Wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) were first successfully introduced into Oregon and Washington in the 1960s; the population has grown in size and expanded in distribution to a point where it provides an important recreational hunting opportunity in both states that generates significant funds for habitat conservation and contributes financially to...
Two of the most powerful ways in which humans have altered ecosystems are by increasing productivity and changing the densities of important consumers. The bottom-up effects of productivity and the top-down effects of consumers have been identified as primary determinants of biological diversity, though the links between them remain unclear....
Urban stormwater runoff contains pollutants that have a detrimental effect on pond water quality and watershed water quality. Stormwater best management practices (BMPs), such as a constructed wetland, can treat these pollutants through processes like infiltration, adsorption, and plant uptake. It is hypothesized that the surface-runoff fed pond at Bruce...
Ecosystems are facing increasing threats from human related activities, such as overfishing, pollution, habitat destruction, species invasions, and diseases, among others. While oceanic islands provide natural laboratories to understand ecological and evolutionary process, they are also particularly vulnerable to these impacts, given their usual isolation from the mainland and the...
Lichens play many important roles in subarctic terrestrial ecosystems by fixing nitrogen, colonizing rock and gravel, stabilizing otherwise bare soil, adding significantly to vegetation biodiversity and serving as the primary food for caribou in the winter. In these chapters, I analyzed lichen community and ecological trait structure along environmental gradients,...
The North Pacific humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) population has been increasing at an average annual rate of ~6% since the early 1990s. In northern Southeast Alaska alone, there are now more whales than estimated for the entire North Pacific several decades ago. An understanding of how this growing population is...
One of the tasks of inequality reasoning is to determine the relationship between two quantities for any given set of qualitative constraints. For implementation of this kind of reasoning, Simmons [1] has provided a technique called the "graph search" (GS). This paper briefly reviews GS technique, then presents an implementation...
The multifaceted role of the environment in regulating the structure and dynamics of biological communities has long fascinated ecologists and motivated much debate and research. Now, in a time of accelerated global changes due to human impacts, the need to understand how the environment shapes communities has gained new urgency....
In this thesis an introduction to simulation and object oriented programming discusses the need for the creation of several classes which directly support object oriented simulation. The author places no restrictions on the type of simulations that can be conducted and simulation practitioners will find that the classes provided lay...