Agricultural practices influence the nutrient dynamics of soil and plants, which may take more than a decade to be expressed in the drylands. The nutrient supplying capacity of soil is a crucial component of sustainable agriculture, and hence, this study can play an important role in policy making for the...
The effects of no-till versus conventional farming practices were evaluated on soft wheat functional and nutritional characteristics, including kernel physical properties, whole wheat composition, antioxidant activity, and end-product quality. Soft white winter wheat cultivar ORCF 102 was evaluated over a two-year period from three long-term replicated no-till versus conventional tillage...
This paper introduces a class of k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) estimators called bipartite plug-in (BPI) estimators for estimating integrals of non-linear functions of a probability density, such as Shannon entropy and R´enyi entropy. The density is assumed to be smooth, have bounded support, and be uniformly bounded from below on this...
This paper examines ways in which natural resource management – NRM – may be decolonized in order to better serve Hawaiʻi communities. Expressed needs for diversity in NRM has brought about inclusion of traditional ecological knowledge in recent years. Here, traditional ecological knowledge is redefined as ʻIK, ʻike kupuna –...
In this thesis I argue that Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel Blood Meridian serves as a critique of the American Western mythos by collapsing aspects of myth, ideology, and the sublime into the question of violence's relationship to language. In explicating the novel, I demonstrate how the ironies staged between the...
Thomas Stearns Eliot’s 1922 modernist poem The Waste Land presents itself as an alternative to the decaying society Eliot found himself inhabiting. It begins as a personal means of pulling together one’s fragmented consciousness, but in doing so Eliot manages to present a solution to a world of selfishness—looking beyond...
A majority of eighteenth-century novels remain in regular print over two hundred years since their inception. Yet with the possible exception of Robinson Crusoe, they have largely fallen out of popularity, rarely appearing on "The Summer's Hottest Reading" lists or receiving celebrity endorsement. I consider Ian Watt's foundational study, The...
Floods are beneficial to nature but can be destructive to humans. For centuries humanity has attempted to control nature and specifically rivers and their flooding. After looking at a history of river management in the United States, an examination of both the burdens and benefits of flood control policy in...
There Were Bears and Rumors of Bears is a collection of stories that explores spiritual injury and recovery using a variety of interior and exterior narrative approaches to depict the profane and sacred, the mundane and non-ordinary, aspects of experience. In each story, the characters encounter situations in the physical...
Like other species interactions in ecological systems, host-pathogen interactions are influenced by environmental factors, landscape characteristics and the broader community context. My thesis explores the potential influences of food-web interactions (Chapter 2), climate change (Chapter 3), landscape structure and host movement patterns (Chapter 4), and the combined influences of local...
The Long House explores belonging and commitment. Jennifer Hawley, an American graduate student in linguistic anthropology, arrives in the early 1990s in Long Awan, a Dayak village in the remote highlands of Borneo. Her research concerns oral history among Punan families, traditionally nomadic, which have recently decided to settle in...
Ellis, a booming mid-sized town in California's Central Valley, is packed with farmers and commuters, and plagued with a dwindling sense of itself and its history. Set against the backdrop of a failed murder-suicide, a secret affair and a wealthy local mogul's attempt to develop the town into something it's...
Floating guidance structures are intended to promote safe in-stream passage for juvenile salmon migrating downstream through reservoirs. However, the ability of an engineered structure to guide fish to safe passage has been primarily tested either after large-scale implementation in existing reservoirs or in laboratory studies and computer simulations without live...
The rise of digital streaming has largely impacted the way the average listener consumes music. Consequentially, while the role of album art has evolved to meet the changes in music technology, it is hard to measure the effect of digital streaming on modern album art. This research seeks to determine...
Boulder transport models have been used to develop a historical record of hydrodynamic events. This is done by evaluating the size, location, and composition of boulders that have been removed from their region of formation. Boulder transport is difficult to predict, even under laboratory conditions.
Experiments were conducted to evaluate...