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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Vietnam is considered one of the most climate change-vulnerable countries due to its high dependence on agriculture and its coastal location. Increased atmospheric temperatures caused by climate change also significantly threaten one of Vietnam's most important cash crops, robusta coffee (Coffea canephora). Suitable cultivation sites of robusta, which comprises 97%...
Today, there are six extant species of sea lion around the world, with the seventh (the Japanese sea lion) already having gone extinct due to a lack of proper conservation management. Because each of the surviving 6 sea lion species differ slightly in their anatomy, behavior, reproduction, and local habitats,...
Abalone (Haliotis) are an iconic species all over the world. They play a vital role in maintaining a healthy coastal ecosystem and hold an important cultural value for coastal communities in California. Almost all wild abalone in California are threatened in some way. The black and white abalone are listed...
This project provides insight on the current state of forest management policy, as it relates to climate change in the United States. It analyzes the current statutory framework that governs the management of National Forests and administrative Executive Orders that can determine federal agency direction. A comparative analysis is conducted...
Variation in cheese quality due to geographic location is important to cheese producers, consumers, and retailers on a global level. Understanding the impacts of geographic location of cheese plants may be useful to businesses for marketing, cost reduction, and quality improvement. Many aspects of variation due to geography have been...
The Professional Science Master’s program requires all graduates to complete an internship and prepare a descriptive report in lieu of a master’s thesis. In 2009 I concluded a three-month full-time internship with the Institute for Natural Resources (INR). Oregon Explorer (OE) is a collaborative effort between INR and Oregon State...
This paper discusses Java Bytecode Obfuscation techniques that make the reverse engineering task more difficult. This paper is structured as follows: Java virtual machine and Java language specifications are discussed first. Then the paper talks about different techniques for protecting software and then details one promising approach named Obfuscation. The...
Shape transformation is a technique for gradually changing one geometric shape to another. A recent approach presents the use of thin-plate radial basis functions as opposed to traditional "blobby sphere" implicit functions. Without the explicit evaluation of he energy function, this approach combined the two traditional steps into one by...
Personalization is defined as a process that facilitates interaction among consumers and providers such that individual consumers are enabled to more readily access the content and services of providers, and individual providers are enabled to more effectively and easily deliver their content and services to consumers. This project presents a...
This project is about helping protein naturalists understand the protein structure. The database system developed here provides a convenient tool for scientists to explore conformational information in a database of known structures and thereby provide researchers with a deeper and wider view of the empirical data. In this way, it...
'Search engine for a book library section' was developed for the Philosophy department. This Search Engine is a user interface application used for the purpose of searching for words or phrases as the need may be from a directory of books in a section of the Philosophy department library. The...
As XML becomes more and more popular, easy-to-use and powerful XML query languages are in great need. Xing is a visual query and restructuring language for XML documents. The objective of this project is to develop a basic version of Xing, including a user-oriented XML query interface and a simple...
Monitoring the performance of electrical utility assets is a critical activity for power companies. Gas chromatography has long been established as the analytical technique of choice for assessment of transformer fault conditions by detection of the presence of key fault gases through analysis of transformer oil. Chromatography is one of...