Geochemical characterization methods are commonly used in the reconstruction of prehistoric raw material use and procurement systems. Trace element studies of lithic source material and artifacts, specifically those made of obsidian, can reveal important information about the environmental and cultural factors which influence the prehistoric distribution of raw material. The...
Spatial variation in the diet of the northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) influences owl home ranges, and understanding this relationship will aid managers in forest management prescriptions that influence spotted owl recovery. This study describes the spatial variation in owl diet based on 4183 prey collected at 114 owl...
The Willamette River floodplain has been highly modified by urbanization, conversion of land to agriculture, construction of dams and revetments, and regulation of flow, all of which have reduced floodplain processes that provide valuable ecosystem services such as fish and wildlife habitat and flood storage. Efforts to protect and restore...
Comparative investigations based on volcanic morphology suffer from the lack of a large terrestrial baseline for comparison. To fill this gap, the Lava Flow Morphology Database (LAMDA) was proposed as a GIS based central clearinghouse for remote and field investigations of volcanic morphology. This study presents an analysis of LAMDA’S...
Old-growth in the Pacific Northwest is generally defined as trees that are more
than 200 years old. A great deal of analysis and discussion about old-growth forests in
western Oregon, however, has focused on the relatively widespread 400 to 500 year
age class of primarily Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) trees. The...
The leasing of submerged and submersible lands is emerging as a new marine conservation method. Using a geographic information system, this study: (1) examines the suitability of estuary tideland sites for conservation leasing in Lincoln County, Oregon, and (2) explores the relationship between adjacent terrestrial land use zones and the...
Although the Pacific Northwest has the least proportion of non-native plant species in relation to other regions of North America, exotic species continue to spread into mountainous areas, including the Cascade Range. In a forested landscape, road networks can act as corridors for exotic plant dispersal and establishment, helping species...
The Tobin Range of central Nevada lies in the Basin and Range extensional province near the transition between more extended terrane (>50%) to the south and east, and generally less extended terrane to the north and west. Geologic mapping, 40Ar/39Ar dating and whole-rock geochemical analysis were employed to establish the...
Many studies have looked at human settlements around individual volcanoes for
volcanic risk analyses, but few have done a comparative study to identify possible global
patterns. With the use of Landsat ETM+ data, this study identifies and compares urban
proximity to the Decade Volcanoes to identify volcanic settlement patterns. These...
Nearest-neighbor resampling is a common procedure used by cartographers to
reproject raster data sets. This type of resampling is useful because it retains the data
from the original raster data set. However, during nearest-neighbor resampling some of
the original data will be lost as it is reprojected, while other data...
Bangladesh lies almost entirely on the delta of three major rivers: the Padma (the
Ganges), the Jamuna (the Brahmaputra), and the Meghna. A considerable portion of
Bangladesh has been repeatedly devastated by floods associated with cyclonic storm
surges along its coastal islands and riverine flooding along the rivers traversing the...
The purpose of this thesis is to provide a first look at the spatial and temporal distributions of dissolved organic material (DOM) off the Oregon coast of North America. While this paper is not a comprehensive examination of these distributions, several patterns are identified as promising candidates for continued research....
In unstable landscapes, modern pedological research explores the role of soils as products and indicators of geomorphologic change. Understanding the dynamics of hill slope pedogenesis is especially important in regions with limited, poor, or threatened soil resources. The island of Cyprus, situated in the eastern Mediterranean, is claimed by many...
Fishery dependent data--length distributions, sex ratios, maturity schedules, and species composition of landed catches--are necessary for stock assessments. These data are currently collected by state port biologists using a sampling design that randomly selects samples from a small percentage of a very large target population. Sampling programs may need to...
Documented trends in rising sea levels, storminess, and extreme wave heights have the potential to increase the frequency and magnitude of coastal change hazards, increasing risks to coastal infrastructure and environmental resources. Coastal planners and decision makers need information about the impacts of future hazards in order to apply mitigation...
Establishment of marine protected areas (MPAs) has been documented to effectively manage marine resource's diversity and enhance fisheries productivity. However, there must be a critical consideration of how these sites are selected and the actual description of the site itself. Its effectiveness is greatly dependent on understanding these habitats and...
We took the back-propagation algorithms of Werbos for recurrent and feed-forward neural networks and implemented them on machines with graphics processing units (GPU). The parallelism of these units gave our implementations a 10 to 100 fold increase in speed. For nets with less than 20 neurons the machine performed faster...
Details the development of the OSU 360 virtual tour system (www.oregonstate.edu/osu360) from May 2008 to May 2009. OSU 360 is a collaboration between the Department of Geosciences, University Housing and Dining Services, Central Web Services, Web Communications, and Admissions/Enrollment. This article details the project development from determining goals, distinguishing locations,...
Several state and federal agencies have identified Oregon's coastal wetlands as
priority areas for conservation, and in some cases have specifically singled out
nontidal (mostly palustrine) wetlands as a major concern. Recent research has
highlighted the need to study and manage wetlands from a regional perspective that
considers the distribution...
Bankfull discharge is an important indicator of streamfiow and affects
physical instream habitat. Geographic Information Systems (G IS), hydrologic
modeling, and statistical analysis were utilized to assess the relationship of
bankfull discharge recurrence intervals and land use / land cover watershed
wide and for stream adjacent buffers and bands of...
St. Lawrence Island, Alaska is home to two Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS) under remediation by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers since 1985. After more than two decades the local residents continue to be concerned about inadequate site characterization and cleanup. During the summer of 2005, I collected ethnographic...
This study examined two neighborhoods in San Francisco with similar earthquake-induced ground failure history -- the Marina District and the South of Market Area (SoMa) -- in the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The earthquake struck shortly after 5 pm on October 17th, 1989 and registered 6.9 in...
This dissertation uses a new methodological approach for an in-depth analysis of three cartographic works. Studies within the discipline of the history of cartography have followed various methodologies throughout the past century. This dissertation argues that in order to come to a more complete understanding of how maps were produced...
Resource managers of Oregon’s tidal wetlands require an improved GIS layer for management of existing tidal wetland habitat and areas considered for tidal wetland restoration. A reconnaissance project was initiated, such that interpretations of remote sensing data, the National Wetland Inventory, Oregon Estuary Plan Book and additional management tools were...
Multibeam sonar data was collected on Nehalem Bank, off of the Oregon Coast with the purpose of increasing the spatial resolution of our knowledge of the area and delineating seafloor habitats. The system used was the Kongsberg Simrad EM-300 operating at 30 kHz. The data set collected includes both topographic...
Satellite remote sensing is an effective tool for mapping snow covered area. However, complex terrain and heterogeneous land cover, due to vegetation and patchy snow cover, present challenges to snow cover mapping. This research compares two techniques for mapping snow covered area: binary and enhanced fractional snow cover mapping techniques....
Hydroacoustic tertiary (T-) waves are seismically generated acoustic waves that propagate
over great distances in the ocean sound channel with little loss in signal strength.
Hydrophone recorded T-waves can provide a lower earthquake detection threshold and an
improved epicenter location accuracy for oceanic earthquakes than land-based seismic
networks. Thus detection...
The working hypothesis for this study is that the introduction of GIS technology into the ancient procedures of map-making has changed the map-making context sufficiently to require a revision of the way we think about, learn from, and use maps, specifically in the public involvement process in natural resource management....
Understanding the movement behavior and foraging strategies of individuals across multiple spatial and temporal scales is essential not only for understanding the biological requirements of individuals but also for linking individual strategies to population level effects. Glacial fjords scattered throughout south-central and southeastern Alaska host some of the largest seasonal...
Montane meadows in the western Cascades of Oregon occupy approximately 5% of the landscape, but contribute greatly to the region's biodiversity. Western Cascades meadows are dynamic parts of the landscape and have contracted by over 50% in the past two hundred years in the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest (hereafter Andrews...
In the past decade, issues related to cultural diversity and pluralism
have risen to the forefront in education. The increasing cultural diversity in
American classrooms and communities requires preservice teachers to be
ready to promote multiple perspectives within their curricula and among their
students. The purpose of this study was...
This study aimed to connect habitat and landscape scale variation, through time and space, to wildlife population dynamics. I studied African buffalo (Syncerus caffer) group size according to habitat structure, landscape heterogeneity, forage quality, and water availability in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Game Reserve, South Africa. I used two approaches to study grouping...
The effect of scale is an important concern in mapping of biodiversity. Scale issues include the grid cell size used for analysis and the effect of the extent and internal boundaries. Because biodiversity analysis involves combinatorial processes, determining the proper scale is data dependent and cannot be predicted from the...
This study compared effects of human and natural wildfire disturbance on age class distribution and associated ecosystem properties of forests in a 15,670 km2 area of the western Cascades of Oregon. The study site is characterized by three forest use types: low elevation, intensively harvested private industrial lands; mid elevation...
The study examines the effect of forest clearance on fire occurrences in major islands of Indonesia, namely: Borneo, Sumatra, Sulawesi and Irian Jaya. The working hypothesis of the study is that forest clearing is a necessary predecessor for extensive fires to occur. The study is designed to test the idea...
This dissertation primarily uses observations made during the 2005 Kashmir earthquake relief effort and available disaster literature to address problems that impede effective and efficient disaster preparedness and response. Three manuscripts form the body of the dissertation. The manuscripts are thematically linked through the Emergency Management Cycle. Each manuscript examines...
One in four Ecuadorians do not have access to health services; while more than two-thirds have no health insurance and insufficient resources to pay for the health care services they might require. The following three studies examined utilization of health care services using Andersen’s Health Care Utilization Behavior Theory. Secondary...
Incidental bycatch in commercial fisheries has been identified as a threat to black-footed albatrosses (Phoebastria nigripes) and Laysan albatrosses (P. immutabilis). Effective long-term conservation of these albatrosses necessitates a thorough understanding of their marine distribution, which marine habitats are selected during foraging, and where they are most likely to interact...
This study demonstrates the utility of combining available scientific data with local ecological knowledge in a Geographic Information System (GIS) to support community-based fisheries management. The approach used provides both the framework for capturing important ecological, economic and social information relevant to marine fisheries management, and also offers coastal citizens...
This study demonstrates the utility of combining available scientific data with local ecological knowledge in a Geographic Information System (GIS) to support community-based fisheries management. The approach used provides both the framework for capturing important ecological, economic and social information relevant to marine fisheries management, and also offers coastal citizens...
The 14-km long Netarts Littoral Cell, located on the northern Oregon coast, experienced episodic erosion as a result of the severe 1997-98 El Nino and 1998-99 La Nina. The erosion events led to the development of a unique partnership bridging scientists, stakeholders, and various planning agencies. To address these erosion...
To date, the use of oceanographic data in fisheries management has been limited by the scarcity and the difficulty of accessing complete oceanographic datasets. Consequently, fish stocks are managed with limited knowledge about the habitat where fish live and incomplete understanding of what oceanographic conditions affect their populations. With the...