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...
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...
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...
Just off the coast of the Pacific Northwest lies the Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ); odds of a very large CSZ earthquake occurring in the next 50 years is estimated to be about 37%. A CSZ seismic event has the potential to cause wide scale damage not just to the power...
This thesis argues that the first two novels of Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy mark a sharp turn from the antihumanism of his earlier ‘Southern’ novels to a more affective exploration of posthumanist subjectivity within a world dominated by social discourse and metanarratives. In my examination of All the Pretty...
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Raymond Malewitz
This thesis argues that the first two novels of Cormac McCarthy’s The Border
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...
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...
Consistent with its charge under Oregon House Bill 3543, the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute (OCCRI) conducts a biennial assessment of the state of climate change science, including biological, physical, and social science, as it relates to Oregon and the likely effects of climate change on Oregon. This sixth Oregon...
As the global demand for seafood increases each year, there is a growing need to expand sustainable aquaculture in the interests of food security and resilience of coastal communities. Pacific oysters, Crassostrea gigas, are grown in West coast estuaries - where cultures often overlap with the federally protected native eelgrass,...
The scale of pest and disease dispersal is often larger than the scale of individual farms. Therefore, an individual grower’s response to pests and diseases can affect and is affected by their surrounding growing region. Individual growers are also not isolated, and engage in various forms of information gathering, sharing,...
Early life stages of marine fishes exert substantial control on the productivity and resilience of marine fisheries, as these life stages represent periods of extreme mortality. Additionally, eggs and larvae of marine fishes respond rapidly to environmental change and can thus be used to infer ecosystem-wide responses to climate change...
Polyoxometalates (POMs) are anions consisting of three or more early transition metals ™ (Gr V and VI) oxoanions (in their highest oxidation state) linked together by a shared oxygen bond to form a 3D framework. Polyoxometalates (POMs) are a rapidly growing class of metal oxo clusters with a wide range...
Background: Although both transgender adults and adults living with disabilities struggle to access healthcare, both populations are underserved and understudied. Existing research either examines transgender adults and adults with disabilities as separate groups or frames disability as a health outcome a transgender person may experience. Health care utilization and health...
Society derives many critical and irreplaceable values from forests. With a growing global human population and rates of consumption, forests are under increasing pressure to provide all these values simultaneously. To meet societal demands for wood products, tree plantations are becoming increasingly common and are replacing native forests. Yet, forests...
Haiti is far from achieving the UN goal of sanitation access for all; 20% Haitians have no sanitation access, and less than 0.1% of urban excreta is safely managed. Container-Based Sanitation (CBS) may be a key tool for achieving equitable sanitation coverage in Haiti’s cities. CBS is a sanitation strategy...
Proceedings of the 80th Annual Pacific Northwest Insect Management Conference, held virtually January 4-5, 2021.
These are research reports only, not management recommendations.
Consistent with its charge under Oregon House Bill 3543, the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute (OCCRI) conducts a biennial assessment of the state of climate change science, including biological, physical, and social science, as it relates to Oregon and the likely effects of climate change on Oregon. This fifth Oregon...
Consideration of social and cultural dimensions in coastal and marine planning has increased and ecosystem services provide important framing to investigate values and priorities associated with these systems. Research efforts in coastal communities offer insights on social dimensions of ocean and coastal management decisions, but questions remain about how demographics...
Reef building corals are the foundation of an entire ecosystem, but they are threatened primarily by rising ocean temperatures due to climate change. Corals depend on a thermally sensitive symbiosis with intracellular dinoflagellates. As oceans warm, this symbiosis is disrupted and results in coral mortality, declining populations and degraded reefs....
Hop powdery mildew (Podosphaera macularis) was confirmed in the Pacific Northwest in 1996. Before 2012, the most common race of P. macularis was able to infect plants that possessed powdery mildew resistance based on the R-genes Rb, R3, and R5. Post 2012, two additional races of P. macularis were discovered...
Humboldt Redwoods State Park in southern Humboldt County, California is a coastal redwood forest, a highly unique and valued ecosystem. It has many social, cultural, ecological, and economic values, including recreational benefits, heritage and aesthetic values, high biodiversity, nutrient cycling, and climate regulation. However, Humboldt County is at risk of...
Somatic growth variation manifests from the cumulative effects of a suite of biological, ecological, and environmental processes and can have profound effects on individual fitness and species population dynamics. As ectotherms whose growth dynamics are greatly influenced by environmental factors, sea turtles display considerable variation in somatic growth within and...
Metal-insulator-metal (MIM) and dual-insulator MIM (MIIM) devices are used in rectennas, hot-electron transistors, single electron transistors, resistive random access memory (RRAM), and capacitors. The performance of these devices relies heavily on the energy barrier height at each metal-insulator interface. Thus, determination of the in-situ electron energy barrier at each interface...
Plant pathogens in the genus Phytophthora are known to cause disease on field crops, nursery plants, and forest trees. The best known example probably is Phytophthora infestans, which triggered the infamous Irish potato famine. Other important Phytophthora species include: P. ramorum (sudden oak death pathogen), P. sojae (soybean root rot...
Contemporary forest management involves a more extensive and diverse suite of management objectives than was the case throughout much of the Twentieth Century. Heightened public and political awareness of local and global biodiversity decline, and interest in arresting these trends, has increased the emphasis on broad-based biodiversity conservation as an...
Nearly all birds communicate through sound, and there has been much study of avian populations and communities using song and other vocalizations. Owls are no exception as they defend territories, advertise for mates, and defend against threats using various vocalizations. However, due to their generally nocturnal habits, some owl species...
The objective of this dissertation was to examine trade-offs and synergies between multiple ecosystem services derived from plantation forests in the coastal Pacific Northwest. I accomplished this in five chapters. In the first chapter I provided background information for the study. In the next chapter I set the context for...
Humans have drastically altered the physical habitat and food web structure of stream ecosystems. Two major impacts humans have had on Pacific Northwest streams are modification of streamside forests (as a result of agriculture, land development, and timber harvest), and declines in the return of wild anadromous salmon to headwater...
Land management practices in much of the western US that included wildland fire suppression have led to greater fuel loads than has been typical of historical fire regimes. In response to the increased wildland fire risk, “restoration” has emerged as a forest management goal. Restoration involves removal of uncharacteristic amounts...
Despite some successful conservation stories, biodiversity continues to be lost around the world. Climate change accentuates the ecological crisis and demands not only coordinated action by individuals and collectives, but also a re-examination (and re-imagination) of our relationship with nature. As part of the basis for such a re-examination, further...
The energy barrier heights between two recently reported Ta-based amorphous metals (TaWSi and TaNiSi), TaN, and atomic layer deposited Al2O3 and HfO2 insulators are measured in metal/insulator/metal (MIM) structures with Au top electrodes using internal photoemission (IPE) spectroscopy. For Al2O3, the Ta-based metal barrier heights, phi(Bn), increase with increasing metal...
The Southern Ocean plays an important role in the ocean’s uptake of heat and carbon yet the processes controlling this uptake are not well understood. To date, more than 100 biogeochemical profiling floats that measure water column pH, oxygen, nitrate, fluorescence, and backscattering at 10-day intervals have been deployed throughout...
Environmental DNA (eDNA) is an emerging biological monitoring tool that can aid in assessing the effects of forestry and forest manufacturing activities on biota. Monitoring taxa across broad spatial and temporal scales is necessary to ensure forest management and forest manufacturing activities meet their environmental goals of maintaining biodiversity. Our...
Traditional analysis in population genetics evaluates differences among groups of individuals and, in some cases, considers the effects of distance or potential barriers to gene flow. However, many forces may shape genetic variation of organisms in riverine systems. Similarly complex research linking habitat heterogeneity and configuration to genetic structure has...