One goal of the Oregon Library Association's Vision 2010 is to promote a strong and diverse workforce throughout all of the state's libraries. The forecasted shortage of librarians in the next decade prompted the OLA Board to request a demographic study of Oregon's libraries. A simple survey was adminstered at...
At Oregon State University, we are exploring the differences between collections formed by digitizing existing materials on our shelves and those created by identifying and acquiring digital objects beyond our library. One example is the proposed Tsunami Digital Library (TDL) that would support a growing research program with users needing...
This is a listing of both PhD and Master's· theses relating to the areas of forestry issued during the period from July 1976 to June 1981. The
list is arranged first by state, then by college or university within each state. Authors of theses are arranged alphabetically under each of...
This is a bibliography of doctoral dissertations and masters' theses in forestry and related topics issued during the period from July 1981 through June 1990. The colleges and universities included are all accredited by the Society of American Foresters. The actual listings were supplied by the individual institutions. Topics covered...
This annotated bibliography was prepared for the Salmon Anchor Habitat Work Group. This group was formed by the Oregon Department of Forestry to review and evaluate the Salmon Anchor Habitat Strategy as directed by the 2003 Oregon Legislature. The Salmon Anchor Habitat Strategy is a component of management plans developed...
The purpose of this study was to explore the phenomenon of community colleges creating pathways to degree completion in professional-technical programs by breaking degree programs into smaller portions, referred to as "chunks." The purpose or possible advantage of chunking was that it would improve the rate of degree completion among...
This research was designed to broaden the understanding of how timber-harvest affects aquatic macroinvertebrates in perennial and intermittent headwater streams. This study compared emergent and benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages from 20 headwater streams in the central Oregon Coast Range that varied by harvest condition and flow duration. Through comparison of the...
Although the question of free will has persisted throughout the history of philosophy as an important metaphysical consideration, rarely does the inquiry include empirical evidence from other disciplines concerned with human behavior. In this interdisciplinary paper, I combine the wisdom of psychologists, metaphysicians, and philosophers of science to comment on...
Island systems and species are susceptible to extinction because of their small population size and an ecological naiveté from an evolutionary past lacking strong competition and predation. For example, only one-fifth of the world’s bird species occur on islands, yet more than 90% of the avian extinctions witnessed during historic...
For the first objective of this thesis, we attempt to understand the role of water flow and directionality in determining steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss) and spring/summer and fall Chinook (O. tschawytscha) migration patterns within the Columbia River Estuary and plume by integrating recent advances in biotelemetry and environmental observation and forecasting...
Traditionally linear actuator applications are addressed by the use of hydraulic systems. The high maintenance cost and poor reliability will always be the most critical problem in the real applications. Benefited from both the high mechanical advantage of the roll screw and the simple structure of the switched reluctance motor,...
Recent studies of headwater streams have demonstrated their importance to overall watershed biodiversity, nutrient cycling, and energy flux. However, little attention has been paid to long-term effects of forest harvest on macroinvertebrate communities in headwater streams. This study investigated headwater stream macroinvertebrate communities in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Oregon,...
This dissertation concentrates on the controlling factors on the instability of the Laurentide Ice Sheet (LIS) and their effects on abrupt climate change. Northern Hemisphere climate fluctuated abruptly during the last deglaciation possibly related to variability in Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) and reduced aerial extent of the LIS. Reductions...
Radiotelemetry was used to study the seasonal movements and habitat use of adult westslope cutthroat trout Oncorhynchus clarki lewisi in Roberts
Creek and Rail Creek, headwater tributaries of the John Day River, Oregon,
from September 2000 to December 2001. The objectives were to (1)
describe adult cutthroat trout life history...
Previous observations of light levels and phytoplankton abundances along the Oregon coast demonstrated that phytoplankton attenuated light sufficiently to potentially limit the growth of intertidal macrophytes and therefore structure local intertidal communities. Inspired by this observation, in spring 2004, I initiated a study to quantify the direct and indirect benthic...
The impact of forest roads on the hydrology of forested watersheds has long been studied. While forest roads have been reported to alter storm runoff at the road segment scale, the potential for changes to be detectable at the small watershed scale has been debated. The purpose of this study...
This study investigated whether a device commonly used to measure settlement of mussel larvae for ecological studies, the Tuffy™, functions uniformly whether placed in a bed of filamentous algae or on bare rock. During the summers of 2004 and 2005, the number of mussel larvae settling on Tuffys in patches...
Two of the most powerful ways in which humans have altered ecosystems are by increasing productivity and changing the densities of important consumers. The bottom-up effects of productivity and the top-down effects of consumers have been identified as primary determinants of biological diversity, though the links between them remain unclear....
Molecular genetic and enzymological techniques have been employed to study antibiotic biosynthesis. In this thesis, we studied the formation and modification of the nonproteinogenic amino acid enduracididine (End), which exists in two important antibiotics, mannopeptimycins (MPPs) and enduracidin.
Sequence analysis of the MPP gene cluster revealed that the product of...
Section I contains an introduction to the subject of Scientific Evidence Review. Section II reviews Oregon state mandates to use “best available science” in policymaking and summarizes ODF efforts to address these mandates. Section III provides an overview of Systematic Evidence Reviews and how they are conducted in the fields...
Conventional register files spread porting resources uniformly across all registers. This paper proposes a method called Asymmetric Clustering using a Register Cache (ACRC). ACRC utilizes a fast register cache that concentrates valuable register file ports to the most active registers thereby reducing the total register file area and power consumption....
The primary responsibility of electric utilities is to supply consistent, dependable, and affordable energy to private customers, businesses, and industries. As with many businesses, electric utilities are experiencing the effects of an aging workforce and expending considerable resources to train their current and replacement workers. Community colleges can partner with...
Seabirds are an integral component of marine ecosystems, however, because humans typically observe only snapshots of their lives at sea, our understanding of seabird foraging ecology is often limited. A more complete understanding of the ecological roles of seabirds and identification of critical foraging habitats requires the ability to follow...
Curricular models and teaching techniques that support college students as the primary authors of their writing-across-the-curriculum experiences remain largely unexplored. This thesis addresses that research gap by investigating the use of a start-of-term writing self-assessment and goal-setting questionnaire (STQ) for upper-division undergraduates taking writing-intensive (WI) college courses in their majors....
The purpose of this study was to describe the development of mathematics
preservice teachers’ technology pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK) in a
subject specific, technology integrated teacher preparation program. The study also
investigated the roles of several influential components of the program and the
technology thread throughout the program in supporting...
Protein secondary structure prediction plays a pivotal role in predicting protein folding in three-dimensions. Its task is to assign each residue one of the three secondary structure classes helix, strand, or random coil. This is an instance of the problem of sequential supervised learning in machine learning. This thesis describes...
This dissertation addresses issues of oligopoly markets where advertising plays a prominent role. The first study empirically investigates the effect of advertising regulations on equilibrium consumption of an addictive commodity using U.S. cigarette industry data. The results of the first study show that the advertising regulations reduced cigarette consumption by...
1-km MODIS observations of ship tracks off the west coast of the U.S. are used to characterize changes in cloud visible optical depths, cloud droplet radii, cloud cover fraction, and column cloud liquid water amount as low-level marine clouds respond to particle pollution from underlying ships. This study re-examines the...
The thesis focuses on model-based approximation methods for reinforcement
learning with large scale applications such as combinatorial optimization problems.
First, the thesis proposes two new model-based methods to stablize the
value–function approximation for reinforcement learning. The first one is the
BFBP algorithm, a batch-like reinforcement learning process which iterates between...
The objective of this project was to investigate technical efficiency and productivity growth in the Pacific Northwest sawmilling industry over the period 1968-2002. Productivity growth was decomposed into three components: technical change, efficiency change, and scale efficiency change. In addition, using econometric methods, changes in output elasticities and input substitution...
The complexity of forest management has increased with the scope of resources of concern and the level of scrutiny from stakeholders. The design and use of specialized computer software, often referred to as “decision support systems” (DSS), is one method for helping managers deal with this complexity. DSS have proven...
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...
Negative feedback has become ubiquitous in science both as a
technique and as a conceptual tool. As a technique, negative feedback
has a long history; devices based in its use were made in
antiquity. It has only been during the last century, however, that
rigorous quantitiative methods have become associated...
Interface habitats are considered valuable natural systems, tightly linked to adjacent habitats through the flow of matter and energy. However, there is limited research on mechanisms of connectivity such as movement of organisms and particulate matter and ways in which anthropogenic disturbance to interface habitats may affect immediate and adjacent...
Fossil woods supplement knowledge of the Succor Creek fossil flora / Wallace Eubanks -- Broken Top breaks : flood released by erosion of glacial moraine / Bruce Nolf.
Multibeam sonar data was collected on Nehalem Bank, off of the Oregon Coast with the purpose of increasing the spatial resolution of our knowledge of the area and delineating seafloor habitats. The system used was the Kongsberg Simrad EM-300 operating at 30 kHz. The data set collected includes both topographic...
The majority of our modern understanding of bacterial pathogenesis is based on the strategy that involves screening bacterial genomes for the presence of the genes encoding pathogenic factors, and analysis of these genes via forward and reverse genetics. Chlamydiae represent a unique group of pathogenic bacteria in which it is...
This study examines the interactions between the scientific communities of the
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(SLAC) in the discovery of the tau lepton by physicist Martin Perl between 1973-
1977. Perl became interested in searching for heavy leptons through positron-electron
collision experiments using the...
Wildlife managers are on the front lines of the effort to conserve wildlife and
are required to do so cost-effectively. This dissertation consists of three manuscripts
that integrate economics and ecology to inform cost-effective wildlife management.
The first and second manuscripts focus on identifying cost-effective wildlife
management plans. The third...
Riparian areas in the Pacific Northwest provide important biotic and abiotic
features, such as down wood, moist microsites, and abundant invertebrate prey that
benefit aquatic and terrestrial amphibians. Reported high densities of amphibians from
streams and riparian areas in the Pacific Northwest highlight their importance in riparian
food webs. Amphibians...
In this thesis, I studied the translation of dengue virus RNA using a luciferase reporter gene system in Vero cells. The dengue reporter mRNA construct, which harbors 5´-terminal viral nts and 3´-terminal nts, could be translated efficiently compared to an alpha globin reporter construct. The 5´-cap structure and 3´-untranslated region...
When you drive through the Madras region on U.S. Highway 97, you see a gently rolling plain dotted with low hills and flat-topped buttes. Since the plain appears to extend westward uninterruptedly to the foothills of the Cascade Range, little would you imagine that between you and the mountains lurk...
The enzymes of dNTP synthesis in T4 infection associate to form a multienzyme complex, the T4 dNTP synthetase complex, facilitating the flow of metabolites en route to dNTPs, and their subsequent flow into DNA. Study of protein-protein interactions helps one to understand how the enzymes in the complex are organized...
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), which has been very attractive for future high rate wireless communications, is very robust to channel multipath fading effect while providing high transmission data rate with high spectral efficiency.
Multiple antennas can be combined with OFDM to increase diversity gain and to improve spectral efficiency...
Tree species directly and indirectly affect soil nutrient cycles. I sought to characterize soils and foliage associated with four common canopy tree species (Douglas-fir, western hemlock, western redcedar, and bigleaf maple) in mixed-species old-growth forests of the Oregon Coast Range and to determine whether and how soils differ among the...
Periodic violent eruptions from many different centers during Cenozoic time deposited vast quantities of pyroclastic material as ash-flow tuffs over most of Oregon, although the Coast Ranges and isolated patches elsewhere in the state appear to have been spared these recurring inundations. Eruptions occurred at different times throughout the Cenozoic,...
Two studies used DNA markers to assess their usefulness in germplasm identification and evaluation of genetic stability in four cryopreserved Rubus accessions that were stored for over 10 years in liquid nitrogen. In the first study, 12 robust Simple Sequence Repeat (SSR) markers were developed from two microsatellite-enriched libraries of...
This research addressed the opportunity to obtain baseline data for both stream chemistry and soil resources for an intensively managed forest watershed, encompassed by the North and South Forks of Hinkle Creek Watershed Research and Demonstration Area Project near Sutherlin, Oregon. A solid representative database for both stream and soil...
Full dynamic control of physically simulated characters is the holy grail of video
games and other interactive applications. Recent advances in the field have
presented controllers that can handle the balance and fall response after a
collision. This thesis addresses the development of a controller that handles the
response before...
The amount of instruction level parallelism (ILP) that can be exploited depends
greatly on the size of the instruction window and the number of in-flight instructions
the processor can support. However, this requires a register file with a large set of
physical registers for renaming and multiple ports to provide...
Sperm mobility is defined as the net movement of a sperm population against resistance. Previous research demonstrated that the cell-permeant Ca2+ indicator rhod-2 AM gave a fluorescent signal predominantly in the head region of fowl sperm that differed between sperm mobility phenotypes. This thesis served to explore the role of...
Our studies and those of our colleagues in Idaho indicate that the western Snake River Basin is a major geothermal province, similar in some ways to the Imperial Valley Geothermal Province. Deep drilling should encounter high temperature fluids in permeable rocks below 2 km and at shallower depths where permeability...
Resource managers of Oregon’s tidal wetlands require an improved GIS layer for management of existing tidal wetland habitat and areas considered for tidal wetland restoration. A reconnaissance project was initiated, such that interpretations of remote sensing data, the National Wetland Inventory, Oregon Estuary Plan Book and additional management tools were...
The biological transformation of dinitrogen gas (N2) into combined forms(termed N2 fixation) by certain genera of oceanic cyanobacteria represents the largest incoming flux of nitrogen to the global ocean. As such, biological nitrogen fixation
plays a significant role in the regulation of oceanic productivity and the export of
carbon and...