Monitoring wildlife habitats has become important to forest ecosystem management because it provides valuable information about the response of forests and their species to harvest practices, impacts from recreational use, conservation efforts, and natural and human-caused disturbances. Monitoring is a complex task that requires a variety of abiotic and biotic...
There are more than 87,000 chemicals in current use with little to no toxicity information available. Assessing such a large number of chemicals using traditional methods would take an unreasonable amount of time and money, and require the use a large number of animals. The incorporation of high-throughput in vivo...
Met is a prognostic indicator of colorectal cancer patient survival. Therapies that target Met may therefore have beneficial outcomes in the clinic. Recently, EGCG was reported to suppress Met activation, although the mechanisms were not elucidated. HCT116 and HT29 human colon cancer cells were used to examine the relationships between...
Forest management is rapidly undergoing a transformation from a discipline based on efficient commodity production to one for multiple uses, especially on federally managed land in the United States. This new management paradigm has challenged silviculturists to develop and adapt forest management techniques that can deal with increased demands. Using...
Obesity is a complex multifactorial disease resulting from excessive energy intake compared to energy expenditure. The excess energy is mostly stored as fat in enlarged adipocytes, but some lipids may infiltrate other organs such as the liver to form ectopic fat. Adipose tissue and ectopic fat produce and secrete a...
Alcoholic liver disease (ALD) continues to be one of the major public health problems in the United States and worldwide. Complicated by factors including gender, polymorphisms of alcohol-metabolizing enzymes, immunologic factors, exposures to other substances/drugs, hepatic viral infections, nutritional deficiencies, and obesity, ALD is a complex disease that requires a...
The studies described in this thesis were motivated by ongoing efforts to develop lignocellulosic biomass as an efficient and practical source of renewable energy. Enormous problems complicate these efforts to reduce reliance on greenhouse gas-generating fossil fuels. Simply obtaining the fermentable sugars available in the cellulose and hemicellulose components of...
Obesity and metabolic syndrome (MetS) affect over 1.9 billion adults and 12.7 million youth in the US. If all of today’s obese American youth become obese adults, the total societal costs over their lifetime may exceed $1.1 trillion. We show that feeding rodents a high-fat diet supplemented with xanthohumol (XN)...
The rare earth elements (REEs) have been established as powerful tracers for a range of physiochemical processes occurring in the natural environment. They also hold significant economic importance as many technological advancements are reliant upon the REEs for their unique magnetic, luminescent, and electrochemical characteristics. In sedimentary settings, understanding the...
The use of Native American fire regimes evolved in the Klamath-Siskiyou bioregion over millennia. A mixture of Native American and Euro-American socio-cultural management has developed from adaptations to climate, topography, ecological processes, and land use practices. This research incorporates Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to partially examine the role of tribal...