Following a history of tensions surrounding concubinage in medieval and early modern Spain, the Church sought greater control of religious life, particularly over the sacrament of marriage, via the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The Church exercised its strengthened restrictions and prosecuted these relationships with more frequency, as did civil...
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...
Most of today’s Internet of Things (IoT) applications assume that data will be moved offdevices into centralized cloud platforms. While existing IoT systems leverage cloud-based analytics for meaningful data reasoning, the assumption that data should always be moved off the devices is problematic. The amount of data to be moved...
The economic analysis of land use decisions provides insight into incentive structures faced by landowners and the impacts of landowner decisions on others. Qualifying and quantifying these incentives and impacts offers insight into the relevant characteristics of decision-making. In turn, this allows the researcher to model and predict land use...
The discovery of new antibiotics reached its peak during the golden era of antibiotics in the mid 20th century and continued to thrive until the 1980s. However, after more than 50 years of fruitful exploration and exploitation of microbial natural products the discovery rate of new antibiotics has dropped drastically...
The isoprenoid pathway is one of the major biosynthetic pathways of secondary metabolites. Isoprenoids with a C₂₀ skeleton are known as diterpenoids and are derived from the common precursor, geranylgeranyl diphosphate (GGPP). This dissertation describes approaches to discover the diterpene synthase enzymes which provide the backbone structures for pleuromutilin and...
Bigeye tunas are bycatch to skipjack tunas when tuna purse seine vessels set their nets on floating aggregator devices (FADs). Current approaches to managing bigeye in both the Eastern Pacific Ocean (EPO) and the Western and Central Pacific Ocean (WCPO) entail permanently closed areas, such as the “correlito” in the...
Natural products from both terrestrial and marine sources represent a significant source of novel drug leads, and have previously been developed into clinically-approved agents for the treatment of various human diseases. This work represents the biological characterization of the mechanistic basis for activity of several natural product structures in models...
This thesis discusses both theoretical and practical considerations inherent in conducting community-based research within a case study of sea turtle conservation in Baja California, Mexico. A brief background, including the general ecology, status and distribution of sea turtles of the Baja peninsula is presented, with an overview of the current...
Today nano scale materials are being used for wide range of applications. One promising topic in nano scale materials is using them for reinforcement of different polymeric materials to reach desirable stiffness properties. The stiffness of these materials is mostly found experimentally because the nanocomposite community lacks a decent analytical...