Headwater streams and their riparian zones are a common, yet poorly understood,
component of Pacific Northwest landscapes. I sought to describe the ecological significance of
headwater stream riparian zones as habitat for forest-floor invertebrate communities, and to
assess how alternative management strategies for riparian zones may impact these communities.
I...
I researched depictions of dragons in several works of modern literature to conceptualize what a dragon looks like and how they generally function in popular media. From there, I researched several key characteristics of dragons to see how they work with science’s current understanding. I looked into size and scaling,...
The relationship between attitudes toward energy and conservation
behavior was studied in the context of sociodemographic and housing
characteristics. Data were obtained by mail survey from a random sample
of 1,503 Oregon households (Western Regional Agricultural Experiment
Station Project, W-159). The return rate was 55 percent (834).
Attitudes toward energy...
Although deep reinforcement learning agents have produced impressive results in many domains, their decision making is difficult to explain to humans. To address this problem, past work has mainly focused on explaining why an action was chosen in a given state. A different type of explanation that is useful is...
This dissertation delves into understanding, characterizing, and addressing dataset shift in deep learning, a pervasive issue for deployed machine learning systems. Integral aspects of the problem are examined: We start with the use of counterfactual explanations in order to characterize the behavior of deep reinforcement learning agents in visual input...
The term "interaction" in evolutionary biology and ecology
describes the relationships among variables in two classes of causal
models. In the first, "interaction" refers to the influence of a
single putatively causal variable on a variable of interest. In the
second class of models, the term applies when a third...
An automatic, continuous analyzer has been developed which
is suitable for estimating the level of spent sulfite liquors (SSL) in
laboratory samples. The analyzer makes use of a version of the
Pearl-Benson, or nitroso method, and, in its present form, is
useful for samples whose actual SSL solids concentrations are...
Breeding ecology and behavior were investigated in a field study of three sympatric anuran amphibians in the Oregon Cascade Mountains: the western toad (Bufo
boreas), the Cascades frog (Rana cascadae) and the Pacific treefrog (Hyla regilla). A comprehensive study of the western toad mating system was conducted at three populations...