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Full-Text Articles in Biology
Migratory Ecology Of Sea Turtles, Nathan Jack Robinson
Migratory Ecology Of Sea Turtles, Nathan Jack Robinson
Open Access Dissertations
Establishing the movement patterns of free-ranging animals is imperative to understanding their behavior and ecology, and is often necessary for designing effective conservation-strategies. This is especially true for migratory species, such as sea turtles, whose long-distance movements form a major component of their life history. In this thesis, I investigated which factors are driving the migratory behavior of the leatherback turtleDermochelys coriacea. Firstly, I examined whether the timing of the nesting season (nesting phenology) is influenced by oceanographic conditions along the pre-nesting migratory route or by variation in population structure. The discovery that nesting phenology appears more influenced by …
Quantitative Modeling Of Spatiotemporal Systems: Simulation Of Biological Systems And Analysis Of Error Metric Effects On Model Fitting, James Hengenius
Quantitative Modeling Of Spatiotemporal Systems: Simulation Of Biological Systems And Analysis Of Error Metric Effects On Model Fitting, James Hengenius
Open Access Dissertations
Understanding the biophysical processes underlying biological and biotechnological processes is a prerequisite for therapeutic treatments and technological innovation. With the exponential growth of computational processing speed, experimental findings in these fields have been complemented by dynamic simulations of developmental signaling and genetic interactions. Models provide means to evaluate "emergent" properties of systems sometimes inaccessible by reductionist approaches, making them test beds for biological inference and technological refinement.^ The complexity and interconnectedness of biological processes pose special challenges to modelers; biological models typically possess a large number of unknown parameters relative to their counterparts in other physical sciences. Estimating these parameter …
Towards A Paradigm Shift In The Modeling Of Soil Organic Carbon Decomposition For Earth System Models, Yujie He
Open Access Dissertations
Soils are the largest terrestrial carbon pools and contain approximately 2200 Pg of carbon. Thus, the dynamics of soil carbon plays an important role in the global carbon cycle and climate system. Earth System Models are used to project future interactions between terrestrial ecosystem carbon dynamics and climate. However, these models often predict a wide range of soil carbon responses and their formulations have lagged behind recent soil science advances, omitting key biogeochemical mechanisms. In contrast, recent mechanistically-based biogeochemical models that explicitly account for microbial biomass pools and enzyme kinetics that catalyze soil carbon decomposition produce notably different results and …
The Effects Of Radar On Avian Behavior: Implications For Wildlife Management At Airports, Eleanor R. Sheridan
The Effects Of Radar On Avian Behavior: Implications For Wildlife Management At Airports, Eleanor R. Sheridan
Open Access Theses
Airports are areas with a high availability of resources for wildlife to forage, breed, and roost. Airports also have different types of radars to assist with air traffic control as well as tracking of wildlife that could become a risk for aircraft. The effect of radar electromagnetic radiation on wildlife behavior is not well understood. The goal of this study was to determine if bird behavior is affected by radar in two contexts: static radar (e.g., surveillance radar) and approaching radar (e.g., aircraft weather radar). We used brown-headed cowbirds as a model species. In the static radar context, we performed …
Abcb11 Functions With B1 And B19 To Regulate Rootward Auxin Transport, Jesica Elyse Reemmer
Abcb11 Functions With B1 And B19 To Regulate Rootward Auxin Transport, Jesica Elyse Reemmer
Open Access Theses
Auxin transport is essential for the architecture and development of erect plants. In a network of transporters directing auxin flows, ATP-Binding Cassette (ABC) transporters are a ubiquitous family of proteins that actively transport important substrates, including auxins, across the plasma membrane. ABCB1 and ABCB19 have been shown to account for the majority of rootward auxin transport, but residual fluxes to the root tip in Arabidopsis b1b19 double mutants implies the involvement of at least one additional auxin transporter in this process. Of specific interest, the severe dwarfism seen in abcb1abcb19 is strikingly reminiscent of that seen in mutants defective in …
Dj-1 And Atp13a2: Two Proteins Involved In Parkinson’S Disease, Josephat M Asiago
Dj-1 And Atp13a2: Two Proteins Involved In Parkinson’S Disease, Josephat M Asiago
Open Access Dissertations
Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder after Alzheimer's disease, affecting approximately 0.3% of the total U.S. population, and its prevalence increases with age. Two neuropathological hallmarks of PD are the loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta, a region in the midbrain involved in initiating and sustaining movement, and the presence of cytosolic inclusions called Lewy bodies (LBs) in various brain regions. LBs are enriched with fibrillar forms of the presynaptic protein &agr;-synuclein (aSyn). Two autosomal recessive genes implicated in familial PD are PARK9, encoding the P-type ATPase ATP13A2, a lysosomal ATPase; and …