and severity across the western United States. The purpose of this paper is to compare forest development of a mature Douglas-fir forest in western Oregon across fire severities. Postburn field measurements were collected in...
Scientists have long recognized that bees and other insects respond to floral color, including ultraviolet (UV) floral patterns that are invisible to the human eye. While previous research has focused on isolating and capturing these UV markings in laboratory settings, methods that could be used in natural settings needed to...
The Pacific Islander diaspora in the Pacific Northwest United States is a unique community characterized by diverse cultures, experiences, and motivations for migration. This study aimed to explore the narratives of individuals from different Pacific Islander backgrounds residing in Oregon, shedding light on their reasons for migration and the impact...
The counseling profession has historically adopted a one-size-fits-all approach toward addressing bereavement. However, there is an emerging paradigm-shift in grief therapy that has been enabled by recent research that differentiates, for example, between types of grief and styles of grieving. This research project contributes to this nuanced approach to grief...
The study collected data using ARCGIS Field Maps from a field survey of plants at six (6) sites in Fairfield County, CT. The sites included three (3) urban and three (3) suburban locations. A primary goal of this study was to determine whether there are differences in the extent of...
RF data-driven device fingerprinting through the use of deep learning has recently surfaced as a possible method for secure device identification and authentication. Traditional approaches are commonly susceptible to the domain adaptation problem where a model trained on data from one domain performs badly when tested on data from a...
To facilitate the design of Natural and Nature-Based Features (NNBF) for flood protection, this thesis expands an existing engineering design methodology to NNBF systems. The existing approach is a Level III reliability method for the performance-based design of traditional coastal engineering systems. The expanded methodology incorporates uncertainties inherent to both...
Walking is the single most universal mode of transportation in the world, but being a pedestrian exposes a traveler to high risk. Historically, pedestrians have consistently experienced disproportionately high rates of fatalities and severe injuries in traffic crashes. Research has probed into factors influencing pedestrian crash injury severity outcomes, but...
Oregon has one of the five highest homeless occupancy rates in the U.S., according to the Annual Homeless Assessment Report (2021). Using the current governor of Oregon’s (Tina Kotek) plan to decrease homelessness, which focuses primarily on housing developments and strategies, this study will first examine the merits of permanent...
This thesis presents innovative pedagogical approaches to teach fundamental Computer Science (CS) concepts, such as abstraction, representation, algorithms, and computation utilizing manipulatives, which are physical objects that students interact with to teach or reinforce a concept. Teaching and learning with manipulatives has a long history in science and mathematics education,...
Cannabis production has gained popularity over the last 10 years. There is a growing demand for true-to-type grain, fiber, and resin crops. Breeding for homozygous trait development with traditional methods can take as long as 8 years. With dihaploid breeding, homozygosity can be achieved in 2 generations saving breeders time...
In many on-campus classes, collaborative projects engage students in shared creative experiences. Verbal and nonverbal interactions within the classroom provide lessons in group decision-making, brainstorming, teamwork, and leadership. This type of interaction is more challenging for students taking online classes. Virtual Reality (VR) can potentially be an alternative to this...
Groundwater overdraft in the Wilcox Groundwater Basin, as a consequence of increasing rates of agricultural groundwater withdrawal, has led to significant regional groundwater level decline and threatens to undermine the basin’s long-term water resource security. Updated characterization of the basin’s water resource conditions and agricultural water demand is critically important...
Since research data services were first offered within our institutional repository, community interest and dataset deposit counts have both grown steadily. While primarily focused on housing traditional scholarship and publications, the institutional repository also provides a discipline-agnostic storage and access solution for datasets for the university. Given a landscape in...
Advanced geomatics tools such as robotic and terrestrial laser scanners have the potential to significantly improve the progress monitoring of construction sites throughout their life cycle, particularly in the concrete structures, from the initial stage to cracking the ground for excavation and shoring to outdoor pouring of concrete at above...