This dissertation is a collection of three manuscripts that serve to fill the knowledge gaps and advance methods of detecting the effects of contemporary forest harvesting in experimental catchment studies. While there is a preponderance of studies evaluating the environmental effects of forest harvesting in the western United States, few...
The unsustainable use of fresh water sources and unavailability of fresh water in certain parts of the world have created a demand for water desalination systems. Desalination methods are effective at producing consumable water, but often require large scale setups, high energy consumption, and careful maintenance. A team of students...
This paper addresses the high model complexity and overconfident frame labeling of state-of-the-art (SOTA) action segmenters. Their complexity is typically justified by the need to sequentially refine action segmentation through multiple stages of a deep architecture. However, this multistage refinement does not take into account uncertainty of frame labeling predicted...
Current riparian management objectives in the Pacific Northwest promote both retention of existing conifers and conversion of hardwood-dominated areas to conifers. Although understanding of relationships between riparian vegetation and salmonid prey availability is growing, temporal variation in these relationships is poorly understood. Seasonal fluxes in availability of aquatic and terrestrial...
Shallow landslides are destructive natural hazards that result in widespread losses, both of infrastructure and lives, throughout the world. To help mitigate the impact of landslide hazards, they are commonly characterized across a regional scale by (1) their location and likelihood using susceptibility maps, (2) their magnitude and frequency using...
Image segmentation is the process by which an image is divided into number of regions. The regions are to be homogeneous with respect to some property. Definition of homogeneity depends mainly on the expected patterns of the objects of interest. The algorithms designed to perform these tasks can be divided...
Waldo Lake, located in the Oregon Cascades, is
considered to be one of the most dilute lakes in the
world. Even with very low nutrient concentrations and
sparse populations of zooplankton, introduced fish in the
lake are large in size and in good condition when compared
to fish from other...
Descendants of eastern cottontails from Ohio
(Sylvilagns floridanus) introduced in Benton County,
Oregon and cottontails from Ohio were sampled and
analyzed morphometrically and colorimetrically. In
general, Oregon cottontails were smaller and lighter in
color than Ohio rabbits. Introgression and interspecific
competition with the smaller and darker colored native
brush rabbit...
This research presents a methodology to identify and analyze human-system interactions, and their potential failure modes using a functional decomposition approach during the early system design stage.
The fundamental research contribution of this work is the development of a framework to identify associations between physical user-product interactions, generic human errors...
Small-scale fisheries often suffer from weak, formal governance, and in response they organize in various ways. These self-organizational arrangements rely on the capacity of informal institutions, such as norms and communication, in generating social cohesion among actors in the supply chain and therefore improve the likelihood of generating commonly devised...