With the advent of next generation reactor systems and new fuel designs, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has identified the need for the resumption of transient testing of nuclear fuels. The DOE has decided that the Transient Reactor Test Facility (TREAT) at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is best suited...
Surface water quality is a growing concern in the Willamette River Basin and elsewhere. The region's growing population is dependent on the availability of clean water for drinking water, irrigation, wastewater dilution, and wildlife habitat. Watershed management to produce economic goods and environmental services requires an understanding of basic hydrologic...
The United States (US) Department of Energy (DOE) has identified the pebble-bed reactor as a high priority for US research with the end goal of licensing a pebble-bed reactor (PBR) for operation in the United States. Before this can be accomplished significant research must be done regarding the safety of...
The implementation of advanced hybrid (Monte Carlo/Deterministic) transport methods for realistic test problems has been a challenge due to the overhead efforts associated with interfacing a solution generated by a deterministic solver with a Monte Carlo based radiation transport code. In this work, with the help of Transpire, Inc., a...
In this dissertation, we study two risk models. First, we consider the dual risk process which models the surplus of a company that incurs expenses at a constant rate and earns random positive gains at random times. When the surplus is invested in a risky asset following a geometric Brownian...
Forest growth and yield models are critical to supporting decision making in forestry, but often lack considerations for wood properties. The feasibility of simulating wood properties in the context of a Douglas-fir individual tree growth and yield model was evaluated. This assessment explored the effect of predicted sapwood width, stem...
Marine systems undergo changes in community composition over time as a result of a variety of environmental and anthropogenic factors. Understanding these community changes and the factors that drive them is critical for ecosystem management of marine resources. The Gulf of Alaska (GOA) is a large marine ecosystem that includes...
Temperature is a key factor for salmonid health and is an important restoration metric on the Middle Fork of the John Day River in northeast Oregon. In the past century, dredge mining, deforestation, and overgrazing have degraded stream habitat and resulted in greater daytime stream temperatures in the region. Recent...
Many problems in ecology and conservation biology can be formulated and solved using machine learning algorithms for multi-label classification. This dissertation addresses three topics related to predicting the distributions of multiple species. It improves existing methods and proposes a new modeling paradigm to address the multi-species, multi-label problem. The first...
The issue of global climate change and an increasing interest in the reduction of fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions by using forest biomass for energy production has increased the importance of quantifying forest biomass in recent years. The official U.S. forest carbon reporting is based on the forest biomass estimates...