Natural events such as wildfires, floods, and storms can significantly alter the short-term structure and functioning of natural systems. Recreation in wilderness areas is one instance in which individuals are directly exposed to post-disturbance landscapes. Consequently, public land managers may be faced with a different set of challenges stemming from...
A method based on fatty acid (FA) analysis is used to profile microbial community structure (MCS). Various extraction protocols are available, which alter the types of FAs extracted from soils. The more time consuming but widely used protocol extracts only FAs from phospholipids (PLFA). This technique is desirable because PLFAs...
Marine sediments exceptionally rich in organic carbon, known as black shales, occur globally but intermittently in well correlated Cretaceous successions. The presence of black shales indicates that sporadic, ocean-wide interruption of normal respiration of marine organic matter during oxygen-deficient conditions has occurred. Submarine volcanism on a massive scale, related to...
Accurate scaled modeling and simulation are critical to advancing ocean wave linear generator buoys. A 100th scaled model of ocean wave generator buoy systems is analyzed by solving the Navier-Stokes equations. These equations are numerically solved using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) by implementing the front capturing method. In this thesis,...
Light-frame construction practices and materials have changed greatly
over the past 100 years. Contemporary research has focused on modern construction; thus, we know a great deal about the behavior of modern lightframe buildings under lateral forces. However, there are many light-frame buildings that were built prior to the introduction of...
The purpose of this study was to understand how refrigeration, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (RHVAC) service technicians (techs) learned from troubleshooting. This understanding resulted in instructional and curricular strategies designed to help community colleges prepare vocational students to learn more effectively from informal workplace learning. RHVAC techs were studied...
Lateral heel wedge orthotics are designed to reduce medial tibiofemoral joint loading and pain in patients with knee osteoarthritis (OA). To date, the efficacy of long-term lateral heel wedge orthotics use among OA patients has not been determined. This study evaluated the extent to which lateral heel wedge orthotics reduced...
Power reduction can be achieved at many different levels, such as architecture, algorithm, logic, and transistor levels in circuit design. This thesis focuses on low power scheduling at the algorithm level. We present a latency-constrained scheduling and a latency and resource constrained scheduling, which minimize power consumption for the resources...
Consists largely of tables summarizing various hatchery and game farm expenditures, numbers of trout handled at different life stages and locations, and also game fish/pheasants liberated.
This paper presents a framework for analyzing efficient spatial allocation of forest
management efforts - fuel treatment and harvest - under the risk of fire. The framework
integrates a fire behavior model and a spatially-explicit stochastic dynamic optimization
model. I investigate the effects of spatial interaction across plots during forest...
Animal signaling systems frequently utilize multiple traits to produce and transmit a signal. These system elements may span multiple levels of organization. Functional integration of these traits may be expected to generate concordance in evolutionary pattern among system elements, such that evolutionary change in one system component is correlated with...
An analytical model is developed to address the question of how different disturbance
regimes affect the mean and variance of landscape carbon storage in forest ecosystems. Total landscape carbon is divided into five pools based on the processes from which they are derived and based on their temporal dynamics. Formulae...
Riparian areas are eco-tones where aquatically- and terrestrially-derived insect biomass is exchanged between habitats, presenting consumers with new sources of energy, and resulting in a reciprocal subsidy. The relative contribution of energy exchange and the
resulting impacts on vertebrate riparian consumers, such as fish or birds, remains poorly understood. We...