The body of work aims to contribute to the area of Quantitative analysis in Environmental Sciences, and is focused on the microbiome. The underlying theme for the dissertation is methods and workflow. The unique bioinformatics workflow used for the analysis of genomic data was used to answer distinct and pressing...
The literature on first-generation South Asian American (SAA) mental health is limited despite the increased focus of studies on help-seeking behaviors and subjective well-being over the past decade. Therefore, we designed a web-based survey seeking to address two research questions. Research Question 1 informed Study 1 of this dissertation project:...
Livestock grazing is the prominent land use in Wyoming big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata ssp. wyomingensis [Beetle & A. Young] S.L. Welsh) steppe and has been present since the late 1800’s. There have been calls to remove livestock grazing from rangelands as historic grazing practices resulted in the degradation of some...
The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experiences of school-based agriculture education (SBAE) teachers who self-identified as blended pedagogues. This study specifically focused on SBAE teachers' beliefs and how those beliefs influence their blended teaching classroom practice. Teacher beliefs are personal, subjective, and temporally and contextually stable....
Mental health disorders are the leading cause of disability worldwide. The strong need for mental health services has prompted intensive global efforts to develop, evaluate, and deliver effective mental health treatment, especially for low- and middle-income countries. The counseling profession in the United States has responded to this global need...
Within the sagebrush steppe ecosystem, invasive annual grasses are of growing management concern as they outcompete native vegetation, change the fundamental nutrient cycling processes, decrease biodiversity, and increase frequency of wildfires. The most widely used and effective management tool to decrease invasive annual grass abundance, is the use of pre-emergent...
The agricultural industry in the Western United States continues to possess issues of overwatering, accounting for over 80% of consumed water per year in the country. While technologies such as satellite imaging and sensor networks have slowly improved irrigation Best Management Practices to reduce superfluous water consumption, limitations associated with...
We describe spatio-temporal random processes using linear mixed models and discuss estimation, inference, and prediction under this formulation. We show how many commonly used covariances are special cases of this more general framework and pay special attention to the separable and product-sum covariances. The linear mixed model formulation facilitates straightforward...
Reestablishing native perennial vegetation in annual grass-invaded rangelands is critical to restoring ecosystems, especially following wildfires. Controlling invasive annual grasses is essential to increasing revegetation success; however, pre-emergent herbicides used to control annual grasses prohibit immediate seeding due to non-target herbicide damage. Thus, seeding is often delayed one year following...
Roughstalk bluegrass (Poa trivialis L.) (RB) is a weed species that increased very quickly in grass seed production fields of the Willamette Valley. The invasion of RB in grass seed crops often occurs in waterlogged soils. In waterlogged areas, RB exhibited better competitiveness and had greater population densities than other...