This thesis consists of three studies to better understand the environmental sustainability potential for algal-based biofuels. Initially, a comparison of recent life cycle assessments (LCA) of theoretical full-scale algal biofuel facilities was developed. These studies include varying boundaries and scope, functional units, and technology maturity assumptions. The comparison converted results...
As the negative impacts of a fossil fueled electricity market are becoming more prevalent and destructive, the necessity for alternative energy techniques increases as well. However, before commercial implementation is underway, these alternatives must be assessed from three important perspectives: environmentally, economically, and socially, which are known as the three...
The objective of this study was to compare light wood framing and traditional timber
framing quantitatively through environmental impact assessment and load path analysis. This
research was inspired by a traditional timber frame structure constructed in Vermont in 2011, and
the design of structures considered within reflect the general characteristics...
Wind energy is a promising alternative energy source due to its environmental, economic, and social benefits and, as such, has garnered public support and government incentives for its development and implementation. With the growing number of wind parks in Oregon, a life cycle assessment (LCA) study for a representative new...
Softwood plywood is one of the structural wood products studied in the CORRIM
II effort to document the environmental performance of wood product in residential
structures. Life-cycle inventory (LCI) models were developed to provide performance
data for plywood production by tracking all of its inputs and outputs in a gate-to-gate...
This thesis is the result of two research publications, which together form a framework for the evaluation of product innovativeness with potential future applications to early design. Innovation is a challenging concept to quantify. Experts seemingly have a grasp of what innovation is when they see it, however this evaluation...
Over the last 20 years, there has been rapid growth in the amount of installed wind power in the Pacific Northwest, specifically in the Columbia River Gorge. The variable and non-dispatchable nature of this resource requires that it be balanced in some form by other sources on the grid. In...
Interest in accounting for environmental impacts of products, processes, and systems during the design phase is increasing. Numerous studies have undertaken investigations for reducing environmental impacts across the product life cycle. Efforts have also been launched to quantify such impacts more accurately. Life cycle energy consumption and carbon footprint are...
The purpose of this study was to develop a slow fashion design model using the house of quality model (HOQ) to provide designers an opportunity to improve the overall sustainability of an apparel product. Slow fashion is based on the slow food movement that supports the consumption of food that...
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Product care and repair services
End of life (EOL
The shoe repair transaction, as it occurs in the 5000 or so remaining shoe repair shops in the United States, is currently unexamined in academic literature for the significance it holds for either shoe repairers or their customers. Making use of both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection, this...
Attributional and consequential life cycle assessments are useful in evaluating the environmental impacts of a process, product, or decision. Both types of life cycle assessments differ however in their scope and their ability to answer specific questions. In order to fully understand and compare the environmental impacts of a sugarcane...
Current life cycle assessment tools are often deficient in assisting design for sustainable manufacturing efforts. Integrating an improved assessment method into a decision support framework will provide a means for designers and engineers to better understand the impacts of their decisions. A unit process modeling-based sustainability assessment method is presented...
Sustainability has been the focus of intense discussions over the past two decades, with topics around the entire product life cycle. In the manufacturing phase, research has been focused solely on environmental impact assessment or environmental impact and cost analysis in its assessment of sustainability. However, few efforts have investigated...
The objective of this study is to complete life cycle inventories (LCI) for laminated veneer lumber (LVL) and composite I-joist (I-joist) production in the two main forest products producing regions in the U.S., the Pacific Northwest (PNW) and Southeast (SE). LVL and I-joists are composite wood building materials that are...
The research involved development of two ecological
simulation models to explain the complex dimensionality of
chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) life history
structure (represented by the age composition of the
spawning stock) and management difficulties entailed in the
complexity.
Since different sizes of chinook salmon are thought to
adapt differently to...
The developmental milestones of Sustainability are consistent with the post-normal versus traditional science, where transdisciplinary and policy/action research are among the important approaches to be added to traditional analysis. This shift requires a new perspective to look at the problem at hand: we are no longer considering a group of...
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44. Probability of Differences in LifeCycle Impacts of Albany vs. Sisters Buildings
The growth, size and age composition, mortality and reproduction of darkblotched rockfish (Sebastes crameri) were examined using fishery data and analysis of fish
characteristics for samples collected of f the Oregon coast. A total of 1060 fish, caught by commercial groundfish and shrimp trawlers operating out of Newport, Coos Bay...
Published June 1962. Facts and recommendations in this publication may no longer be valid. Please look for up-to-date information in the OSU Extension Catalog: http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog
Published July 1958. Facts and recommendations in this publication may no longer be valid. Please look for up-to-date information in the OSU Extension Catalog: http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog
The endemic cyprinids of Lake Lanao, Philippines have been described as a species flock and are thought to be an example of explosive evolution. However, based on historical surveys, 16 of the 18 cyprinid species endemic to Lake Lanao are now believed to be extinct. Furthermore, non-native species have been...
Steelhead and rainbow trout are common names for marine-migratory (anadromous) and freshwater-resident forms of Oncorhynchus mykiss, a partially migratory salmonid fish. Anadromous and resident forms are sympatric and can produce offspring with a life history different from their own (i.e., steelhead parents can produce rainbow trout offspring and vice versa)....
An approach to understanding and managing anadromous salmon, steelhead,
and sea-run cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus spp.) based on life history and
evolutionary adaptive capacities of species and stocks is presented. Species, stocks,
and local populations are viewed as systems that are continuously adapting to
changing environmental conditions. They have the potential...
Grape phylloxera, Daktulosp/iaira vitfoliae (Fitch) development was studied under field and laboratory conditions. The aphid-like insect feeds on Vitis vinfera L. roots producing swellings that decay and lead to vine decline. The only long-term economic solution for control of grape phylloxera (GP) is to plant vines grafted onto a resistant...
Chinook salmon returns to the Columbia River basin have declined due to impacts of a growing human population, despite significant mitigation expenditures. Consequently, fisheries managers have become focused on recovery and long-term viability of at-risk populations. A viable population depends, in part, on the connectivity and quality of diverse habitat...
It is good practice to fully understand components of an ecosystem if we hope to preserve its biodiversity. A problem is that we know very little about some organisms and nothing of others. Studies that investigate an organism’s basic biological, ecological and physiological life history variables advance our knowledge of...
Patterns of nest attendance behavior by breeding birds represent a parent-offspring trade-off in which adults balance self-maintenance with parental care decisions.
Incubation, in particular, is of interest because adults must provide an environment
suitable for embryonic development through nest-building and contact-incubation.
We evaluated how adult incubation constancy and nest visitation...
With increased resource development on the western Arctic coastal plain of Alaska (especially within the oil extraction industry) it is important to understand the basic life history attributes of whitefish stocks in the region in order to ensure appropriate management. These fish are a crucial part of subsistence harvests for...
Aquatic insects that emerge out of streams to mate represent a potential energy
flux to terrestrial food webs. The relative success of an individual aquatic adult insect
is whether it survives long enough to produce offspring, i.e. mate and return to the
stream to oviposit eggs. Some characteristics of the...
Drosophila suzukii (Diptera: Drosophilidae), a pest of thin-skinned fruits, has been detected worldwide recently, with new locations of establishment determined annually since it first became a concern on continental North America in 2008. Drosophila suzukii females are different from most other drosophilids as being one of two known species capable...
The typical coho salmon life history has been characterized by juvenile fish that spend their entire first year in freshwater habitats before migrating into estuaries as smolts. However, reports of early migrating coho fry (age 0), including migration downstream to estuarine habitats, date back to the 1960s. Until a few...
Parasites are unique study organisms for evolutionary ecologists. Yet, molecular ecology studies on parasites have lagged far behind those on free-living organisms. The goal of the review in Chapter 2 was to illustrate areas of research that may be of particular interest in relation to the parasitic life style and...
Anadromous coastal cutthroat trout Oncorhynchus clarkii clarkii may be highly dependent on estuaries, passing through them multiple times during their lifetime. However, few studies have investigated estuarine use by coastal cutthroat trout and it is often thought that estuaries serve primarily as migration corridors rather than rearing areas. We used...
The evolution and maintenance of multiple phenotypes within populations is an interesting evolutionary and ecological question, and is becoming increasingly important for the restoration and conservation of partially migratory species. In particular, why individuals adopt a particular phenotype has been the focus of numerous research efforts. In the partially migratory...
Greenland halibut (Reinhardtius hippoglossoides) have decreased in the eastern Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands since the 1970s. The reasons behind the poor recruitment are unknown, and important knowledge gaps of the ecology of the early life stages have been identified. The objectives of thesis research were (1) to examine geographic...
A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the production of poplar biomass grown under four management conditions in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) of the U.S.A. was conducted. While the extraction of fossil fuels and the subsequent generation of energy have environmental impacts, the alternative of extracting poplar biomass also has impacts...
In this study, I examine the influence of habitat gradients created by the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, Washington USA on a recently established Rainbow Trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) population in the Spirit Lake basin. My goal was to evaluate the responses of fish in seven streams across a volcanic...
Ceratomyxa shasta is a myxozoan parasite that infects salmonid fishes causing the disease ceratomyxosis that is characterized by severe hemorrhage and necrosis of the intestine and death of the fish host. Ceratomyxa shasta is endemic to the Pacific Northwestern United States and Canada, where epizootics are reported for both wild...
My thesis explored the effects of environmental variability on population
dynamics and community composition of aquatic insects. Environmental variability in
the form of flow regime in streams can limit the distribution and life-history traits of
aquatic insects. I used tributaries to the McKenzie River in Oregon with dramatically
different flow...
The decline of many Pacific salmon stocks has stimulated interest in the early life history and habitat requirements of juvenile salmon. Although estuarine habitat associations of juvenile salmon have been investigated in many coastal areas of the eastern Pacific Ocean, until recently, little was known about juvenile salmonid ecology within...
Understanding seasonal changes in growth, survival, and movement rates is
crucial to salmonid management. These life history characteristics provide a context for
evaluation of management actions. We evaluated the life history of individually
marked Oncorhynchus mykiss gairdneri in the South Fork John Day River basin in
Northeastern Oregon. This thesis...
Aquatic ecosystems continue to be increasingly affected by climate warming. For salmonids in the Pacific Northwest of North America, increasing temperatures pose tighter thermal constraints on their habitat use as well as aspects of their individual performance, such as disease resistance. This thesis examines the effect of temperature on the...
Ontogenetic niche theory predicts that as organisms grow they make size-specific changes in habitat use and diet to optimize growth and survival. A variety of factors contribute to growth and survival in different habitats, ultimately leading to variation in life history that can affect population dynamics. An understanding of the...
Most parasites and their hosts live in a balance within their environment; however a disease outbreak can occur when either the parasite, host, or environment, are perturbed. Myxozoan parasites are associated with a wide variety of cultured and wild fish populations. Most myxozoans are relatively benign to their vertebrate host;...
Alternative male phenotypes in salmonine fishes arise from individuals that mature as either larger and older anadromous marine-migrants or as smaller and younger freshwater residents. Variability in age and size of males at maturity is hypothesized to be preceded by early differences in growth in size and lipid storage. Water...