Plants respond to defoliation in many different and complex ways, depending on their growth habit and form as well as the extent and duration of the defoliation. Tree crowns have been shown to be quite sensitive to disturbances such as defoliation, however quantitative relationships have rarely been developed, making the...
Forest growth models in the Pacific Northwest are predominantly empirical. Predictions of yield under alternative silvicultural regimes cannot rely completely on field trials; yet empirical growth models are often inadequate for extrapolating untested regimes and genotypes. The limitations of current models include (1) long time-steps (e.g. 5-10 years); (2) insufficient...
Tree biomass is typically estimated using statistical models. This review highlights five limitations of most tree biomass models, which include the following: (1) biomass data are costly to collect and alternative sampling methods are used; (2) belowground data and models are generally lacking; (3) models are often developed from small...
The species self-thinning boundary line has been widely analyzed with a variety of statistical techniques. Most previous studies in the forestry literature have reported that the relationship does not differ across a range of stand and site factors, but these studies have primarily used statistical techniques that make model fitting...
Conifer crowns can be highly variable both within and between trees, particularly with respect to foliage biomass and leaf area. A variety of sampling schemes have been used to estimate biomass and leaf area at the individual tree and stand scales. Rarely has the effectiveness of these sampling schemes been...
In this thesis I examine the question: can allowing a wildfire to burn this year result in a net positive economic gain? To answer this question I created 2,500 multiple sets of paired scenarios (called a fire of interest) which consist of ignitions, vegetation growth, and timber harvest over the...
During 2016-2018, unprecedented aggregations of the colonial pelagic tunicate Pyrosoma atlanticum were observed in the Northern California Current (NCC). Pyrosomes are common in tropical and sub-tropical ocean waters, but little is known about their abundance, distribution, and trophic ecology in mid-latitude systems. To assess these factors, pyrosomes were collected during...
Pyrosomes are colonial pelagic tunicates that have fascinated marine biologists for over a century. Their name comes from the “fiery” bioluminescence that luminous organs produce at night time. Blooms of pyrosomes, identified as Pyrosoma atlanticum (Peron, 1804), have recently appeared in the North Pacific Ocean, prompting questions about environmental factors...
Where a legacy of aggressive wildland fire suppression has left forests in need of fuel reduction, allowing wildland fire to burn may provide fuel treatment benefits, thereby reducing suppression costs from subsequent fires. The least-cost-plus-net-value-change model of wildland fire economics includes benefits of wildfire in a framework for evaluating suppression...
The potential of the developing zebrafish model for toxicology and drug discovery is limited by inefficient approaches to manipulating and chemically exposing zebrafish embryos—namely, manual placement of embryos into 96- or 384-well plates and exposure of embryos while still in the chorion, a barrier of poorly characterized permeability enclosing the...