My dissertation focuses on the evolutionary forces that have shaped the chemical signaling system of plethodontid salamanders. Pheromones mediate two phases of plethodontid reproduction: mate attraction prior to courtship and female persuasion during courtship. Substrate-borne chemical signals are believed to play an important role in mate attraction for these animals....
Resource availability follows seasonal cycles in environmental conditions. To align physiology and behavior with prevailing environmental conditions, seasonal animals integrate cues from the environment with their internal state. One of the systems animals use to integrate those cues is the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and its primary effector, glucocorticoid hormones. The...
The approximation of a continuous function, in the maximum
norm, by continuous splines in the Everett Interpolation Form is considered.
The topics of characterization, uniqueness, and calculation
of best approximations are investigated. Since uniqueness fails, a
new vector-valued norm, which yields uniqueness, is introduced.
Species and cultivar combinations have been relatively well studied, though little is known about the influence of spatial arrangement on agricultural or native plant mixtures. The effect of spatial pattern on mixtures was explored in three experiments. In the first two, agricultural and native plants were planted in two-way mixtures...
A brown and burn site preparation project was monitored on an
alder-dominated brushfield in the western Oregon Coast Range. Prefire
vegetation was surveyed, and the fuel complex created by felling
and aerial application of herbicides was evaluated. Post-fire vegetation
was examined during the four months following the August, 1974,
fire....
Microbial communities are responsible for the bulk of biogeochemical processing in temporary headwater streams, yet there is still relatively little known about how community structure and function respond to periodic drying. Moreover, the ability to sample temporary habitats can be a logistical challenge due to the limited capability to measure...
DOGMATIS is a research project funded by the French Research Agency (ANR, programme ANR-OGM 2007-2010). The transgenic technologies have been applied to fish since more than 20 years now and some strains are at the premarket or market stage in countries outside Europe. In Europe the main risk is a...
Recent studies hypothesize that some submarine slides fail via pressure-driven slow-slip deformation. To test this hypothesis, this study derives pore pressures in failed and adjacent unfailed deep marine sediments by integrating rock physics models, physical property measurements on recovered sediment core, and wireline logs. Two drill sites (U1394 and U1399)...
Marine sediments around volcanic islands contain an archive of volcaniclastic deposits, which can be used to reconstruct the volcanic history of an area. Such records hold many advantages over often incomplete terrestrial data sets. This includes the potential for precise and continuous dating of intervening sediment packages, which allow a...
Using temperature gradients measured in 10 holes at 6 sites, we generate the first high fidelity heat flow measurements from Integrated Ocean Drilling Program drill holes across the northern and central Lesser Antilles arc and back arc Grenada basin. The implied heat flow, after correcting for bathymetry and sedimentation effects,...
