A rural watershed containing a protected forest area in the north
and a small rural community in the south was monitored for numbers of
fecal indicator bacteria as well as the incidence and origin of the
enteric pathogen Salmonella. Isolation of Salmonella only occurred
once in the protected watershed, while...
Species' distributions across the landscape are perhaps the least understood yet most conspicuous features of life on earth. Ecologists have long studied species' distributions; yet, many questions remain about why species occur where they do. Such questions persist largely because species' distributions are complex systems with challenging properties like non-linearity,...
Featuring high waterfalls and forested cliffs, and displaying a remarkable transition between the Pacific and Interior west, the Columbia River Gorge reveals the grandeur of western landscapes. Yet the landscape that one sees today is an amalgamation of the Gorge's natural setting and its unique human history. Historical research on...
The general objective of this study was to develop
models and datasets that would significantly advance our
ability to assess the current and future effects of global
change on the biosphere. The focus was in two areas: (1)
preparing environmental datasets at regional to small
watershed scales; and (2) developing...
The study of the diversity of multivariate objects shares common characteristics across disciplines, including ecology and organizational management. Nevertheless, experts in these two disciplines have adopted somewhat separate diversity concepts and analysis techniques, limiting the ability of potentially sharing and cross comparing these concerns. Moreover, while complex diversity data may...
Most research on U.S. hunger and food insecurity is at the household level, where it occurs. Because policy to address food insecurity is created and implemented at the national and state level, hunger research at the state level provides important contextual information. By including weather data with state level economic...
This dissertation explores and analyzes the performance of several Bayesian anytime inference algorithms for dynamic influence diagrams. These algorithms are compared on the On-Line Maintenance Agent testbed, a software artifact permitting comparison of dynamic reasoning algorithms used by an agent on a variety of simulated maintenance and monitoring tasks. Analysis...
Bayesian networks are used for building intelligent agents that act under uncertainty. They are a compact representation of agents' probabilistic knowledge. A Bayesian network can be viewed as representing a factorization of a full joint probability distribution into the multiplication of a set of conditional probability distributions. Independence of causal...