Mountain search and rescue is a vital form of emergency response to assist people in austere environments (e.g., extreme terrain, poor weather). Volunteer mountain search and rescue teams in the United States have begun adopting consumer- grade unmanned aerial vehicles to assist a variety of tasks (e.g., search, resource delivery);...
The purpose of this capstone is to provide a reassessment of the emergence of biophilia in interpretive programs conducted in California State Parks. More specifically, this project examines what effect natural resource interpretive programming has on the emergence of biophilia practices and if participants are more likely to be more...
Geospatial data analysis is a multifaceted discipline encompassing the collection, processing, and visualization of diverse datasets. It models and delineates the interactions of people, objects, and phenomena within geographical spaces and predicts patterns based on the relationships between different locations. Despite significant advancements in geospatial data engineering and analytics over...
Water in the U.S. West faces considerable challenges and uncertainties. Climate change has intensified weather extremes, threatening the water sources that support the region’s many stakeholders. Urban water providers are among the stakeholders contending with the challenge of providing reliable water supplies to their growing populations. Recognizing the critical role...
Septoria canker remains the most important disease of poplars in intensively managed forest plantations. Genetic resistance has long been considered the best way to manage for this disease. Transgenic resistance mediated by RNA silencing against pathogens and pests (HIGS: host-induced gene silencing) has shown promise in other pathosystems but has...
Humans have always been fascinated with whales; from prominent features in mythology, to stories of terrifying monsters on the high seas, to globalized utility, to symbolic wildness and radical environmentalism, to figures and statistics, how have human relationships with whales been understood throughout time? Because humans have a need to...
Since the decline of salmonid populations in the Pacific Northwest, supplementation programs have become frequently implemented by hatcheries as a way to protect and conserve wild stock. However, hatchery-reared fish have lower fitness than wild fish which is likely due to adaptation to the hatchery environment, i.e., domestication selection. Fish...
Cell signaling under external stimulation is a critical mechanism that governs many biological processes such as cell proliferation, cell migration, and cell apoptosis, etc. For multicellular organisms, the ability to synchronize heterogeneous individual cellular responses through intercellular communication is crucial to maintain normal functionality. However, even though the biological pathways...
Having valid measures of college student FI is essential for justifying basic-needs services for students. But college student food insecurity (FI) rates vary significantly across institutions, perhaps partially due to differences in non-response bias resulting from participant recruitment strategies. We tested for effects of recruitment method on measured levels of...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
As we contemplate the future of forest landscapes under changing climate conditions and land-use demands, there is increasing value in studying historic forest conditions and how these landscapes have changed following past disturbances. Historic landscape paintings are a potential source of data on preindustrial forests with highly detailed, full-color depictions...
One of the pervasive problems arising in our modern, digital world surrounds data breaches where an adversary, through zero-day exploitations, phishing, or old-fashioned social engineering attacks, gains access to a service’s data stores. Our society increasingly relies on these cloud-based services for everything from our taxes to personal communication. As...
The conservation community has long recognized the critical role that agricultural landowners play in efforts to improve fish and wildlife habitat in order to recover threatened and endangered species. In many rural areas dominated by agricultural working landscapes, government agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) struggle to...
The Pacific Islander diaspora in the Pacific Northwest United States is a unique community characterized by diverse cultures, experiences, and motivations for migration. This study aimed to explore the narratives of individuals from different Pacific Islander backgrounds residing in Oregon, shedding light on their reasons for migration and the impact...
Streams across the western United States are impaired from human alterations that have reduced freshwater habitat by simplifying channel complexity and disconnecting floodplains (Knox et al., 2022; Waples et al., 2008; Wohl, 2014). Climate change is likely to continue exacerbating these risks by warming summer surface stream temperatures (Crozier et...
Marine protected areas (MPAs) are an area-based tool used to manage and protect areas along the coasts and ocean that face impacts from development and climate change. Local communities both impact and are affected by the creation of MPAs and as such, it is important to include their knowledge and...
Elie Wiesel’s Night has become a canonical work in the genre of Holocaust literature. This thesis examines the process by which Night achieved this status. An argument will be composed using, as evidence, analysis of Elie Wiesel’s life, the broad history of Holocaust literature, and the complexities surrounding Night’s publication...
To facilitate the design of Natural and Nature-Based Features (NNBF) for flood protection, this thesis expands an existing engineering design methodology to NNBF systems. The existing approach is a Level III reliability method for the performance-based design of traditional coastal engineering systems. The expanded methodology incorporates uncertainties inherent to both...
This capstone report provides an overview of the emergence of the bigleaf maple sugaring industry in Oregon. This report consists of a literature review and three case studies. The literature review compiles information relevant to bigleaf maple sugaring within the wider context of maple sugaring in North America. The three...
The Peruvian cocoa sector has been growing quickly since the beginning of this century due to international demand for this commodity together with concentrated international cooperation, including NGOs and governmental agencies. Similarly, certification among cocoa producers has been growing quickly. Little is known regarding how certification impacts environmental and socioeconomic...
Oregon has one of the five highest homeless occupancy rates in the U.S., according to the Annual Homeless Assessment Report (2021). Using the current governor of Oregon’s (Tina Kotek) plan to decrease homelessness, which focuses primarily on housing developments and strategies, this study will first examine the merits of permanent...
Physicists solve problems and communicate their work using many external representations, such as equations, words, diagrams, graphs, sketches, pictures, and more. To learn physics, then, students must learn to use external representations. In this dissertation, I present three manuscripts. Each manuscript discusses how upper-division Paradigms in Physics students use multiple...
My thesis is an exploration of xánthiip (Karuk for black oak, Quercus kelloggii) restoration within the Karuk Tribe’s Ancestral Territory in present-day northwestern California. Black oak is a cultural keystone species for the Karuk and has been chosen as one of the species to guide Tribally led forest restoration work...
During the first full school year of the Covid-19 pandemic, two central contexts for adolescent development—home and school—changed utterly. In Oregon, most middle- and high schoolers attended school entirely remotely from the beginning of the pandemic, in March, 2020, through the end of April, 2021, removing both the supports available...
Sexual and gender minority (SGM) samples report elevated rates of substance use and substance use disorder compared to their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts across a wide variety of substances (Connolly & Gilchrist, 2020; Krueger et al., 2020; Rice et al., 2019), in part due to the experience of minority stress....
Low-tech habitat restoration techniques, including Stage 0 treatments, are increasingly applied but often lack robust evaluation of their effects. In 2018, one kilometer of the South Fork McKenzie (SFMK) River, OR was modified to the Stage 0 condition for the benefit of ESA-listed Chinook by raising the incised channel to...
Toxin production by cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms (cyanoHABs) in freshwater systems has lasting ecological and human impacts. Nutrients, light availability, hydrology, and microbial community composition impact the frequency and intensity of toxic cyanoHABs. Climate change will exacerbate toxic cyanoHABs, making real time and predictive monitoring a vital tool for managing...
Voltage fault injection is a technique to disrupt power supply, such that the data or instruction flow in a microcontroller can be modified. Recently, a new class of voltage glitches was introduced termed arbitrary wave voltage glitches. Despite its demonstrated success in practical studies it comes with additional challenges, such...
The purpose of this dissertation was to estimate the extent to which group-level synchrony predicts specific group outcomes. Synchrony is broadly defined as the coordination of biological and behavioral processes during social contact (Feldman, 2017). In this dissertation, biological coordination is defined as, “the spontaneous synchronization of physiological signals (e.g.,...
The objective of this dissertation is to enhance the monitoring of forest ecosystems through the utilization of remotely sensed data to address the exigencies posed by the Anthropocene. On a global scale, rising temperatures and fluctuating precipitation patterns have strained forests and produced shifts in natural disturbance regimes. Additionally, the...
In the months preceding the 2016 presidential election and during the Trump presidency, rhetoric, composition, and communications scholars expressed an urgent concern about the threat that Trump and his political affiliates posed to the status of truth in political life (McComiskey; Rice; Harsin; Cloud). However, the conversations surrounding the discipline’s...
Expressive motion has been found to be a highly effective tool in communicating intent and motivation in single robot human-robot interaction, but work in exploring how groups of robots can use motion in interactions with humans is relatively nascent. There are many additional complexities to consider expanding from single robot...
Skeletal muscle mitochondria are highly plastic organelles, integral to whole-body health. High-fat diet (HFD) and exercise remodel the skeletal muscle mitochondria. Whereby, altered skeletal muscle mitochondrial function is linked to decreased skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity which can be reversed by exercise. However, the mechanisms that contribute to skeletal muscle remodeling...
The oceans are one of humanity’s greatest resources, providing food, raw materials, livelihoods, and protection. More than 3 billion people around the world rely on marine life as a source of protein as well as their livelihood. Seafood is one of the highest traded commodities globally and many major cities...
Quick and accurate measurements of nanoparticles have important applications in biology, environmental and non-proliferation areas. Calculation of isotopic ratios, particularly in special nuclear materials, has relied on integration of nanoparticle counts and limited the capability of counting minor isotopes. Rapid transient detection method of nanoparticles has demonstrated the effectiveness of...
This study aimed to explore the relationship between grassroots activism, in the form of a plastic bag ban, and social capital. I postulated that grassroots activism would lead to higher levels of social capital. The data was collected through a survey distributed on community bulletin boards, an announcement at a...
Dual use pasture systems, sometimes referred to as dual purpose pasture systems, take advantage of the land being used to maximize multiple outputs from a single area. Developing a system to support both production of grazing livestock as well as pollinator health is of increasing importance in pasture-based farming systems....
The body of work aims to contribute to the area of Quantitative analysis in Environmental Sciences, and is focused on the microbiome. The underlying theme for the dissertation is methods and workflow. The unique bioinformatics workflow used for the analysis of genomic data was used to answer distinct and pressing...
Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) comes in a huge assortment of fresh and dried varieties, including snap beans, kidney beans, and pinto beans. Together, these and other market classes provide a third of the daily dietary protein in some cultures, particularly in Africa, Asia, and developing nations in the Americas....
Excavation of pit feature 110 (F110) at the Cooper’s Ferry site (10IH73) in central Idaho provides a unique snapshot of the domestic lifeways associated with the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST). Analysis was conducted of the F110 assemblage to better understand the function F110 served. The contents of F110 include Canis...
The State of Oregon possesses a tumultuous relationship with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and currently experiences one of the lowest participation rates in the country despite attempting several policy reforms. The State of Washington has exhibited a comparatively similar relationship. However, it has adopted a distinctive policy supplementation...