Climate change has the potential to accelerate many forms of human migration and mobility, yet almost all of the key migration outcomes of interest are determined predominantly by governance, or the norms, laws, and institutions involved in the coordination of human society. These outcomes include the decision whether or not...
Natural disasters are an increasingly costly and frequent occurrence globally and in the United States (IPCC, 2012; IPCC, 2014; Berlemann & Steinhardt, 2017). Discrete disaster events, such as coastal flooding, have been shown to be push factors in temporary and long-term migration (Black et al., 2013). Policy efforts to adapt...
The purpose of this study was to understand the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of shellfish stakeholders in the Pacific Northwest who are adapting to ocean acidification (OA). This study developed a geovisualization tool of existing environmental data for assessing species-specific risk profiles to OA (based on their exposure and sensitivity),...
The frontlines of climate change adaptation will occur in rural, impoverished regions of the world where households engage in climatically dependent livelihoods, such as peasant agriculture or pastoralism. As changing climate and changing markets affect the suite of household livelihood assets (environmental, social, and economic) which enable a household to...
On a global scale, illicit economies have dramatic impacts on the physical environment. Cocaine trafficking has been recognized as a major driver of deforestation inside Central American protected areas. A key problem in studying and managing the environmental impacts of illicit economic activity is the difficulty in obtaining reliable data....
In communities impacted by climate disasters, institutions largely determine the distribution of outcomes within a population. This research aims to examine the role of institutions in differential outcomes for displaced communities impacted by the 2020 Labor Day Wildfires in the Santiam Canyon and the Rogue Valley. Using semi-structured interviews of...
Environmental crime around the world, such as trafficking in illegal timber, is directly related to political instability. Traffickers exploit weak, fragile, and chaotic political circumstances to illegally extract high-value commodities, challenging the extent to which conservation goals are achievable in resource rich developing countries. Rosewood is the largest traded endangered...
Forests provide a wide range of timber and non-timber products along with providing a range of ecological services and support for biodiversity. Climate change poses various risks to forest health, as it can disrupt tree growth functions and trigger natural disturbances that increase tree mortality. In recent decades, altered disturbance...
In this work we introduce some basic concepts within homotopy type theory (HoTT), a proposed alternative mathematical foundation to classical set theory. In particular, our discussion revolves around the Axiom of Choice (AC). In Part I, we introduce the classical AC and some of its most important equivalents. In Part...
Forests are highly valuable resources providing both timber as well as many non-use values like habitat for various endangered and threatened species, carbon sequestration, and recreation, to name a few. Given that there are 765 million acres of forestland in the United States, almost 60% of which are privately owned,...
Computational statistical mechanics leans heavily on the class of Markov Chain Monte Carlo Algorithms. Many such algorithms exist, and simulations can run for several weeks, making the selection of algorithms a difficult, but critical task. In this work, we introduce a benchmark system of two quadratic wells with an analytical...
Nowadays, wireless communication systems use high-order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) together with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) to increase the link capacity and robustness. These signals always have large peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and require power amplifiers (PAs) achieve both high efficiency and linearity simultaneously. For the efficiency, the complementary metal...
The gm/ID-based design of analog integrated circuits introduced in 1996 employs an empirical transistor sizing methodology using SPICE-generated lookup tables that enables good agreement between simulations and specifications. This thesis introduces a new SPICE lookup table that extends the gm/ID approach to the Miller pole-splitting frequency compensation of the classical...
Sensor system plays an important role in connecting everything including human body to the electrical information systems that we have built and that we are going to build, to make the world more intelligent and efficient. One of the key propulsive forces behind these emerging techniques is CMOS scaling that...
The motor protein dynein is responsible for cellular processes such as axonal transport and cell division by delivering vital information along the microtubule track. A failed delivery can cause severe damage to the cell’s functionality and lead to neurological diseases. Despite dynein’s rich history in cellular research, the mechanism of...
This thesis uses a hedonic price model to estimate the value of water for irrigation in Deschutes County, Oregon. The analysis uses a dataset comprising information on 2,274 agricultural parcels across the County. Uniquely, the analysis successfully utilizes assessor-determined real market values in the place of actual land sales. A...
Private forest owners face an increasing risk of economic damage from extreme wildfires as the climate becomes warmer and drier. This thesis empirically estimates the influence of climate on private forest owners’ management decisions using plot-level data in the Pacific states of the U.S. Econometric models are specified where the...
Using summertime housing transactions data of 3,309 parcels from multiple years in Eugene-Springfield, OR, we present a hedonic price model to estimate the influence of the urban heat island (UHI) effect on housing prices in this metropolitan area. By taking advantage of the inherent random nature of summertime weather observations,...
The operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) is a fundamental building block in analog and mixed-signal systems. This research describes a process-, voltage-, and temperature- (PVT) insensitive low-voltage tracking RC compensation scheme considered for two-stage CMOS OTAs, which cancels the pole due to the load capacitance using a Miller zero generated by...
Deep Learning methods have been gaining a lot of significance for various Biomedical applications for diagnosing several types of diseases. Two applications considered here are: 1) Diabetic Retinopathy Detection and 2) ECG signal Classification (or Arrhythmia Detection). Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a major cause of blindness in Diabetic patients, and...