Oregon's estuaries are important ecosystems for scientific study. Consequently, knowledge of what research has been conducted helps us identify benchmarks and plan new projects. A comprehensive bibliography of published research, technical reports, local documents, and data sets is one means of recording this knowledge. For these reasons, the Guin Library...
At a time when environmental conditions are rapidly changing, understanding how thermal extremes impact wildlife is imperative to fully understanding the consequences of climate change in natural ecosystems. While many organisms are currently impacted by rapidly warming and more erratic environmental conditions, identifying and investigating model species whose life histories...
The focus of this thesis is to design, characterize, and apply novel computational methods and molecular systems to interrogate heterogeneous human gut microbiome-related phenomena. In Chapter 2, I design, implement, and characterize a method for embedding co-occurrence patterns derived from massive 16s amplicon datasets. I use this method to 1....
Climate model simulations and paleoclimate proxies are two tools that enable an understanding of the climate history of the Earth. When utilized together, they form a powerful paradigm for understanding past changes. Proxies are the only physical link to the past conditions on Earth, and models “fill in the gaps”...
The South Pole ice core (SPC14), drilled in the field seasons of 2014/2015 and 2015/2016, is an intermediate length, 1,751-m ice core which preserves a 54,000-year record of past climate and atmospheric composition. The SPC14 ice core adds to the spatial grid of ice cores in Antarctica extending into the...
Given the many significant roles that bacteria play in modern food manufacturing, it is crucial that we have a fundamental understanding of how bacterial communities assemble and behave in the food manufacturing environment. The focus of this dissertation was to investigate both the spatial and temporal distributions of microbial communities...
Forest composition in Paraguay has been in a state of change for the past half century due to land management practices, forest fragmentation, and deforestation for agriculture. How these factors affect dendrological diversity and wood anatomy in Paraguay is not well understood. This thesis documents Paraguayan forest composition on the...
Species declines and extinctions have been recorded across taxa as evidence of an ongoing global biodiversity crisis. Amphibians are at the forefront of these declines with nearly one third of amphibian species estimated to be at risk of extinction. While many factors contribute to population declines and extinctions, the role...
Plant-parasitic nematodes cause more than US $100 billion in annual agriculture loss worldwide. Thorough knowledge of their genetic diversity, and interactions with endosymbionts and environment have the potential to provide valuable insights into the basic biology of these animals, and assist future efforts aimed at management of these plant parasites....
Understanding structural evolution in solids as composition changes is essential to materials properties prediction. Such structure-properties relationships are the theme of solid state chemistry. Materials scientists and chemists have utilized an abundance of simple crystal structures to enhance understanding of chemical and structural origins of properties in materials for decades....
In the event of a mid-flight flameout of a gas turbine engine, reignition is paramount to occupant safety. Ignition at high altitude can be challenging, due in part to the potentially lower ambient pressures. An understanding of the effects of sub-atmospheric pressures on the temperature evolution of spark kernels is...
Dearomatization reactions exist broadly in biosynthesis and chemical synthesis. The highly functionalized atoms of arenes can be masked by it aromaticity, and upon dearomatization, those reactive atoms can be readily applied to bond formation and further manipulation. The total synthesis of (–)-cephalotaxine and (–)- homoharringtonine is described via an oxidative...
Reconstructing the sensitivity of past climate to forcings, and of ancient glaciers and ice sheets to this climate, can allow us to better understand the range of climate and cryosphere behavior we may see in the coming centuries. The Arctic is a region of particular importance due to its well-documented...
The objective of this dissertation was to understand the physical mechanisms affecting inversion events in a complex forested mountain landscape. This work was motivated by the long-term studies of climate at the Andrews Forest, short-term studies of vertical temperature, light, wind, and moisture gradient in old-growth trees, and interest in...
Vibrio coralliilyticus (Vcor) is a bacterial pathogen that is well adapted to shellfish hatcheries and is very pathogenic to the larvae of the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas. Vcor has been associated with several large scale larval mortality events in the Pacific Northwest that interrupt the supply of seed oysters available...
Global biodiversity decline is primarily driven by habitat loss. Deforestation, the primary driver of terrestrial habitat loss, is increasing worldwide, with the most significant impact in the world biodiversity hotspots. Sadly, specific knowledge of such impacts in biodiversity-rich but data-poor countries are still unknown, and many national and regional narratives...
This dissertation examines the impact of the German naturalist and literary figure Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s ideas on twentieth century Anglophone plant morphology and biology. Goethe interpreted the organ forms of flowering plants as metamorphoses of each other. His literary, historical, and philosophical writings suggest themes of alienation from and...
Characiform fishes form one of the most diverse freshwater fish clades in the world. Comprising more than 2000 species and distributed primarily in South America and Africa, characiforms vary dramatically in their ecomorphology. However, the evolutionary processes responsible for the immense ecomorphological diversity remains unknown. Recently, a study postulated that...
A sewer geyser is a series of ejecting air-water mixture eruptions through vertical shafts of drainage systems. In field observed geyser incidents, manhole covers were blown into the air and they were followed by ejecting air-water mixture eruptions that lasted for several seconds at a time. Trapped air in sewer...
Methane is a product of biogeochemical processes which respond to changes in climate. The history of atmospheric methane is recorded by ice cores providing insight into past changes in these biogeochemical processes. This dissertation is comprised of three studies which focus on centennial- and millenial-scale variability of methane from ice...