Populated and developed areas at the fringes of or intermixed with undeveloped landscapes are referred to as the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI). There are many unique benefits associated with living in the WUI that understandably attract people to move to them. However, there are also potential wildfire-related risks particular to...
At a time when environmental conditions are rapidly changing, understanding how thermal extremes impact wildlife is imperative to fully understanding the consequences of climate change in natural ecosystems. While many organisms are currently impacted by rapidly warming and more erratic environmental conditions, identifying and investigating model species whose life histories...
With the rapid advancement of educational technology and the need for personalized, engaging content to accommodate diverse learning needs, Virtual Reality (VR) holds promises for the present and future. However, VR applications suffer from challenges, including usability concerns, lack of pedagogical value, and evaluation standards. This thesis focuses on two...
A seasonal hair-loss syndrome of native deer began to occur in the Pacific Northwest United States in the mid-1990s. Clinical manifestations of the disease typically include large numbers of chewing lice on Columbia Black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus) and Columbia White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus leucurus). Expenditure of energy responding to...
Nutrient limitation constrains tree growth in many managed forests. Nitrogen (N) is the most common limiting nutrient, but high N supply can shift limitation to other nutrients, particularly phosphorus (P) and the base cations calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), and potassium (K). As different soil minerals have different capacities to supply...
Society derives many critical and irreplaceable values from forests. With a growing global human population and rates of consumption, forests are under increasing pressure to provide all these values simultaneously. To meet societal demands for wood products, tree plantations are becoming increasingly common and are replacing native forests. Yet, forests...
This dataset includes species richness of native plants, pollinators and birds as well as 13 proxies for ecosystem services representing timber production, culturally-valued plants and animals, and regulating services tied to forest productivity. The data were collected from an experiment conducted in the Oregon Coast Range USA that sought to...
Two key challenges emerge when initiating individual-tree growth models for bare ground or very young plantations. Both involve the need for a list of individual trees with known or predicted size and known expansion factor (number of trees per unit of area represented by each tree). In the case of...
Animal weapons are thought to have evolved to compete for reproductive opportunities within a species. Across the diverse weapon-bearing taxa, several evolutionary trends have emerged: (1) increasing complexity and relative size across ontogeny, (2) sexual dimorphism, and (3) higher levels of random deviations from symmetry (i.e., fluctuating asymmetry) than non-weaponized...