The Earth’s surface is experiencing unprecedented change. Humanity’s growing population, expanding land-use footprint, and increasing global emissions of atmospheric greenhouse gases affect a vast number of species on Earth and the functioning of virtually all ecosystems. Given the vital interactions and feedbacks between the Earth’s land surface and climate, measurements...
Increasing forest stress and tree mortality has been directly linked to combinations of drought and high temperatures. The climatic changes expected during the next decades – large increases in mean temperature, increased heat waves, and significant long-term regional drying in the western USA – will likely increase chronic forest stress...
Measurements that link surface conditions and climate can provide critical information on important biospheric changes occurring in the Earth system. As the direct driving force of energy and water fluxes at the surface-atmosphere interface, land surface temperature (LST) provides information on physical processes of land-cover change and energy-balance changes that...
Disturbance processes of various types substantially modify ecosystem carbon dynamics both temporally and spatially, and constitute a fundamental part of larger landscape-level dynamics. Forests typically lose carbon for several years to several decades following severe disturbance, but our understanding of the duration and dynamics of post-disturbance forest carbon fluxes remains...
The bi-directional relationships within the personal and contextual environments of adolescents are critical to the development of adolescents and their transition into adulthood. Opportunities for youth to participate in and provide leadership in meaningful programs, gain life skills, and interact with adults in sustained relationships are key features leading to...
The last two years of the Covid-19 pandemic have brought significant changes to global and American societies, as well as to our healthcare system. Millions of Americans were laid off and left without insurance, some areas of medicine suffered financial catastrophe with a fall in patient volumes, others were victims...
Food webs are extraordinarily complex, containing myriad direct interactions and indirect effects. Determining how this network of interactions and effects influences a food web’s qualitative dynamics is a challenging task, especially because data on food web structure and individual interaction strengths is unknown in virtually all real-world ecosystems. The goal...
This dissertation studies the microeconomics of forest fire suppression programs. It starts with an inquiry into the causes of increasing shares of public land management budgets devoted to wildland fire suppression in lieu of hazardous fuel reduction or other pre-fire risk mitigation programs. The first two chapters consider competing economic...
High Performance Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry coupled with filtration, centrifugation, and other common sample preparation techniques offers a rapid and robust method for separating and quantifying propofol, a commonly used anesthetic, from human blood and its synthetic analogs. Method development is important for not only optimizing separation and quantification for a...
Global efforts to support non-uranium approaches for 99Mo production, due to the proliferation risks associated with 235U fission-based production methods, have recently taken huge strides towards fruition. Several linear accelerator-based methods are currently in late-stage development that can produce low specific activity 99Mo from enriched 98/100Mo targets. The development of...