Wet meadow ecosystems are a useful natural laboratory in which to explore feedbacks between biogenic and geologic controls on valley bottom landforms. Characterized by flat valley floors flanked by higher-gradient hillslopes, these meadows are singular both in that they represent depositional features in what is primarily an erosional environment, and...
The scientific endeavors that took place at Hanford Engineer Works, beginning in World War II and continuing thereafter, are often overlooked in the literature on the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Energy Commission, and in regional histories. To historians of science, Hanford is described as an industrial facility that illustrates the...
This study describes and analyzes Oregon Trail related
exhibits of eleven museums and two interpretive centers
that are geographically located along the Oregon Trail
from Baker City, Oregon to Portland, Oregon. The exhibits
were featured at the facilities during the 1993 Oregon
Trail Sesquicentennial, a celebration that was initiated
and...
Over the last 25 years structural adjustment programs have challenged Ecuador's ability to provide adequate social services and employment opportunities. In the wake of these policies, many women have turned to non-governmental agencies for possible solutions and assistance. Empowerment programs as a form of development work in particular have been...
This dissertation integrates a process-based hydrological investigation with an
ongoing paired-catchment study to better understand how forest harvest impacts
catchment function at multiple scales. We do this by addressing fundamental questions
related to the stocks, flows and transit times of water. Isotope tracers are used within a
top-down catchment intercomparison...
Resilient water, food, and energy management strategies for an ever-growing population and changing environment depends on our understanding of water and carbon cycles from local to global scales. Fluxes of water and carbon are coupled by photosynthesis and plant transpiration cycles the largest fraction of terrestrial water from the land...
Micronesians are in the process of becoming independent nation-states after nearly a
century of colonial rule, including four decades of U.S. administration as the Trust
Territory of the Pacific Islands. Pressures to attain self-sufficiency have led many of these
island nations to embrace tourism as an economic development strategy. Meanwhile,...
As dams approach the end of their useful life, there is need to predict where and how accumulated sediment will move following their removal to estimate impacts on aquatic habitat and infrastructure. Flume studies suggest that sediment pulses disperse in place for most dams, but it is hypothesized that a...
Ungulate behavior has been studied extensively but direct observation of free-ranging animals over long periods of time and large geographic areas is often prohibitively difficult. Improved technology, such as GPS collars fitted with motion-sensitive activity monitors, provides researchers with a potential tool to remotely collect fine scale activity and location...
This thesis examines the concepts of power and participation and how they are intertwined in the examination of the urban planning systems in Curitiba, Brazil. Power is identified as both the planning system's ability to affect the daily lives of the city's residents and the power of individuals and groups...
Multiagent approaches are well suited to designing autonomous solutions for systems that feature complex interactions between many individuals such as in autonomous traffic systems and multi-robot exploration systems. However, creating autonomous agents that function effectively in these systems is a challenging task. In these complex environments, agents need informative reward...
The purpose of this annotated bibliography is to guide middle school and high school students into critical thinking about environmental issues. Through keen observation of their bioregion and through an integration of interdisciplinary literature which focuses on Oregon writers, students will be challenged to think, write, and discuss current issues...
This dissertation focuses on the life of Dixy Lee Ray as it examines important developments in marine biology and biological oceanography during the mid twentieth century. In addition, Ray's key involvement in the public understanding of science movement of the 1950s and 1960s provides a larger social and cultural context...
Autonomous agents that sense, decide, act, and coordinate effectively with each other are critical in many real-world domains such as autonomous driving, search and rescue missions, air traffic management, and underwater or deep space exploration. All such domains share a key difficulty: though high-level mission goals are clear to system...
Seeding is a vital tool to facilitate recovery of degraded ecosystems, but low seedling recruitment rates limit the utility of this practice in a range of ecosystems across the globe. Plant functional traits impact individual fitness through effects on growth, reproduction and survival. Consequently, seed and seedling trait variation among...
Understanding how the interactions and feedbacks between plant function, climate, and soils ultimately affects the terrestrial water balance and subsurface flow processes is major challenge in scientific hydrology. This dissertation summarizes the findings of a manipulative climate warming experiment, an observational field study that utilized stable-isotope tracers, and associated modeling...
Groundwater nitrate contamination is a well-documented issue in the Southern Willamette Valley (SWV) of Oregon, as a Groundwater Management Area (GWMA) has recently been declared. As a GWMA, groundwater nitrate monitoring must occur until regional concentrations are below 7 mg/L NO3-N. However, the presence of temporal variability can make it...
The Purpose of the Study
The central purpose of this study was to identify the common
competency elements deemed necessary for entry-level vocational
certification and to develop these elements into groups that would
serve as a basis for use in an occupational competency test. Questions
to be answered from the...
Coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) migration and spawning are unique components of the salmon life cycle because they require synchrony of behavior with other individuals as well as with acceptable fluvial conditions. As with other organisms that exhibit group mating behavior, it is likely that environmental cues trigger coho salmon movement...
Oregon Biography Index is intended to serve primarily as a starting point in locating biographies of Oregonians. We have indexed 47 historical volumes which are either entirely devoted to biographies or have large self-contained biographical sections. The profiles in the books vary widely in accuracy and detail. Birth dates of...
The focus of this thesis is to design, characterize, and apply novel computational methods and molecular systems to interrogate heterogeneous human gut microbiome-related phenomena. In Chapter 2, I design, implement, and characterize a method for embedding co-occurrence patterns derived from massive 16s amplicon datasets. I use this method to 1....
The purpose of this thesis is to understand the experiences that Nahua children, in rural Mexico, have as they attend schools that are primarily influenced by formal Western education in relation to their own ways of learning and knowing. This research took place over the course of three months within...
In 2017, the cost of congestion in the United States was around 305 billion dollars, and city-dwellers, on average, lost 1400 dollars while sitting 42 hours in traffic jams. Aiming for better mobility and more efficient utilization of the transportation network, emerging connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) technologies and their...
Ocean acidification (OA) is the result of increasing concentrations of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, leading to a suite of alterations to specific parameters of ocean chemistry, which can negatively impact many marine organisms and ecosystems. Understanding how to measure and monitor the chemistry of OA will require specialized education...
The focus of this dissertation is the analysis of submesoscale and finescale features measured at oceanic fronts and the role they play in the transport of heat and salt. Two different geographical areas were used to analyze this transport: one, an area on the western side of the North Atlantic...
Research on the population genetics of microbial organisms requires the use of specialized analyses designed for clonal organisms to avoid violating the assumptions of traditional population genetic models. The tools necessary for performing these analyses existed as a set of unrelated software with non-overlapping capabilities and did not cover all...
Despite advances in the understanding of rain-on-snow storms and their resulting peak flows, little is understood about the response of snowmelt to precipitation and the relative timing of the two at multiple temporal scales within such events. To address this issue, climate, snowmelt, and streamflow data were analyzed for 26...
The purpose of this study was to determine the attitudes of
three Oregon State Penitentiary minority inmate groups -
Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans - towards the Activities
Programs as a rehabilitative tool. Two other purposes
were to (1) determine significant differences among group
attitudes, and (2) determine the degree...
A linearized model with two vertical modes has been developed to understand observed characteristics of monthly variability in the Equatorial Pacific from TOPEX/POSEIDON measurements of Sea Surface Height (SSH). The 2-mode model is obtained from an equatorial beta plane model that has been linearized about a geostrophically balanced mean flow...
This document provides details of the Scientific and Social Programs at the NAAFE Forum 2015, Economic Sustainability, Fishing Communities, and Working Waterfronts, held in Ketchikan, Alaska, May 20-22, 2015. The conference was organized by Keith Criddle and Quentin Fong, University of Alaska Fairbanks, School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, with...