Perkinsus marinus is a protozoan parasite that causes a major disease of eastern oysters Crassostrea virginica from Chesapeake Bay south along the Atlantic coast of the USA and throughout the Gulf of Mexico. It is a warm-season disease that kills eastern oysters at temperatures above 20°C. The pathogen requires salinities...
Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods may be used to determine normalizations and moments of distributions. However, these methods may perform poorly when starting from distributions that have little overlap with the target. We develop a homotopy based iterative process of incremental importance sampling to normalize distributions when observations can only...
A comprehensive tribal-level classification for the world's subfamilies of Hesperiidae, the skipper butterflies, is proposed for the first time. Phylogenetic relationships between tribes and subfamilies are inferred using DNA sequence data from three gene regions: 943 bp of cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) (in the mitochondrial genome), 739 bp of...
Congress created the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) in 2009 with the passage of the Forest Landscape Restoration Act (Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009 Title IV). The purpose of the CFLRP legislation is to implement forest restoration work on national forest lands through a competitive grant program....
In this thesis, I present studies in the field of terahertz (THz) spectroscopy. These studies are divided into three areas: Development of a narrowband THz source, the study of carrier transport in metal thin films, and the exploration of coherent dynamics of quasi-particles in semiconductor nanostructures with both broadband and...
Freshwater cyanobacterial blooms are a nuisance and health threat in the Pacific Northwest. The accepted methods of characterizing these blooms by microscopic cell counts cannot differentiate between toxic and non-toxic strains of the cyanobacterium Microcystis. Also, there is limited understanding of freshwater cyanophage that may control bloom dynamics. In order...
For 30 years, the pathogen Haplosporidium nelsoni (MSX) has been causing serious mortalities of eastern oysters Crassostrea virginica in the Delaware and Chesapeake bays. Its life cycle is largely unknown, and methods for control are wanting. Breeding of resistant eastern oyster strains, at this time, offers the best hope for...