Humans are increasing the scale and frequency of many natural disturbances, as well as adding novel disturbances to ecosystems. This thesis uses the arthropod community as a metric to examine the multi-trophic responses to disturbances in California grasslands. Chapter 2 explores how the long-term exclusion of native vertebrate herbivores has...
Cattle grazing and invasion by non-native plant species are globally-ubiquitous changes occurring to plant communities that are likely to reverberate through whole food webs. We used a manipulative field experiment to quantify how arthropod community structure differed in native and non-native California grassland communities in the presence and absence of...
As a result of a warming climate, subsequent declining snowpack, and a century of fire suppression, forest fires are increasing across the western United States. However, we still do not fully understand how forest fire effects snowpack energy balance, nor the volume and availability of snow melt and associated water...
Breeding bird communities were examined in 18 managed Douglas-fir stands in 6 age classes from 5 to 34 years old in spring and early
summer, 1993 on the Detroit Ranger District, Willamette National Forest, Oregon. The range of seral stages included early shrub/sapling, late shrub/sapling, and pole. In general, the...
Three-dimensional gravity analysis is the process of removing the predictable
components from the free-air gravity anomalies and has proven to be useful for
interpreting the subsurface structures and active processes at mid-ocean ridges. The
three-dimensional effects of the seafloor and Moho topography, assuming a constant
crustal thickness and constant crust...
Apparel fashion is a daily component of society that transcends generations and cultures.
The purpose of my research was to analyze the garment structure and construction of two
separate but comparable garments in style, function, and content - one from the 1910s
and one from 2015. Using the New Brunswick...
Throughout many of the world’s mountain ranges snowpack accumulates during the winter and into the spring, providing a natural reservoir for water. As this reservoir melts, it fills streams and recharges groundwater for over 1 billion people globally. Despite its importance to water resources, our understanding of the storage capacity...
The western United States is experiencing significant changes in wildfire and snow regimes as a result of warming temperatures. An amplification of wildfire activity and reduction in snow water equivalent, snow covered area, and earlier spring snowmelt are documented trends that are projected to continue into the future. With an...
Forested, mountain landscapes in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) are changing at an unprecedented rate, largely due to shifts in the regional climate regime. Documented climatic trends across the PNW include increasing wildfire frequency and intensity and an increasingly ephemeral snowpack, especially at moderate elevations. One relationship that has yet to...
This thesis presents elastic finite difference simulations of two dimensional wavefield propagation for line-9, recorded during the 1993 part of the multi-institutional, multi-year Mendocino Triple Junction (MTJ) Seismic Experiment. Line-9 is a high-resolution, large-aperture seismic profile oriented in north-south direction, extending from the subduction regime north of the MTJ to...