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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Approaches For Studying Fish Production: Do River And Lake Researchers Have Different Perspectives?, Wayne A. Wurtsbaugh, Nicholas A. Heredia, Brian G. Laub, Christy S. Meredith, Harrison E. Mohn, Sarah E. Null, David A. Pluth, Brett B. Roper, W. Carl Saunders, David King Stevens, Richard H. Walker, Kit Wheeler Sep 2014

Approaches For Studying Fish Production: Do River And Lake Researchers Have Different Perspectives?, Wayne A. Wurtsbaugh, Nicholas A. Heredia, Brian G. Laub, Christy S. Meredith, Harrison E. Mohn, Sarah E. Null, David A. Pluth, Brett B. Roper, W. Carl Saunders, David King Stevens, Richard H. Walker, Kit Wheeler

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Biased perspectives of fisheries researchers may hinder scientific progress and effective management if limiting factors controlling productivity go unrecognized. We investigated whether river and lake researchers used different approaches when studying salmonid production and whether any differences were ecologically supported. We assessed 564 peer-reviewed papers published between 1966 and 2012 that studied salmonid production or surrogate variables (e.g., abundance, growth, biomass, population) and classified them into five major predictor variable categories: physical habitat, fertility (i.e., nutrients, bottom-up), biotic, temperature, and pollution. The review demonstrated that river researchers primarily analyzed physical habitat (65% of studies) and lake researchers primarily analyzed fertility …


How To Utilize Relevance Vectors To Collect Required Data For Modeling Water Quality Constitu-Ents, And Fine Sediment In Natural Systems? Case Study: Mud Lake, Idaho, Hussein Aly Batt, David King Stevens Jun 2014

How To Utilize Relevance Vectors To Collect Required Data For Modeling Water Quality Constitu-Ents, And Fine Sediment In Natural Systems? Case Study: Mud Lake, Idaho, Hussein Aly Batt, David King Stevens

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

The development of monitoring programs for water quality and habitat assessment in surface waters is an ongoing challenge because of inherent difficulties in determining the effective spatial and temporal distribution of sites and trips. Recent advances in statistical learning theory, in which system characteristics are learned from data, point to the possibility of using the information content of data to shed light on monitoring results that provide sensitive and independent results. One of those techniques, multivariate relevance vector machines (MVRVM), creates as part of its algorithm subsets of a data set, called relevant vectors (RVs), that are most relevant for …


Arsenic(V) Reduction In Relation To Iron(Iii) Transformation And Molecular Analysis Of Arsenate Reductase (Arra) Gene Within Sediments Of A Northern Utah, Basin-Fill Aquifer, Babur S. Mirza, Subathra Muruganandam, Xianyu Meng, Darwin L. Sorensen, Ryan Dupont, Joan E. Mclean May 2014

Arsenic(V) Reduction In Relation To Iron(Iii) Transformation And Molecular Analysis Of Arsenate Reductase (Arra) Gene Within Sediments Of A Northern Utah, Basin-Fill Aquifer, Babur S. Mirza, Subathra Muruganandam, Xianyu Meng, Darwin L. Sorensen, Ryan Dupont, Joan E. Mclean

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Basin-fill aquifers of the Southwestern United States are associated with elevated concentrations of arsenic (As) in groundwater. Many private domestic wells in the Cache Valley Basin, UT, have As concentrations in excess of the U.S. EPA drinking water limit. Thirteen sediment cores were collected from the center of the valley at the depth of the shallow groundwater and were sectioned into layers based on redoxmorphic features. Three of the layers, two from redox transition zones and one from a depletion zone, were used to establish microcosms. Microcosms were treated with groundwater (GW) or groundwater plus glucose (GW+G) to investigate the …


Study Of The Effect Of Wind Speed On Evaporation From Soil Through Integrated Modeling Of The Atmospheric Boundary Layer And Shallow Subsurface, Hossein Davarzani, Kathleen Smits, Ryan M. T Tolene, Tissa Illangasekare Jan 2014

Study Of The Effect Of Wind Speed On Evaporation From Soil Through Integrated Modeling Of The Atmospheric Boundary Layer And Shallow Subsurface, Hossein Davarzani, Kathleen Smits, Ryan M. T Tolene, Tissa Illangasekare

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

In an effort to develop methods based on integrating the subsurface to the atmospheric boundary layer to estimate evaporation, we developed a model based on the coupling of Navier-Stokes free flow and Darcy flow in porous medium. The model was tested using experimental data to study the effect of wind speed on evaporation. The model consists of the coupled equations of mass conservation for two-phase flow in porous medium with single-phase flow in the free-flow domain under nonisothermal, nonequilibrium phase change conditions. In this model, the evaporation rate and soil surface temperature and relative humidity at the interface come directly …


Response Of Free-Living Nitrogen-Fixing Microorganisms To Land Use Change In The Amazon Rainforest, Babur S. Mirza, C. Potisap, K. Nusslein, B. Bohannan, J. L.M. Rodrigues Jan 2014

Response Of Free-Living Nitrogen-Fixing Microorganisms To Land Use Change In The Amazon Rainforest, Babur S. Mirza, C. Potisap, K. Nusslein, B. Bohannan, J. L.M. Rodrigues

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

The Amazon rainforest, the largest equatorial forest in the world, is being cleared for pasture and agricultural use at alarming rates. Tropical deforestation is known to cause alterations in microbial communities at taxonomic and phylogenetic levels, but it is unclear whether microbial functional groups are altered. We asked whether free-living nitrogen-fixing microorganisms (diazotrophs) respond to deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, using analysis of the marker gene nifH. Clone libraries were generated from soil samples collected from a primary forest, a 5-year-old pasture originally converted from primary forest, and a secondary forest established after pasture abandonment. Although diazotroph richness did not …


The Impact Of Slit And Detention Dams On Debris Flow Control Using Gstars 3.0, Leila Hassan-Esfahani, Mohammad Ebrahim Banihabib Jan 2014

The Impact Of Slit And Detention Dams On Debris Flow Control Using Gstars 3.0, Leila Hassan-Esfahani, Mohammad Ebrahim Banihabib

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Sedimentation, Modeling, GSTARS3.0, Debris flow, Slit dam, Detention dam


Transformation Of, In, And By Learning In A Service-Learning Faculty Fellows Program, Mary Cazzell, Shirley Theriot, Joan M. Blakey, Melanie L. Sattler Jan 2014

Transformation Of, In, And By Learning In A Service-Learning Faculty Fellows Program, Mary Cazzell, Shirley Theriot, Joan M. Blakey, Melanie L. Sattler

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

Transformative learning is the most desired core outcome in adult education. The qualitative study examined critical reflections for professional transformation related to development and implementation of service-learning courses or projects from four university faculty members during enrollment in a Service-Learning Faculty Fellows program and post-servicelearning implementation. Reflective questions related to faculty perceptions of student learning, service-learning as pedagogy, and their own learning— transformation of, in, and by learning, respectively. Content analyses of faculty reflections resulted in three categories of transformation based on three preservice-learning and three post-servicelearning descriptive themes: (1) transformation of student learning from anticipatory integration to conflicts between …


Investigation Of An Association Between Childhood Leukemia Incidences And Airports In Texas, Sala. Nanyanzi Senkayi, Melanie L. Sattler, Nancy Rowe, Victoria Chen Jan 2014

Investigation Of An Association Between Childhood Leukemia Incidences And Airports In Texas, Sala. Nanyanzi Senkayi, Melanie L. Sattler, Nancy Rowe, Victoria Chen

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

As worldwide demand for air travel increases, emissions from airports will likely also increase. Airport emissions pose a concern due to lack of information about their quantity and impacts on human health and the environment. This research aimed to address the question of whether there is an association between childhood leukemia cases and airport emissions in Texas. Rather than looking at the impacts of a single airport on the surrounding community, this study looks at all airports in the state of Texas, and 2 134 incidences of childhood leukemia (children age 9 and under) state–wide over a 10–year period. The …