The Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico was home to one of the most intensively-studied archaic states in the New World. Centered at the hilltop city of Monte Albán, the Zapotec State first arose around 500 BC and eventually encompassed much of the present-day state of Oaxaca. But by the Late Classic...
Land managers, scientists, and the interested public are confronted with uncertainty about the impacts of salvage logging on soil productivity. In recent years, stand-replacing wildfires in the western United States have increased in frequency, prompting the need to evaluate the effect of post-fire treatments on forest ecosystem recovery. This study...
The Rusty Blackbird (Euphagus carolinus) has suffered significant population declines across its entire geographic range and the mechanisms associated with this decline are poorly understood. Although much of the Rusty Blackbird breeding habitat in Alaska has remained relatively unaltered by anthropogenic activities, this species continues to decline by an estimated...
Seed shattering is a constraint to improvement of seed yield in Lolium perenne L. and as a result, seed retention is an essential trait for this valuable crop. Field studies were conducted near Corvallis, OR in two years (2017-2018 and 2018-2019) to identify genetic variation for seed retention and to...
We develop the idea of risk transmission from large wildfires and apply network analyses to understand its importance on a 0.75 million ha US national forest. Wildfires in the western US frequently burn over long distances (e.g., 20-50 km) through highly fragmented landscapes with respect to ownership, fuels,
management intensity,...
Oceanic carbon cycling plays a major role in determining global atmospheric CO₂. A better understanding of dissolved organic matter and its constituents in the water column and how it affects marine carbon cycling is sought after. This study successfully measured osmolytes, low molecular zwitterionic compounds derived from amino acids, in...
This thesis considers one of the classical problems in the actuarial mathematics literature, the decay of the probability of ruin in the collective risk model. The
claim number process N(t) is assumed to be a renewal process, the resulting model
being referred as the Sparre Andersen risk model. The inter-claim...
Plant pathogenic Rhodococcus species are persistent pathogens able to cause severe growth deformities on a large range of hosts. The most well studied species, R. fascians is predicted by current models to synthesize a mixture of cytokinins that act to directly perturb the hosts' hormone balances, which results in abnormal...
Using temperature gradients measured in 10 holes at 6 sites, we generate the first high fidelity heat flow measurements from Integrated Ocean Drilling Program drill holes across the northern and central Lesser Antilles arc and back arc Grenada basin. The implied heat flow, after correcting for bathymetry and sedimentation effects,...