The nearshore waters off the Oregon coast (< 73 meters) are a region of high productivity and economic value, with a variety of habitats that include rock outcrops. Temperate reef habitats are important to many commercially important fishes inhabiting the Pacific coast, including canary rockfish (Sebastes pinniger) and yelloweye rockfish...
Tacrolimus is an immunosuppressant drug approved by the FDA for the prevention of organ transplant rejection. However, the use of this drug is hindered by its narrow therapeutic window and extreme insolubility in water. Due to these properties, the currently used tacrolimus preparations must be administered once or twice daily...
Reinforcement learning has made impressive strides in solving problems in challenging domains, but problems are increasingly being described with sparse rewards. Sparse rewards directly reduce the rate at which useful feedback is provided to the learner and make it difficult to distinguish between what specific actions led to the reception...
When decision makers work collaboratively, their combined performance can exceed the performance of even the best group member working alone. However, despite the potential for performance gains when working in a group, collaborating individuals often show poor coordination and losses of motivation, and are generally inefficient at combining their resources...
Electrochemical sensing provides a quantitative alternative to colorimetric reactions within paper-based devices. The paper-based devices were fabricated by screen printing the conductive and reference inks onto porous substrates that were evaluated using cyclic voltammetry. Devices were evaluated based on the magnitude of the average anodic peak height, which correlates with...
Automated systems have become increasingly important to human decision making and task performance in a wide variety of complex fields and situations. Decision aids, a specific form of automation, assist human operators in making complex decisions under conditions of uncertainty, such as air traffic control or combat identification. When humans...
The FOCUS (Forest, Organisms, Creeks yoU Study) field trip program was developed to provide elementary students in Benton County, Oregon with a hands-on, environmental education experience at Beazell Memorial Forest. Students participated in activities dedicated to specific habitats and organisms found at Beazell that built upon their learning at school....
Human alteration of natural landscapes leads to biodiversity loss, often from a combination of area effects and fragmentation effects. Smaller habitat patches support fewer species than large ones and incur additional consequences from isolation. Efforts to preempt biodiversity loss from insular habitat fragments are complicated by individualistic species responses and...
Birds perform valuable ecological functions and are useful environmental indicators. Avian distributions and diversity are predicted to change over the next 50 years. Little information exists on the role of local and regional conditions in fluctuations of avian communities over time. Historic datasets present a legacy of information that helps...