Digital Commons Network^™

Modeling Lake Temperature Response To Climate Change In The Alaskan Arctic, Thomas Balkcom

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This thesis study focuses on simulating lake temperature and ice duration for four lakes at the Arctic Long-Term Ecological Research site, near the Toolik Field Station in Alaska. Model projections were driven by the representative global climate model outputs under different carbon emission scenarios. Results show that my simple lake model can reproduce historical lake temperature and ice duration observations, indicating the reliability of the model for future projections. Model projections show that JuneSeptember lake temperatures would increase by 4.3-5.8 °C from the historical period with most progressive carbon emission scenarios, but by 0.7-2.2 °C in the conservative scenarios. Results …

Assessing & Protecting Dark Night Skies In El Morro National Monument, Leslie Kobinsky

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Light pollution is causing the disappearance of dark night skies around the world. In the United States alone, 1/3 of people are unable to see the Milky Way where they live (Ramlagan, 2016). National Park Service sites contain some of the darkest skies in the country. Here at El Morro National Monument, these dark skies are a beautiful and healthy benefit to people in the local community and visitors traveling from afar. El Morro’s current park legislation does not include specific measures of protection for the night sky. This capstone project will create a baseline data set of night sky …

Assessing Beaver Dam Dynamics In The Logan-Little Bear Watershed, Connor Penrod

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This paper seeks to address a knowledge gap concerning how flood events impact beaver dams over time. To address this gap, I took four time-snapshots of beaver dams, mapping them across the Utah portion of the Logan-Little Bear watershed, from 2009 to 2016 to bookend a large flood event in 2011. I assessed dam status (intact, breached, or blown out) for each dam mapped to assess the impact of the large spring runoff on the dam status. Assessing dam status over time allowed me to assess the change in condition over time, from before to several years after, while also …

Deep Reinforcement Learning Pairs Trading, Andrew Brim

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This research applies a deep reinforcement learning technique, Deep Q-network, to a stock market pairs trading strategy for profit. Artificial intelligent methods have long since been applied to optimize trading strategies. This work trains and tests a DQN to trade co-integrated stock market prices, in a pairs trading strategy. The results demonstrate the DQN is able to consistently produce positive returns when executing a pairs trading strategy.

Evolution Of The Book Cliffs Dryland Escarpment In Central Utah - Establishing Rates And Testing Models Of Escarpment Retreat, Nicholas R. Mccarroll

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Since the earliest explorations of the Colorado Plateau, geologists have suspected that cliffs are retreating back laterally. Clarence Dutton envisioned “the beds thus dissolving edge wise until after the lapse of millions of centuries their terminal cliffs stand a hundred miles or more back from their original position” when he wrote about the landscape in 1882. While many geologic studies have determined how fast rivers cut down through the Plateau, only a few studies have calculated how quickly cliffs retreat laterally, and geologists have been arguing since the 1940’s what exactly drives cliffs to retreat in the first place. We …

Developing, Adopting, And Executing 100% Net-Renewable Electricity Resolutions At The Local Level, Emily E. Skill

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the absence of national leadership on climate policy, municipalities are adopting resolutions to reduce their carbon footprint and transition to clean energy. However, what leads to successful adoption of these resolutions and how to effectively implement climate goals at the community level needs further exploration. To investigate these questions, this thesis examines the resolutions adopted in Salt Lake City, Park City, and Moab, Utah to transition to 100% renewable electricity by 2032. Data was collected through documents, such as city reports and newspapers, and interviews with government officials, city staff, and community members involved with the resolution process. A …

Temporal Json, Aayush Goyal

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a format for representing data. In this thesis we show how to capture the history of changes to a JSON document. Capturing the history is important in many applications, where not only the current version of a document is required, but all the previous versions. Conceptually the history can be thought of as a sequence of non-temporal JSON documents, one for each instant of time. Each document in the sequence is called a snapshot. Since changes to a document are few and infrequent, the sequence of snapshots largely duplicates a document across many time instants, …

Evaluation Of Stream Bank Restoration To Improve Water Quality In A Semi-Arid Stream, Johnathan Neenan

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Human watershed activities such as converting land cover to agriculture and livestock grazing have negatively impacted stream water quality worldwide. One such case is Utah’s Upper Sevier River where a loss of woody bank vegetation (reduced shading) and accelerated bank erosion (increased fine sediment inputs) has led to increased stream temperature and water turbidity. As a result, the state of Utah sought to improve water quality conditions using streambank restoration. While commonly recommended and performed, the effectiveness of this sort of restoration has rarely been quantified. Here, I evaluated a restored reach of the Upper Sevier River near Hatch, UT …

A Model Explaining Medusahead Invasion And Novel Targeted Grazing Approaches Of Control, Casey N. Spackman

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Medusahead (Taeniatherum caput-medusae (L.) Nevski) is currently one of the biggest threats to rangelands and livestock operations in the Western US. High silica concentrations in medusahead contribute to its invasiveness. I developed a model to explain how silica is involved in the invasion process, and attempted to manipulate silica to increase use of the grass by livestock. Experiments were conducted to determine: 1) whether rotational grazing on established forages of improved nutritional quality would provide supplemental nutrients to increase cattle use of medusahead; 2) evaluate intake of and preference for medusahead treated with a glyphosate herbicide at different rates …

Cost-Effective Synthesis, Bioactivity And Cellular Uptake Study Of Aminoglycosides With Antimicrobial And Connexin Hemichannel Inhibitory Activity, Yagya P. Subedi

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Amphiphilic kanamycin is one of the promising class of compounds for the treatment of fungal infections in plants and animal. Factor that lead to the restricting of compounds for commercialization includes, the higher cost of production and poor stability of the compound. However, the new lead, identified from the synthesis and biological testing, can be synthesized on a large scale with a cost comparable to commercial antifungals. The newly reported lead is stable at the acidic and basic conditions. Additionally, this compound has an excellent activity towards Candida auris, a multidrug-resistant superbug.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death …

Wildfire In The West: An Initial Analysis Of Wildfire Impacts On Hydrology And Riverbed Grain Size In Relation To Salmonid Habitat, Natalie J. Gillard

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Historically wildfires have been beneficial to forests, however, human developments have encroached on forests when wildfire was artificially suppressed by federal and state agencies. The area burned by wildfire each year has increased twenty-fold in the past three decades. Large, high severity fires pose increased threats to human and aquatic communities within and downstream of the burned area due to post-wildfire effects on flooding and sedimentation. We need to understand the impacts of wildfires to be able to mitigate their damages and to recognize their potential benefits. This research addresses the questions: 1) Do wildfires impact rural and urban economies …

Plug-And-Play Web Services, Arihant Jain

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The goal of this research is to make it easier to design and create web services for relational databases. A web service is a software service for providing data over computer networks. Web services provide data endpoints for many web applications. We adopt a plug-and-play approach for web service creation whereby a designer constructs a “plug,” which is a simple specification of the output produced by the service. If the plug can be “played” on the database then the web service is generated. Our plug-and-play approach has three advantages. First, a plug is portable. You can take the plug …

Power V. Threshold: Near-Channel Morphology Controls Sediment Rating Curve Shape In Coastal Redwood Watersheds, Adam Caspian Nebraska Fisher

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

River sediment is one of the most pervasive pollutants in the world. Excess amounts of fine sediment can reduce water quality, damage stream ecosystems, and harm aquatic life. Both natural and human-caused processes can add sediment to a river, such as tectonic uplift, landslides, and timber harvesting. Therefore, it is important to understand how fine sediment enters and moves through a rive system to inform policymakers and land-managers on effective ecosystem management.

In this study, we determined how the relationship between river flow and suspended sediment changed among watersheds along the North Coast of California. We found a rise in …

Using A Discrete Choice Experiment To Estimate Willingness To Pay For Location Based Housing Attributes, Kristopher C. Toll

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In 1993, a travel study was conducted along the Wasatch front in Utah (Research Systems Group INC, 2013). The main purpose of this study was to assess travel behavior to understand the needs for future growth in Utah. Since then, the Research Service Group (RSG), conducted a new study in 2012 to understand current travel preferences in Utah. This survey, called the Residential Choice Stated Preference survey, asked respondents to make ten choice comparisons between two hypothetical homes. Each home in the choice comparison was described by different attributes, those attributes that were used are, type of neighborhood, distance from …

Assessing Amendment Treatments For Sodic Soil Reclamation In Arid Land Environments, Sandra Udy

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Plugged and abandoned well pads throughout the Uintah Basin face reclamation challenges due to factors including a harsh climate, invasive species, and high salt loads. Finding ways to alleviate soil sodicity could improve soil reclamation success. Gypsum, sulfur, activated carbon, and Biochar are being applied to improve soil parameters negatively impacted by sodicity, but the direct impact of these amendments on Uintah Basin soils is still largely unknown. The aim of this study was two-fold. (1) Evaluate the effectiveness of gypsum, sulfuric acid, Biochar, activated carbon, and combinations of these amendments in reducing the impact of soil sodicity of the …

Implementation And Effects Of University College Algebra Growth Mindset Structured Assessments In Large Lectures, Hannah Mae Lewis

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Recent scientific evidence shows the incredible potential of the brain to grow and change. Students with a growth mindset view errors and obstacles as opportunities for growth. These students welcome challenges and the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. Although some university instructors are incorporating growth mindset into their lectures, attitudes, and exams in small classes, the traditional exam method used in large lecture undergraduate mathematics classrooms follows a fixed mindset model. The growth mindset structured assessments developed for this study incorporate a testing center portion (matching, short answer, fill in the blank and free response) with structured rework opportunities, …

The Farm As Place In A Changing Climate: Capturing Women Farmers' Experiences In Idaho, United States And Victoria, Australia, Tagen Towsley Baker

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In Australia and the US, women play a vital role in the agricultural sector. However, historically farmwomen’s contributions to agriculture as well as their individual knowledge and social resilience to stressors like climate and climate change have been unrecognized and rendered invisible. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship from geography and the humanities, this dissertation explores the farm as place in a changing climate, drawing on women farmers’ experiences, under three distinct themes: identity, place, and photography. The dissertation research includes three distinct parts. First, incorporating non-fiction writing and photography, I explore my agricultural and religious heritage, as well as familial connections …

Boundaries And Bridges In Rangeland Social-Ecological Systems: Studies Of Collaboration, Innovation, And Information Flow, Gwendŵr R. Meredith

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Public rangelands are managed by a mixture of federal, state, and local governments. Often, these groups are charged with managing adjacent lands that are part of the same greater landscape. To do this effectively, communication and collaboration is required. This dissertation examines federal, state, and local agencies’ level of communication through three projects.

The first project examined barriers to agencies adopting management tools from each other. I found that individuals within agencies were mainly staying within their own agency when seeking advice, so individuals were not communicating about tools or their findings across agencies. Furthermore, agency policies and fear of …

Electronic Transmutation: An Aid For The Rational Design Of New Chemical Materials Using The Knowledge Of Bonding And Structure Of Neighboring Elements, Katie A. Lundell

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Everything in the universe is made up of elements from the periodic table. Each element has its own role that it plays in the formation of things it makes up. For instance, pencil lead is graphite. A series of honeycomb-like structures made up of carbon stacked on top of one another. Carbon’s neighbor to the left, boron doesn’t like to form such stacked honeycomb-like structures. But, what if there was a way to make boron act like carbon so it did like to form such structures? That question is the basis of the electronic transmutation concept presented in this dissertation. …

Machine Learning Techniques As Applied To Discrete And Combinatorial Structures, Samuel David Schwartz

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Machine Learning Techniques have been used on a wide array of input types: images, sound waves, text, and so forth. In articulating these input types to the almighty machine, there have been all sorts of amazing problems that have been solved for many practical purposes.

Nevertheless, there are some input types which don’t lend themselves nicely to the standard set of machine learning tools we have. Moreover, there are some provably difficult problems which are abysmally hard to solve within a reasonable time frame.

This thesis addresses several of these difficult problems. It frames these problems such that we can …

Towards Conjunctive Management Of Surface Water And Groundwater In The Mediterranean, Matthew Lagod

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

One of the fundamental principles of integrated water resources management is the interconnected nature of water in the hydrological cycle, including the interactions between surface water and groundwater. Although scientists have long recognized these interactions, in many cases they are not reflected in natural resources policies and management practices. As a result, the allocation of water resources by public authorities may not be optimal, and may furthermore lead to long-term degradation of water resources and the ecosystems they sustain. In response to this and to growing pressure on water resources from increasing human populations, water experts have developed a body …

Computational And Experimental Studies On Energy Storage Materials And Electrocatalysts, Jared B. Moss

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

With the growing global population comes the ever-increasing consumption of energy in powering cities, electric vehicles, and portable devices such as cell-phones. While the power grid is used to distribute energy to consumers, the energy sources needed to power the grid itself are unsustainable and inefficient. The primary energy sources powering the grid, being fossil fuels, natural gas, and nuclear, are unsustainable as the economically-accessible reserves are continually depleted in exchange for detrimental emissions and air-pollutants. Cleaner, renewable sources, such as solar, wind, and hydroelectric, are intermittent and unreliable during the peak hours of energy usage, that is dawn and …

Query Autoawesome, Chetna Suryavanshi

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This research investigates how to improve legacy queries. Legacy queries are queries that programmers have coded and are used in applications. A database application typically has tens to hundreds of such queries. One way to improve legacy queries is to add new, interesting queries that are similar to or based on the set of queries. We propose Query AutoAwesome, a tool to generate new queries from legacy queries. The Query AutoAwesome philosophy is taken from Google’s AutoAwesomizer tool for photos, which automatically improves a photo uploaded to Google by animating the photo or adding special effects. In a similar …

Interval-Valued Kriging Models With Applications In Design Ground Snow Load Prediction, Brennan L. Bean

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

One critical consideration in the design of buildings constructed in the western United States is the weight of settled snow on the roof of the structure. Engineers are tasked with selecting a design snow load that ensures that the building is safe and reliable, without making the construction overly expensive. Western states use historical snow records at weather stations scattered throughout the region to estimate appropriate design snow loads. Various mapping techniques are then used to predict design snow loads between the weather stations. Each state uses different mapping techniques to create their snow load requirements, yet these different techniques …

Trout Habitat In An Altered Gravel-Bed River With An Augmented Flow Regime, Jacob B. Stout

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Diamond Fork River, and it’s tributary Sixth Water Creek, has been highly altered in terms of shape, function, and ecologicaly due to large, trans-basin flows additions to the system for irrigation starting in the early 1900s. Flows were exceptionally large for 80 years, after which they were reduced in 2004. Larger than natural flows during the low flow season were then added to the river in an effort to improve ecosystem health and recreational fishing opportunities. Since the prescription additional flow during low flow seasons, the river channel has undergone further change, most noticeably in the form of narrowing. …

Tuning Hyperparameters In Supervised Learning Models And Applications Of Statistical Learning In Genome-Wide Association Studies With Emphasis On Heritability, Jill F. Lundell

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Machine learning is a buzz word that has inundated popular culture in the last few years. This is a term for a computer method that can automatically learn and improve from data instead of being explicitly programmed at every step. Investigations regarding the best way to create and use these methods are prevalent in research. Machine learning models can be difficult to create because models need to be tuned. This dissertation explores the characteristics of tuning three popular machine learning models and finds a way to automatically select a set of tuning parameters. This information was used to create an …

Social Media Use During Crisis Events: A Mixed-Method Analysis Of Information Sources And Their Trustworthiness, Apoorva Chauhan

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This dissertation consists of three studies that examine online communications during crisis events. The first study identified and examined the information sources that provided official information online during the 2014 Carlton Complex Wildfire. Specifically, after the wildfire, a set of webpages and social media accounts were discovered that were named after the wildfire—called Crisis Named Resources (or CNRs). CNRs shared the highest percentage of wildfire-relevant information. Because CNRs are named after a crisis event, they are easier to find and appear to be dedicated and/or official sources around an event. They can, however, be created and deleted in a short …

Change In The Leading Mode Of North America's Wintertime Stationary Eddies, Yu-Tang Chien

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Extreme winter weather events in North America have become more frequent and increasingly destructive. This phenomenon was linked to a jet stream pattern that generates abnormally warm conditions in the west and cold conditions in the east, referred to as the North American Winter Dipole. Studies have shown that the Dipole may have amplified and this amplification could be linked to global warming. By analyzing the atmospheric and oceanic data worldwide, the wintertime circulation in the Northern Hemisphere shows signs of a persistent change after the 1980s. In the first part of this study, we examine how the ocean has …

On Fractional Realizations Of Tournament Score Sequences, Kaitlin S. Murphy

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Contrary to popular belief, we can’t all be winners.

Suppose 6 people compete in a chess tournament in which all pairs of players compete directly and no ties are allowed; i.e., 6 people compete in a ‘round robin tournament’. Each player is assigned a ‘score’, namely the number of games they won, and the ‘score sequence’ of the tournament is a list of the players’ scores. Determining whether a given potential score sequence actually is a score sequence proves to be difficult. For instance, (0, 0, 3, 3, 3, 6) is not feasible because two players cannot both have …

Design And Evaluation Of Convolutional Networks For Video Analysis Of Bee Traffic, Prateek Vats

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has been a major threat to bee colonies around the world which affects vital human food crop pollination. The decline in bee population can have tragic consequences, for humans as well as the bees and the ecosystem. Bee health has been a cause of urgent concern for farmers and scientists around the world for at least a decade but a specific cause for the phenomenon has yet to be conclusively identified.

A normal hive inspection can be very disruptive for the bee colony, as the hive needs to be disassembled to visually assess hive health from …