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...
Multiagent approaches are well suited to designing autonomous solutions for systems that feature complex interactions between many individuals such as in autonomous traffic systems and multi-robot exploration systems. However, creating autonomous agents that function effectively in these systems is a challenging task. In these complex environments, agents need informative reward...
The shortage of physicians serving rural communities is well documented. To address the rural shortage, medical schools have developed extracurricular programs, called rural health tracks, with an intent to foster medical students’ interest in serving rural communities. While there has been some research about the effects of these tracks, almost...
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....
Autonomous agents that sense, decide, act, and coordinate effectively with each other are critical in many real-world domains such as autonomous driving, search and rescue missions, air traffic management, and underwater or deep space exploration. All such domains share a key difficulty: though high-level mission goals are clear to system...
Resilient water, food, and energy management strategies for an ever-growing population and changing environment depends on our understanding of water and carbon cycles from local to global scales. Fluxes of water and carbon are coupled by photosynthesis and plant transpiration cycles the largest fraction of terrestrial water from the land...
In 2017, the cost of congestion in the United States was around 305 billion dollars, and city-dwellers, on average, lost 1400 dollars while sitting 42 hours in traffic jams. Aiming for better mobility and more efficient utilization of the transportation network, emerging connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) technologies and their...
Ocean acidification (OA) is the result of increasing concentrations of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, leading to a suite of alterations to specific parameters of ocean chemistry, which can negatively impact many marine organisms and ecosystems. Understanding how to measure and monitor the chemistry of OA will require specialized education...
The focus of this dissertation is the analysis of submesoscale and finescale features measured at oceanic fronts and the role they play in the transport of heat and salt. Two different geographical areas were used to analyze this transport: one, an area on the western side of the North Atlantic...
Forests dominate carbon (C) exchanges between the terrestrial biosphere and the atmosphere on land. In the long term, the net carbon flux between forests and the atmosphere has been significantly impacted by changes in forest cover area and structure due to ecological disturbances and management activities. Current empirical approaches for...
Riparian vegetation along streams provides a suite of ecosystem services in rangelands and thus is the target of restoration when degraded by over-grazing, erosion, incision, or other disturbances. Assessments of restoration effectiveness depend on defensible monitoring data, which can be both expensive and difficult to collect. We present a method...
Wet meadow ecosystems are a useful natural laboratory in which to explore feedbacks between biogenic and geologic controls on valley bottom landforms. Characterized by flat valley floors flanked by higher-gradient hillslopes, these meadows are singular both in that they represent depositional features in what is primarily an erosional environment, and...
Bedrock meandering rivers are sinuous channels that pair steep bedrock outside banks with lower gradient slip-off slopes on the inside of bends. These rivers have the potential to record information on climatic and tectonic “external” forcings in their morphology (e.g., longitudinal profiles, strath terraces, channel and valley dimensions). However, geology...
The relationship between carbon burial and sedimentation in reservoirs is unknown, exposing gaps in our fundamental understanding of the transport, processing, and deposition of sediment and organic matter in fluvial and lacustrine systems and contributing to uncertainty in our understanding of the net impact of dams to the global carbon...
The Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management propose to adopt coordinated ecosystem management direction for the lands they administer within the range of the northern spotted owl. This Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SETS) presents as alternatives the options, with slight modifications, developed by the Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment...
Microbial communities mediate the biogeochemical cycles that drive ecosystems, and it is important to understand how these communities are affected by changing environmental conditions, especially in complex coastal zones. As fresh and marine waters mix in estuaries and river plumes, the salinity, temperature, and nutrient gradients that are generated strongly...
Full Text:
River to Ocean Salinity
Gradient
Caroline S. Fortunato1*, Byron C. Crump2
1 Josephine Bay Paul Center
Proceedings of the Eighteenth Biennial Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade, held July 11-15, 2016 at Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Center (AECC), Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.
Research on the population genetics of microbial organisms requires the use of specialized analyses designed for clonal organisms to avoid violating the assumptions of traditional population genetic models. The tools necessary for performing these analyses existed as a set of unrelated software with non-overlapping capabilities and did not cover all...
The purpose of this thesis is to understand the experiences that Nahua children, in rural Mexico, have as they attend schools that are primarily influenced by formal Western education in relation to their own ways of learning and knowing. This research took place over the course of three months within...
This document provides details of the Scientific and Social Programs at the NAAFE Forum 2015, Economic Sustainability, Fishing Communities, and Working Waterfronts, held in Ketchikan, Alaska, May 20-22, 2015. The conference was organized by Keith Criddle and Quentin Fong, University of Alaska Fairbanks, School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, with...
As dams approach the end of their useful life, there is need to predict where and how accumulated sediment will move following their removal to estimate impacts on aquatic habitat and infrastructure. Flume studies suggest that sediment pulses disperse in place for most dams, but it is hypothesized that a...
The Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico was home to one of the most intensively-studied archaic states in the New World. Centered at the hilltop city of Monte Albán, the Zapotec State first arose around 500 BC and eventually encompassed much of the present-day state of Oaxaca. But by the Late Classic...
Despite advances in the understanding of rain-on-snow storms and their resulting peak flows, little is understood about the response of snowmelt to precipitation and the relative timing of the two at multiple temporal scales within such events. To address this issue, climate, snowmelt, and streamflow data were analyzed for 26...
The Purpose of the Study
The central purpose of this study was to identify the common
competency elements deemed necessary for entry-level vocational
certification and to develop these elements into groups that would
serve as a basis for use in an occupational competency test. Questions
to be answered from the...
For the past several decades, amphibian populations have been decreasing
around the globe at an unprecedented rate. Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), the fungal
pathogen that causes chytridiomycosis in amphibians, is contributing to amphibian declines.
Natural and anthropogenic environmental factors are hypothesized to contribute to these
declines by reducing the immunocompetence of...
Seeding is a vital tool to facilitate recovery of degraded ecosystems, but low seedling recruitment rates limit the utility of this practice in a range of ecosystems across the globe. Plant functional traits impact individual fitness through effects on growth, reproduction and survival. Consequently, seed and seedling trait variation among...
Understanding how the interactions and feedbacks between plant function, climate, and soils ultimately affects the terrestrial water balance and subsurface flow processes is major challenge in scientific hydrology. This dissertation summarizes the findings of a manipulative climate warming experiment, an observational field study that utilized stable-isotope tracers, and associated modeling...
The purpose of this study was to determine the attitudes of
three Oregon State Penitentiary minority inmate groups -
Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans - towards the Activities
Programs as a rehabilitative tool. Two other purposes
were to (1) determine significant differences among group
attitudes, and (2) determine the degree...