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Assessing The Impact Of Submerged Vegetation On Methane Dynamics In A Discontinuous Permafrost Lake System, Abisko, Sweden, Christopher Daniel Horruitiner

Master's Theses and Capstones

Across the Arctic, postglacial lakes contribute a substantial amount of the total atmospheric methane (CH4), and their emissions are predicted to increase. However, there is still much uncertainty as to the contribution of northern water bodies to atmospheric CH4 emissions. This is mainly due to the spatiotemporal variability of the predominant pathway of emission from high latitude lakes: ebullition (bubbling). There are a myriad of factors that affect ebullition fluxes, including solar radiation input and atmospheric pressure, which make it difficult to model the impact on regional emissions. Very few studies have correlated sediment characteristics and submerged vegetation density with …

Providing Nautical Chart Awareness To Autonomous Surface Vehicles, Samuel John Reed

Master's Theses and Capstones

Autonomous surface vessels (ASVs) have many applications in both military and civilian domains including mine countermeasure, seafloor mapping, and physical oceanography. However, to act as effective tools, ASVs require high levels of autonomy. Currently, many commercially available ASVs have static mission plans with minimal awareness of their environment, which results in a labor intensive approach that does not scale to management of multiple vehicles. In this research, ASV autonomy was increased through the development of an intelligent mission planner and a real-time obstacle avoidance system utilizing Electronic Nautical Charts (ENCs), which describe known hazards in the marine environment without suffering …

A Protocol For Using Long-Term Structural Health Monitoring Data To Detect And Localize Damage In Bridges, Kathryn Elaine Kaspar

Master's Theses and Capstones

The purpose of this research is to establish a protocol for using strain gauge data to characterize the undamaged state of a bridge for structural health monitoring. The Powder Mill Bridge (PMB), which has been instrumented with strain gauges since its opening in 2009, is used as a case study. and the strain gauges used in this study are located at 27 different locations throughout the bridge. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) and linear regression are presented as methodologies for characterizing the relationship between the strains at each of the stations on the bridge. One linear regression analysis was performed as …

Experimental Evaluation Of Fatigue Test Setup For A Gusset-Less Truss Connection, Duncan William Mcgeehan

Master's Theses and Capstones

In 2013, the newly designed Memorial bridge, located between Portsmouth, NH, and Kittery, ME, was opened to traffic. The structural system of the bridge is composed of truss elements with a unique “Gusset-less” connection which utilizes curved steel to transition from the chords to the diagonals where splice plates join the members. With such a unique connection, it is important to verify the design assumptions and assess the performance. In this study, the fatigue performance of the Gusset-less connection is investigated through an experimental fatigue test of a scale model of the connection.

In a high-cycle fatigue test, it is …

Analysis Of Long-Term Productivity Monitoring And Foraging Area Identification Of Breeding Common Terns In Coastal New Hampshire, Jessica Marie Carloni

Master's Theses and Capstones

To restore New Hampshire tern populations, the Isles of Shoals Seabird Restoration Project was initiated in 1997 by New Hampshire Audubon and the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, and is currently administered through a partnership between Shoals Marine Laboratory and New Hampshire Fish Game Department. This initial program was effective and substantial numbers of common terns and lower numbers of roseate and arctic terns have returned to nest on White and Seavey Islands. Analysis of long-term productivity monitoring over 17 years indicates recent stability in the colony with approximately 2,800 nesting pairs with an average productivity rate of 1.11 …

Quantifying Vertical Uncertainty And The Temporal Variability Of The Seafloor To Inform Hydrographic Survey Priorities, Cassandra Bongiovanni

Master's Theses and Capstones

As the area of U.S. coastal waters vastly exceeds the capacity of annual hydrographic surveying, prioritization is necessary to optimize survey benefits. Obtaining new survey coverage over the most vital locations allows for an efficient use of funds; however, identifying these locations is a complex task. The current model to address survey prioritization, called the Hydrographic Health Model (or HHM), was created by personnel at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the authoritative agency tasked with chart maintenance and hydrographic survey collection. While the HHM incorporates potential sources of bathymetric change, it does not include nor lend itself to …

Real-Time Planning As Decision-Making Under Uncertainty, Andrew James Mitchell

Master's Theses and Capstones

In real-time planning, an agent must select the next action to take within a fixed time bound.

Many popular real-time heuristic search methods approach this by expanding nodes using time-limited A* and selecting the action leading toward the frontier node with the lowest f value. In this thesis, we reconsider real-time planning as a problem of decision-making under uncertainty. We treat heuristic values as uncertain evidence and we explore several backup methods for aggregating this evidence. We then propose a novel lookahead strategy that expands nodes to minimize risk, the expected regret in case a non-optimal action is chosen. We …

Analyzing Causes And Consequences Of German Military Interventions: Kosovo, Afghanistan, And Iraq, Matthew Goduto

Master's Theses and Capstones

Due to Germany’s militaristic past, anti-militarism and restraint are ingrained into German society and political discourse. For close to fifty years following WWII, Germany did not deploy its military in offensive missions. Why then, did Germany suddenly participate in a military intervention in Kosovo? Following Kosovo, why did Germany also participate in the military intervention in Afghanistan, but refuse to intervene in Iraq, just two years after the Afghanistan intervention began? Related to these questions are how did Germany intervene in Kosovo and Afghanistan and how did Germany oppose the Iraq war? And what were the consequences of the interventions/non-intervention? …

Impacts Of Sea-Level Rise And Thin-Layer Deposition On Salt Marsh Elevation Dynamics In New Hampshire, Andrew Payne

Master's Theses and Capstones

The survival of salt marshes depends largely on their ability to build in elevation, thereby preventing increases in flooding due to sea-level rise, but the rate of marsh elevation gain depends on processes that are not well-understood, i.e. belowground productivity, sedimentation, and subsidence. The application of sediment to the marsh surface (thin-layer deposition) is a potential mitigation tool for increased flooding, but its effects on plant growth and elevation gain are understudied, especially in New England marshes. A marsh organ experiment was constructed and installed in the field to examine the effects of tidal flooding and thin-layer deposition on productivity. …

Phylogenetic Focusing Reveals The Evolution Of Eumetazoan Opsins, Curtis Provencher

Master's Theses and Capstones

Phylogenetic analyses of gene trees commonly begin by searching large molecular datasets from the taxa of interest using some known query sequence. Resulting sequences that exceed some threshold are then concatenated, aligned, and analyzed phylogenetically. This approach has revealed much about the evolutionary history of gene families, but several problems are apparent. Here we apply a new approach that we call Phylogenetic Focusing that circumvents some issues related to global search strategies. Our approach first circumscribes the largest possible orthogroup containing the gene family of interest and then proceeds to focus in on the gene family of interest based on …

Classification Of Arbitrary Motion Into A Canonical Basis, Michael Moger

Master's Theses and Capstones

The Empatica E4 wristwatch utilizes four sensors to capture medical data from its user - an accelerometer, a plethysmograph, an electro-dermal activity sensor, and an infrared thermophile. Utilizing these sensors, the device can provide detection-based feedback for patients suffering from various ailments. However, each sensor is coupled with the other readings, so any raw data will have a degree of noise accompanying the actual signal. After detailing a conceptual and programming knowledge of various industry-standard data processing techniques, we follow the appropriate steps to take in order to clean up a noisy E4 data signal, starting with supervised basis signals …

Synthetic Strategies To Combat Antibiotic Resistance, Jonathan Fifer

Master's Theses and Capstones

The design and synthesis of β-lactamase inhibitors is a constant area of study to overcome the growing problem of resistance to β-lactam antibiotics. Serine dependent β-lactamase enzymes, through a hydrolysis mechanism, can deactivate many traditional β-lactam antibiotics. Designing drugs to specifically target β-lactamases is of great interest because such drugs could be used in tandem with traditional β-lactam antibiotics. Aza-β-lactam molecules have been theorized to be less vulnerable to hydrolysis than the traditional β-lactams. Nucleophilic attack of the active-site serine of the β-lactamase on the aza-β-lactam ring would lead to a carbamoyl-enzyme intermediate, which would be partially stabilized due to …

The Impact Of Dams On Floods And Nitrogen Flux In The Lamprey River Watershed, Nh, David Simon

Master's Theses and Capstones

Decisions about dam management require weighing many tradeoffs. Among many other factors, dams and their reservoirs can reduce peak flows and retain nutrients that could otherwise cause downstream eutrophication. This study quantifies how dams and their management alter flows and nutrient retention within a coastal New Hampshire watershed. An annual nitrogen budget was estimated at Pawtuckaway Lake, a dammed reservoir within the Lamprey River watershed, through field work. Results showed that annual total dissolved nitrogen (TDN) and dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) retention within Pawtuckaway Lake were close to estimates predicted by an empirical model developed by Seitzinger et al. 2002. …

Site-Specific And Landscape Features Associated With Shrubland Bird Occurence In Anthropogenic Shrublands In The Northeastern United States, Randy Shoe

Master's Theses and Capstones

Habitats dominated by low-growing trees and shrubs are becoming increasingly uncommon in the northeastern U.S. Human development, altered natural-disturbance regimes, and forest succession have reduced the quantity and quality of these shrublands. As a result, over half of the shrubland-dependent songbirds in the region have experienced long-term population declines. Anthropogenic shrublands, including regenerating clearcuts, sand and gravel mines, old fields, and transmission line rights-of-way may provide nesting habitat for most shrubland birds; but differences in size, site-specific features, and landscape composition may affect bird use. To assess the features that may influence shrubland bird occurrence in anthropogenic shrublands, I conducted …

Public Support For Democracy And The Rule Of Law In The Southern Cone, Patrick James Baga

Master's Theses and Capstones

This is an analysis of the countries of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay which argues that public support for democracy and the rule of law in these countries is impacted by the institutional reform processes which are mediated by the social cleavages within these states. The paper begins with a qualitative overview of each country’s experiences before, during, and after military dictatorship. The overview assesses the degree to which each country underwent successful institutional reform at the time of transition to democracy, and how institutional reform impacts public perceptions. Also built within the qualitative overview are the historical experiences which ultimately …

College Students' Perceptions Of Policing Careers, Patrick Robert Sullivan

Master's Theses and Capstones

Police departments across the United States have had tremendous difficulties in recruiting new officers over recent years. Past research has examined factors that motivate people to become police officers but has not examined reasons why people choose not to become police officers. This study aims to identify the college students’ opinions of policing careers. This study evaluates the relationship of views, past interactions, thoughts of prestige, and the role of the media in students’ desire to enter a policing career through a survey and follow-up interviews. Survey results show no statistically significant relationship between views of police and past interactions …

Enhancing E. Coli Removal From Slow-Rate Biofilters Treating Low-Carbon Source Waters, Darline Simoni Balen

Master's Theses and Capstones

Optimizing ripening periods and maintaining removal efficiencies when treating high-quality source waters are some of the main challenges of slow-rate biofiltration. The ripening period of biofilters treating carbon-limited source waters can be significantly longer than biofilters treating nutrient-rich source waters, especially during colder temperatures. Abrupt changes in the influent water quality, e.g. surface water to groundwater, can also impact biofilter active biomass, and consequently biofilter performance. This study aimed to investigate how to reduce ripening period and improve removal efficiencies of slow-rate biofilters treating low-carbon waters by (i) increasing the organic carbon loading of the source water, and (ii) adding …

Assessing The Impact Of Submerged Vegetation On Methane Dynamics In A Discontinuous Permafrost Lake System, Abisko, Sweden, Christopher Daniel Horruitiner

Master's Theses and Capstones

Across the Arctic, postglacial lakes contribute a substantial amount of the total atmospheric methane (CH4), and their emissions are predicted to increase. However, there is still much uncertainty as to the contribution of northern water bodies to atmospheric CH4 emissions. This is mainly due to the spatiotemporal variability of the predominant pathway of emission from high latitude lakes: ebullition (bubbling). There are a myriad of factors that affect ebullition fluxes, including solar radiation input and atmospheric pressure, which make it difficult to model the impact on regional emissions. Very few studies have correlated sediment characteristics and submerged vegetation density with …

Occupancy Detection Using Wireless Sensor Network In Indoor Environment, Farah Ferdaus

Master's Theses and Capstones

Occupancy detection plays an important role in many smart buildings such as reducing building energy usage by controlling heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, monitoring systems and managing lighting systems, tracking people in hospitals for medical issues, advertising to people in malls, and to search and rescue missions. The global positioning system (GPS) is used most widely as a localization system but highly inaccurate for indoor applications. The indoor environment is difficult to handle because along with the loss of signals, privacy is a major concern. Indoor tracking has many aspects in common with sensor localization in Wireless Sensor …

A Simplified Structural Analysis Method For A 20-Foot Cargo Shipping Container, Dzijeme Ntumi

Master's Theses and Capstones

Cargo containers are utilized around the globe as structural components in the design of buildings. Kevin Giriuanas [1] wrote a thesis on the finite element analysis of a 20-foot cargo shipping container, which was comprised of mostly shell elements. This thesis aims to develop a simplified beam model which compares well with the displacement and stresses of a finite element shell model of a 20-foot cargo shipping container. The simplified beam model is comprised of columns with rectangular cross sections and four panels developed using the modified box frame model presented in a thesis by Deborah L. Calvin [2]. The …

Scalable Web Service Development With Amazon Web Services, Patrick Russell Mcelhiney

Master's Theses and Capstones

The objective of this thesis was to explore the topic of scalable web development, and it answered the question, “How do you scale a website to handle more traffic at peak times without wasting resources?” This is important research to any web company that has issues with rising costs as demand for their website increases. It would be wise for every online business to be prepared for more web traffic, before it occurs, without spending the budget of a multi-million user web company in low traffic periods. The last thing you want is an error as your customer base starts …

The Tallgrass Prairie Soundscape; Employing An Ecoacoustic Approach To Understand Grassland Response To Prescribed Burns And The Spatial And Temporal Patterns Of Nechrophilous Invertebrate Communities, Sarah Dodgin

Master's Theses and Capstones

Tallgrass prairies are rapidly vanishing biodiversity hotspots for native and endemic species, yet little is known regarding how spatial and temporal variation of prairie soundscapes relates to seasonal changes, disturbance patterns and biological communities. Ecoacoustics, the study of environmental sounds using passive acoustics as a non-invasive tool for investigating ecological complexity, allows for long-term data to be captured without disrupting biological communities. Two studies were carried out by employing ecoacoustic methodology to study grassland carrion food webs and to capture the phenology of a grassland soundscape following a prescribed burn. Both studies were conducted at the Nature Conservancy’s Tallgrass Prairie …

Biology And Prey Of The Predatory Wasp Cerceris Fumipennis (Hymenoptera: Crabronidae) And Its Use For Bio-Surveillance Of The Emerald Ash Borer, Morgan Carol Dube

Master's Theses and Capstones

Cerceris fumipennis is a colonial wasp that preferentially preys on native and non-native members of the family Buprestidae including the emerald ash borer (EAB), Agrilus planipennis, which is a major threat to North American ash (Fraxinus spp.). Cerceris fumipennis has been used for bio-surveillance of this destructive pest because it catches, stings, and paralyzes buprestids that are then easily intercepted at their nests and documented.

Two large aggregations of C. fumipennis in Merrimack County, NH, USA were monitored during the summer of 2013 and 2014 to determine regional baseline information on aggregation activity, seasonality, paralyzation rate, and prey preference in …

Assessing The Effects Of Habitat Restoration On Shrubland Specialists: Case Study On The New England Cottontail And Shrubland Birds, Melissa Lyn Bauer

Master's Theses and Capstones

Loss and fragmentation of shrubland habitat in the northeastern United States due to succession, suppression of natural disturbance regimes, and development (Cronon 1983, Litvaitis 1993) have resulted in declines of populations of shrubland specialist species, including the New England cottontail (Sylvilagus transitionalis) and shrubland birds (Litvaitis et al. 2006, Schlossberg & King 2007). The New England cottontail’s range has declined by over 86% (Litvaitis et al. 2006, Fenderson et al. 2014, Brubaker et al. 2014) and remaining populations are small and exhibit fine-scale structure, limited dispersal, and loss of metapopulation function (Fenderson 2011, 2014, Cheeseman 2017, Chapter 1). In the …

Conflict Resolution In Popular Film, Linda M. Fogg

Master's Theses and Capstones

Studies on media content have been focused for decades on the frequency of violence, types of aggression, and sex roles. These studies have largely focused on children’s media, especially Disney, with few investigating the presence of violence in adult media as it is perceived as less harmful. Although these are all important topics of research, they have failed to incorporate the larger picture of media's portrayal of conflict resolution. This study aims to answer the questions: how is conflict resolution portrayed in popular films and does it change based on the MPAA rating? using popular movies from 2016. The ratings …

Developing Spectral Metrics As Early Indicators Of Water Stress Detection At The Canopy Level, Korik Vargas

Master's Theses and Capstones

Drought has become an increasing concern over the last few years in forest ecosystems. Understanding how forests respond to drought is critical to elucidate possible drought consequences for forest ecosystem structure and function. There is growing consensus that future climates will be characterized by extreme droughts and extreme precipitation events that will fall outside the historical range to which species and ecosystems are adapted. The limited information of how Northeastern U.S. forest tree species will respond to moderate to extreme drought events have promoted an increasing need to develop monitoring techniques which help us better understand the implications of future …

Optical Properties Of Laboratory Generated Aerosol: Complex Refractive Index Retrieval For Polystyrene Latex Spheres, And Extinction Enhancement Of Montmorillonite By Water Swelling, Tyler Galpin

Master's Theses and Capstones

Aerosol can alter climate through the interaction with solar radiation by absorbing and scattering solar radiation. Absorption and scattering are governed by complex refractive index (CRI) dependent on the chemical composition and wavelength, the physical properties of the aerosol such as size, and other atmospheric parameters such as relative humidity (RH). CRI is commonly reported as the real portion at a single wavelength, or is unknown, which introduces uncertainty when those values are used as input for climate models. Two optical interrogation techniques, Aerosol Extinction Differential Absorption Spectroscopy (AE-DOAS) and Cavity Ring-Down Spectroscopy (CRD), allow for controlled measurements of laboratory …

The Structure, Limits, And Drivers Of Daphnid Diversity, Richard Joseph Knecht

Master's Theses and Capstones

In 1961 Hutchinson proposed the “Paradox of the Plankton” questioning how sympatric planktonic species can coexist for long periods of time while seemingly avoiding the competitive exclusion principle. As this ‘paradox’ became a focus of inquiry, one researcher conducted a 2-year study (1961-1962; Tappa 1965) on Aziscohos Lake Daphnia to address the question. While the study did not solve the enigma, it provided a detailed record of the dynamics and interactions of six coexisting species. Aziscohos Lake and its zooplankton have not been studied since. This study revisits the ‘paradox of the plankton’ by establishing the dynamics of extant Daphnid …

Home Range And Microhabitat Associations Of The Southern Red-Backed Vole (Myodes Gapperi) In New Hampshire Forests, Honora Tisell

Master's Theses and Capstones

Resources, such as food and shelter, are unevenly distributed across the landscape at both macro and micro scales. Home range is one measure of space use that reflects an individual’s resource requirements (e.g., microhabitat characteristics) and competition for those resources (e.g., density dependence). This study focuses on the home range of the southern red-backed vole (Myodes gapperi), comparing field methods for estimating home range and modeling the microhabitat characteristics that define the core area of the home range. Southern red-backed voles (Myodes gapperi) are common to boreal forests, most often found in coniferous or mixed deciduous stands, and in the …

Learning Temporal Dynamics Of Human-Robot Interactions From Demonstrations, Estuardo Rene Carpio Mazariegos

Master's Theses and Capstones

The presence of robots in society is becoming increasingly common, triggering the need to learn reliable policies to automate human-robot interactions (HRI). Manually developing policies for HRI is particularly challenging due to the complexity introduced by the human component. The aim of this thesis is to explore the benefits of leveraging temporal reasoning to learn policies for HRIs from demonstrations. This thesis proposes and evaluates two distinct temporal reasoning approaches. The first one consists of a temporal-reasoning-based learning from demonstration (TR-LfD) framework that employs a variant of an Interval Temporal Bayesian Network to learn the temporal dynamics of an interaction. …