Focus is published by Oregon State University College of Forestry. Our goal is to keep Forestry alumni, friends, faculty, staff, and students informed about the College of Forestry and its many activities and programs.
Focus on Forestry is published by Oregon State University College of Forestry. Our goal is to keep Forestry alumni, friends, faculty, staff, and students informed about the College of Forestry and its many activities and programs.
Over time, Open Source Software (OSS) has become indispensable in the creation and upkeep of software products, serving as the fundamental building block for widely used solutions in our daily lives, including applications that enable communication, entertainment, and productivity. A sustainable OSS ecosystem is one that attracts and retains a...
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...
Falling Into Place: Relational Perspectives on the US Creative Residency Field is an Environmental Arts & Humanities thesis built around a research project called Creative Residencies and Expanded Senses of Community: Interviews With Artists & Residency Leaders. It’s an extended meditation on arts residencies via research, interviews, and experiential learning,...
Oomycete and fungal pathogens threaten food, fiber, and forests around the world. With climate change, these pathogens are expected to emerge more frequently. Evolution can facilitate their emergence through mechanisms such as mutations that change or expand host range. Characterizing evolutionary mechanisms in plant pathogens will contribute to our ability...
The Columbia River Gillnetter is the pilot of the Lower Columbia River commercial fishing industry, keeping fishermen and the public in touch with today's important issues.
Proceedings of the 81st Annual Pacific Northwest Insect Management Conference, held virtually January 10-11, 2022. These are research reports only, not management recommendations.
Severe wildfires are increasing in the western United States, impacting vegetation structure, and in turn, forest regeneration conditions. These wildfires are also raising a substantial amount of scientific and management concern regarding the resilience of forested ecosystems, or the ability of the ecosystem to return to a pre-fire condition. This...
Programming is integrated across the workflow of multiple domains where end-user programmers, those who need to program as a means to an end, regularly need to code. In the modern setting of collaborative development, end-user programmers have to interpret the intentions behind existing code to contribute and build solutions to...
Back pain is the leading cause of disability worldwide, entailing a significant socioeconomic impact. A primary source of back pain can be attributed to intervertebral disc (IVD) degeneration allowing nerve ingrowth, facet joint arthritis, disc bulging, and osteophyte formations that press on nearby nerve roots or the spinal cord. While...
Analysis of observations on sequential events over time is common in real life. Sequential measurements over time describing the behavior of systems are usually called time series data, which have been collected in a wide range of disciplines. Over the years there have been multiple research areas in studying stochastic...
Across from the Memorial Union on Oregon State University’s campus sits Milam Hall, the former site of the Department of Home Economics. The building is named for Ava Milam Clark, the dean of home economics for thirty-three years, from 1917 to 1950. I aim to understand Ava Milam’s early career...
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...
When contributing to a software system, developers need to understand the rationale for previous design decisions so that they can adhere to the system’s design. Not doing so can lead to erosion of the overall design quality of the system. However, discussions embedded in a large volume of communication on...
This study explores how multispecies social networks influence small farmers' perceptions of and responses to climate change across Oregon. Local food sovereignty and food system resilience depend on a robust local food system in which small farms play a critical role. To maintain their viability, small farmers must adapt to...
The climate of the Pacific Northwest is in flux, and existing forest ecosystems are stressed and poised to shift in fundamental ways, with or without human intervention. This dissertation probes the nature of forest responses to environmental change through investigations of morphology and genetics of three species of alder co-occurring...
Ph.D. candidate Qi Wei's thesis consists of two projects: Chemotherapy Project: a study based on the research paper "Predicting chemotherapy response of various cancer types using a variational auto-encoder approach" submitted to the bioRxiv preprint archive and accepted by the BMC bioinformatics; and Wound Monitor Project: implementing and assessing analytics...
This thesis thinks through the ways in which Black and Native storying offer epistemological interventions on neoliberal formations of multiracial identity. I argue that Black and Native storytelling methods and methodologies facilitate rethinking and re/unlearning relationships to the racial and ethnic categories of mixed-race, biracial, and multiracial, as well as...
In my view, ecocriticism needs a foundation in something akin to metaphysics. This work in progress began as an effort to find such a foundation. In the course of working on it, I discovered philosophers today, mostly young, clearly a new generation, philosophizing under the umbrella term “speculative realism” what...
It is desirable for complex engineered systems to perform missions efficiently and economically, even when these missions' complex, variable, long-term operational profiles make it likely for hazards to arise. It is thus important to design these systems to be resilient so that they will actively prevent and recover from hazards...
The enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) can be considered an important policy intervention in the context of the U.S. health care. The ACA supported non-elderly adults to obtain health insurance coverage. While Medicare provided health insurance to almost all elderly-adults (persons over 65), the ACA...
Software systems are becoming an essential part of the lives of both individuals and organizations, and as a consequence, these systems are getting bigger and more complex. Because of this, the tasks of maintaining the quality in these complex software systems are becoming increasingly difficult. Furthermore, these systems are subject...
Merge conflicts have long plagued software development. With larger and more dispersed teams comes greater risk of developers working on the same code at the same time. While merge conflicts are known to be painful, their exact impact on software is still largely unknown. Are merge conflicts an isolated problem,...
Discussions of ecopoetics often seek to investigate how poetics as a form can be rendered more ecological, often in contrast to nature poetry. These conversations tend to concentrate on this generic contrast and the formal qualities of an ecological poetics. Ecopoetics as a field emerged largely as a response to...
With rising sea levels and more frequent exposure to extreme storms, coastlines worldwide are vulnerable to increased erosion and loss of natural marsh lands. In an effort to lessen these impacts, there is a growing practice of adapting hard or “gray” coastline protection techniques to more nature-based features that promote...
Newcomers’ seamless onboarding is important for open collaboration communi- ties, particularly those that leverage outsiders’ contributions to remain sustainable. Nevertheless, previous work shows that OSS newcomers often face several barriers to contribute, which lead them to lose motivation and even give up on contributing. A well-known way to help newcomers...
The shallow aquifer in Southern Willamette Valley (SWV) has high levels of nitrate, and we are exploring the time trends in nitrate, and the hydrologic and land management factors that contribute to this problem. Nitrogen (N) inputs to farmland from fertilizer is thought to be the primary source of nitrogen...
The second volume of a five-volume series is presented. The contents are arranged under the following chapter headings: (1) Fluid Mechanics of Liquid Metals, (2) Liquid-Metal Heat Transfer, (3) Intermediate Heat Exchangers, and (4) Steam Generators.
Diversity literary awards and other sources were used to create a list of high-quality titles written by and about underrepresented groups. This list was used to assess the diversity and inclusiveness of the library collections of a land-grant university. Gaps in the collection and acquisition processes were identified and will...
With the growth of Internet technologies, online-based foreign language curricula are being introduced at large numbers of institutions internationally. This peer-reviewed volume, geared towards a broad audience, presents innovative research on online language teaching, with chapters by highly engaged scholars and practitioners from the U.S. and Europe, with a strong...
In this thesis we study mathematical and computational models for phenomena of flow and transport in porous media in the presence of changing pore scale geometries. The differential equations for the flow and transport models at Darcy scale involve the coefficients of permeability, porosity, and tortuosity which depend on the...
This thesis investigates how beginning, women farmers, within in a women farmers’ network in the Willamette Valley, Oregon are accessing land and farming information. Using ethnographic, community-based research methods, I ask how land access mediates their ability to care for their land and soil. Are these farmers interested in fostering...
Ever since Henry Jenkins’ groundbreaking _Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture_ (1992), fan studies has slowly worked its way further into mainstream academia. However, particular practices and cultures of femslash fandom, and the contribution of queer women to fandom archives and circulation have, in many ways, been neglected. In...
During the 19th century the United States Army was a military institution characterized by a hierarchical system of authoritative, social and economic inequality between members of its different military grades. Although necessary for insuring military discipline within the Army this system of inequality also influenced the non-military social lives of...
Ian Angell, in the New Barbarian Manifesto, said “A ‘brave new world’ is being forced upon unsuspecting societies by advances in information technology.” It would seem then, that technological advances happen automatically and have a life of their own. There is a logic to technological advancements that is outside human...
The present study considers the mid-nineteenth century origins of the term “sexual inversion,” as it became applied to a variety of nonnormative subjects and sexual practices. Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936) has long been recognized as a discursive space wherein socially constructed notions of sexuality and gender are interrogated. A key...
There are clues that suggest human breast cancer cells use collagen fibers to migrate, and vinculin is a transmembrane protein associated with how cells attach to their environment. Therefore, immunostaining for the vinculin will shed some light in how human breast cancer cells are attaching to their environment. Immunostaining for...