Digital Commons Network^™

Lifeblood Of The Earth: Nuwuvi (Southern Paiute) Hydrological Knowledge And Perceptions Of Restoration In Two Southern Nevada Protected Areas, Kendra Lesley Wendel

Dissertations and Theses

In the arid landscapes of the southern Great Basin and northern Mojave Desert, issues surrounding water resource management are often politically contentious. Nuwuvi (Southern Paiute) have known and managed these resources for thousands of years prior to Euro-American arrival in the region. A variety of factors, including federal policies that resulted in the creation of reservations and forced placement in boarding schools, as well as contemporary resource commodification, have influenced Nuwuvi knowledge and practice.

In this thesis, I examined the character of Nuwuvi ethnohydrological knowledge, including management knowledge, of two protected areas: Spring Mountains National Recreation Area (SMNRA), managed by …

Advances In Piecewise Smooth Image Reconstruction, Ralf Juengling

Dissertations and Theses

Advances and new insights into algorithms for piecewise smooth image reconstruction are presented. Such algorithms fit a piecewise smooth function to image data without prior knowledge of the number of regions or the location of region boundaries in the best fitting function. This is a difficult model selection problem since the number of parameters of possible solutions varies widely.

The approach followed in this work was proposed by Yvan Leclerc. It uses the Minimum Description Length principle to make the reconstruction problem well-posed: the best fitting function yields the shortest encoding of the image data. In order to derive a …

Relational Database Analysis Of Dated Prehistoric Shorelines To Establish Sand Partitioning In Late Holocene Barriers And Beach Plains Of The Columbia River Littoral Cell, Washington And Oregon, Usa, Tamara Causer Linde

Dissertations and Theses

Studies of episodic shoreline accretion of the Columbia River Littoral Cell (CRLC) have been ongoing since 1964. In this study, the sediment volumes in the late Holocene barriers and beach plains are compiled and formatted in GIS compatible databases for the four sub-cells of the CRLC.

Initial evaluation involved the creation of a geodatabase of 160 dated retreat scarp positions, that were identified on across-shore GPR and borehole profiles. Ten primary timelines were identified throughout the CRLC (0-4700 ybp) and those were used to develop polygon cells. Elevation, distance measurements, and position information were all linked to the polygon through …

Towards Constructing Interactive Virtual Worlds, Francis Chang

Dissertations and Theses

Networked virtual reality environments including virtual worlds devoted to entertainment, online socializing and remote collaboration have grown in popularity with the rise of commercially available consumer graphics hardware and the growing ubiquity of the Internet. These virtual worlds are typified by a persistent simulated three-dimensional space that communicates over a computer network, where users interact with the environment and each other through digital avatars. Development of these virtual worlds challenges the limits of the networking infrastructure, 3D streaming graphics techniques, and the distributed computing design of the virtual world systems that manages the simulation. In this dissertation, we explore solutions …

A Global Investigation Of Stakeholder And Contextual Influences On Firm Engagement In Sustainability, Annette M. Nemetz

Dissertations and Theses

Global sustainability issues cross all sectors of society, including businesses, governments, and communities and come with substantial costs. Business organizations are increasingly expected to address sustainability issues in a responsible manner and to disclose socially responsible behaviors accurately and transparently, showing that they are effective at managing and being proactive about sustainability challenges. In light of these pressures and expectations for business organizations, the fundamental research question for this study was whether variation existed in the levels of engagement in sustainability efforts across firms globally, and, more importantly, why such variation existed.

The level of strategic firm engagement in sustainability …

The Design, Implementation, Assessment, And Evaluation Of A Power Systems Protection Laboratory Curriculum, Jennifer Ferris

Dissertations and Theses

Over the last the last three decades, there has been a significant and documented decrease of power engineering curriculum within U.S. electrical engineering programs. Development of lifelong learners capable of critical and independent thinking is required to replace the large number of upcoming retirees from the industry and to prepare for the engineering challenges new technologies, laws and regulations are bringing to the electrical power system. In response to these challenges, Portland State University redesigned its BSEE and MSECE power engineering programs in order to create a launching pad for successful power engineering careers. A course series on power system …

Using Spammers' Computing Resources For Volunteer Computing, Thai Le Quy Bui

Dissertations and Theses

Spammers are continually looking to circumvent counter-measures seeking to slow them down. An immense amount of time and money is currently devoted to hiding spam, but not enough is devoted to effectively preventing it. One approach for preventing spam is to force the spammer's machine to solve a computational problem of varying difficulty before granting access. The idea is that suspicious or problematic requests are given difficult problems to solve while legitimate requests are allowed through with minimal computation. Unfortunately, most systems that employ this model waste the computing resources being used, as they are directed towards solving cryptographic problems …

Global Resource Management Of Response Surface Methodology, Michael Chad Miller

Dissertations and Theses

Statistical research can be more difficult to plan than other kinds of projects, since the research must adapt as knowledge is gained. This dissertation establishes a formal language and methodology for designing experimental research strategies with limited resources. It is a mathematically rigorous extension of a sequential and adaptive form of statistical research called response surface methodology. It uses sponsor-given information, conditions, and resource constraints to decompose an overall project into individual stages. At each stage, a "parent" decision-maker determines what design of experimentation to do for its stage of research, and adapts to the feedback from that research's potential …

Bicycle Facilities And The Uptake Of Air Pollution By Active Travelers, Alexander Y. Bigazzi, Miguel A. Figliozzi, James F. Pankow, Wentai Luo, Lorne M. Isabelle

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Outlines the research of urban bicyclists' facilities and the uptake of air pollution by active travelers in urban Portland, OR. Outlines the research goals, beginning data collection methods, intake/uptake, modeling results, conclusions and the next steps for future work with the collected data set of direct uptake measurements.

Effectiveness Of Fuel Treatments For Mitigating Wildfire Risk And Sequestering Forest Carbon: A Case Study In The Lake Tahoe Basin, E. Louise Loudermilk, Alison Stanton, Robert M. Scheller, Thomas E. Dilts, Peter J. Weisberg, Carl Skinner, Jian Yang

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Fuel-reduction treatments are used extensively to reduce wildfire risk and restore forest diversity and function. In the near future, increasing regulation of carbon (C) emissions may force forest managers to balance the use of fuel treatments for reducing wildfire risk against an alternative goal of C sequestration. The objective of this study was to evaluate how long-term fuel treatments mitigate wildfires and affect forest C. For the Lake Tahoe Basin in the central Sierra Nevada, USA, fuel treatment efficiency was explored with a landscape-scale simulation model, LANDIS-II, using five fuel treatment scenarios and two (contemporary and potential future) fire regimes. …

Diverted Opportunity: Inequality And What The Southnorth Water Transfer Project Really Means For China, Britt Crow-Miller

Institute for Sustainable Solutions Publications and Presentations

The article discusses China’s South-North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP) and argues that not only does the SNWTP reflect existing spatially articulated power discrepancies, but it reinforces and potentially exacerbates those inequalities by prioritizing Beijing’s present and future water needs above those of its neighbors and locking them in place for decades to come. Smaller, regional cities and rural areas — Shijiazhuang and Baoding in Hebei, Nanyang in Henan and the gritty, struggling towns and villages around Danjiangkou Reservoir — might have gained muchneeded jobs and government investment in the short term around the construction of the Middle Route, but without …

Conditional Tests On Basins Of Attraction With Finite Fields, Ian H. Dinwoodie

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

An iterative method is given for computing the polynomials that vanish on the basin of attraction of a steady state in discrete polynomial dynamics with finite field coefficients. The algorithm is applied to dynamics of a T cell survival network where it is used to compare transition maps conditional on a basin of attraction.

Riparian Vegetation Assemblages And Associated Landscape Factors Across An Urbanizing Metropolitan Area, Christa Von Behren, Andrew Evans Dietrich, J. Alan Yeakley

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

While diverse, native riparian vegetation provides important functions, it remains unclear to what extent these assemblages can persist in urban areas, and under what conditions. We characterized forested riparian vegetation communities across an urbanizing metropolitan area and examined their relationships with surrounding land cover. We hypothesized that native and hydrophilic species assemblages would correlate with forest cover in the landscape. For each of 30 sites in the Portland–Vancouver metro area, we recorded vegetation at 1-cm intervals along 3 transects using the line-intercept method. Land cover was characterized at 2 scales: within 500 m of each site and across the entire …

Phenotypic Plasticity Of Invasive Spartina Densiflora (Poaceae) Along A Broad Latitudinal Gradient On The Pacific Coast Of North America, Jesus M. Castillo, Brenda J. Grewall, Andrea Pickart, Alejandro Bortolus, Carlos Pena, Enrique Figueroa, Mark D. Sytsma

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Premise of the study: Phenotypic acclimation of individual plants and genetic differentiation by natural selection within invasive populations are two potential mechanisms that may confer fitness advantages and allow plants to cope with environmental variation. The invasion of Spartina densiflora across a wide latitudinal gradient from California (USA) to British Columbia (Canada) provides a natural model system to study the potential mechanisms underlying the response of invasive populations to substantial variation in climate and other environmental variables.

Methods: We examined morphological and physiological leaf traits of Spartina densiflora plants in populations from invaded estuarine sites across broad latitudinal and climate …

Experimental Study On Influence Of Pitch Motion On The Wake Of A Floating Wind Turbine Model, Stanislav Rockel, Elizabeth Camp, Jonas Schmidt, Joachim Peinke, Raúl Bayoán Cal, Michael Höllimg

Mechanical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Wind tunnel experiments were performed, where the development of the wake of a model wind turbine was measured using stereo Particle Image Velocimetry to observe the influence of platform pitch motion. The wakes of a classical bottom fixed turbine and a streamwise oscillating turbine are compared. Results indicate that platform pitch creates an upward shift in all components of the flow and their fluctuations. The vertical flow created by the pitch motion as well as the reduced entrainment of kinetic energy from undisturbed flows above the turbine result in potentially higher loads and less available kinetic energy for a downwind …

Climate Change Effects On Northern Great Lake (Usa) Forests: A Case For Preserving Diversity, Matthew Joshua Duveneck, Robert M. Scheller, Mark A. White, Stephen D. Handler, Catherine Ravenscroft

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Under business as usual (BAU) management, stresses posed by climate change may exceed the ability of Great Lake forests to adapt. Temperature and precipitation projections in the Great Lakes region are expected to change forest tree species composition and productivity. It is unknown how a change in productivity and/or tree species diversity due to climate change will affect the relationship between diversity and productivity. We assessed how forests in two landscapes (i.e., northern lower Michigan and northeastern Minnesota, USA) would respond to climate change and explored the diversityproductivity relationship under climate change. In addition, we explored how tree species diversity …

The Role Of Prototype Learning In Hierarchical Models Of Vision, Michael David Thomure

Dissertations and Theses

I conduct a study of learning in HMAX-like models, which are hierarchical models of visual processing in biological vision systems. Such models compute a new representation for an image based on the similarity of image sub-parts to a number of specific patterns, called prototypes. Despite being a central piece of the overall model, the issue of choosing the best prototypes for a given task is still an open problem. I study this problem, and consider the best way to increase task performance while decreasing the computational costs of the model. This work broadens our understanding of HMAX and related hierarchical …

Convergent Surface Water Distributions In U.S. Cities, Meredith K. Steele, James B. Heffernan, Neil D. Bettez, Jeannine Cavender-Bares, Peter M. Groffman, J. Morgan Grove, Sharon J. Hall, Sarah E. Hobbie, Kelli L. Larson, Jennifer L. Morse, Christopher Neill, Kristen C. Nelson, Jarlath O'Neil-Dunne, Laura A. Ogden, Diane E. Pataki, Colin Polsky, Rinku Roy Chowdhury

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Earth's surface is rapidly urbanizing, resulting in dramatic changes in the abundance, distribution and character of surface water features in urban landscapes. However,the scope and consequences of surface water redistribution at broad spatialscales are not well understood. We hypothesized that urbanization would lead to convergent surface water abundance and distribution: in other words, cities will gain or lose water such that they become more similar to each other than are their surrounding natural landscapes. Using a database of more than 1 million water bodies and 1 million km of streams, we compared the surface water of 100 US cities with …

Damage Spreading In Spatial And Small-World Random Boolean Networks, Qiming Lu, Christof Teuscher

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The study of the response of complex dynamical social, biological, or technological networks to external perturbations has numerous applications. Random Boolean networks (RBNs) are commonly used as a simple generic model for certain dynamics of complex systems. Traditionally, RBNs are interconnected randomly and without considering any spatial extension and arrangement of the links and nodes. However, most real-world networks are spatially extended and arranged with regular, power-law, small-world, or other nonrandom connections. Here we explore the RBN network topology between extreme local connections, random small-world, and pure random networks, and study the damage spreading with small perturbations. We find that …

The West Tidewater Earthflow, Northern Oregon Coast Range, Barry A. Sanford

Dissertations and Theses

The West Tidewater earthflow, one of the largest in Oregon's history, occurred in December of 1994. The earthflow is located approximately 15 km north of Jewel, Oregon near the summit ofthe Northern Oregon Coast Range Mountains. The earthflow is 900 m long and 250 m wide, giving it a surface area of 9 ha, or 22 acres. Volume is 3.5 million m³. The earthflow occurred in low strength, well-bedded, tuffaceous, carbonaceous, micaceous, clay-rich mudstone, and very fine-grained, feldspathic, clay-rich siltstone of the lower Miocene age Northrup Creek Formation. The soil clay fractions contain up to 90% smectite with …

Interview With School Of Health And Physical Education Faculty, Chuck Becker, Alice Lehman, Jack Schendel, Maxine Thomas, Cristine Paschild, Steve Brannan

Portland State University Oral Histories

Three emeritus faculty members from Portland State's School of Health and Human Performance met for this oral history interview: Chuck Becker, Alice Lehman, and Jack Schendel. Accompanying them were two former School of Education faculty, Maxine Thomas and Steve Brannan. Together, their oral histories recall the development, growth, and achievements of Portland State's School of Health and Human Performance, which evolved from the university's Department of Physical Education. Chuck Becker discusses the department's founding years at Vanport and its differentiation from the Athletics program, for which he also served as a football coach. Alice Lehman describes the program's move downtown …

Research Communication Workshop, Nicole Vasilevsky, Melissa Haendel, Jackie Wirz, Robin Champieux

Online Northwest

The library’s role in offering services related to data management and effective research communication is becoming of increasing importance in academic institutions. The goal of this workshop is to discuss how effective data management and scholarly communication can enhance reproducibility of academic outputs and contribute to improved impact. In this workshop, we will teach some key skills which can be disseminated to researchers and students, giving librarians the tools not only to understand the changing landscape of scholarly communication and data management in the digital age, but also how to effectively teach the importance and impact of these practices.

Part …

Faculty Senate Monthly Packet February 2014, Portland State University Faculty Senate

Faculty Senate Monthly Packets

The February 2014 Monthly packet includes the February agenda and appendices and the Faculty Senate minutes and attachments from the meeting held January 2014.

Approximate Equations Of State In Two-Temperature Plasma Mixtures, John D. Ramshaw, Andrew W. Cook

Physics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Approximate thermodynamic state relations for multicomponent atomic and molecular gas mixtures are often constructed by artificially partitioning the mixture into its constituent materials and requiring the separated materials to be in temperature and pressure equilibrium. Iterative numerical algorithms have been employed to enforce this equilibration and compute the resulting approximate state relations in single-temperature mixtures. In partially ionized gas mixtures, there is both theoretical and empirical evidence that equilibrating the chemical potentials, number densities, or partial pressures of the free electrons is likely to produce more accurate results than equilibrating the total pressures. Moreover, in many situations of practical interest …

Tree Cover Mapping For Assessing Greater Sage-Grouse Habitat In Eastern Oregon, Eric M. Nielsen, Matthew D. Noone

Institute for Natural Resources Publications

We used a predictive model to map canopy cover of vegetation over seven feet in height ("tall woody vegetation") at 30-meter resolution over nearly 29 million acres within and adjacent to the range of the greater sage-grouse in Oregon (Figure 1). Texture measures computed at various resolutions from color-infrared aerial photography provided the main source of predictor data used to produce the map. Canopy cover was treated as a categorical variable using six cover classes: absent (cover class C0), present at less than 4% (C1), 4 – 10% (C2), 10 – 20% (C3), 20 – 50% (C4), and 50% and …

Pathways To Sustainability Careers: Building Capacity To Solve Complex Problems, Jennifer H. Allen, Fletcher Beaudoin, Elizabeth Lloyd-Pool, Jacob Sherman

Institute for Sustainable Solutions Publications and Presentations

Many of the central sustainability challenges facing society today—climate change, social inequality, and resource degradation, to name a few—are socially complex, politically fraught, and imperfectly understood. To be able to effectively engage in addressing such “wicked problems,” individuals need a mixture of content knowledge and soft skills that enable them to critically analyze these challenges from a systems perspective, develop creative solutions, communicate effectively, and work collaboratively with others who may not share common views. Such skill sets and abilities are also more generally valuable in navigating personal, organizational, and societal complexities. Portland State University’s (PSU) Pathways to Sustainability Careers …

Research & Strategic Partnerships: Quarterly Review, Volume 1, Issue 2, Portland State University. Research & Strategic Partnerships

Portland State Research Magazine

In this second issue of RSP’s Quarterly Review, we turn our attention to the Innovation and Intellectual Property office (IIP), which connects university research to companies both large and small. IIP Director Joe Janda works closely with faculty, students and staff who seek to get their discoveries into the commercial marketplace through licensing and the creation of startup companies. For a relatively youthful research enterprise like Portland State University’s, IIP’s successes to date have been remarkable.

The Review also highlights Social Determinants of Health (SDH), an initiative that exemplifies Portland State University’s ability to link research to the interests of …

Ecological Homogenization Of Urban Usa, Peter M. Groffman, Jeannine Cavender-Bares, Neil D. Bettez, J. Morgan Grove, Sharon J. Hall, James B. Heffernan, Sarah E. Hobbie, Kelli L. Larson, Jennifer L. Morse, Christopher Neill, Kristen C. Nelson, Jarlath O'Neil-Dunne, Diane E. Pataki, Colin Polsky, Rinku Roy Chowdhury, Meredith K. Steele

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

A visually apparent but scientifically untested outcome of land-use change is homogenization across urban areas, where neighborhoods in different parts of the country have similar patterns of roads, residential lots, commercial areas, and aquatic features. We hypothesize that this homogenization extends to ecological structure and also to ecosystem functions such as carbon dynamics and microclimate, with continental-scale implications. Further, we suggest that understanding urban homogenization will provide the basis for understanding the impacts of urban land-use change from local to continental scales. Here, we show how multi-scale, multi-disciplinary datasets from six metropolitan areas that cover the major climatic regions of …

Osmb Final Report: Task 5. Zebra And Quagga Mussel Early-Detection Monitoring In High Risk Oregon Waters, Steve W. Wells, Mark Sytsma

Center for Lakes and Reservoirs Publications and Presentations

Neither zebra nor quagga mussels (Dreissena polymorpha and D. rostriformis bugensis, respectively) were detected by Portland State University (PSU) during their early detection sampling in Oregon water bodies during 2013. PSU conducted sampling for planktonic larvae, juvenile, and adult mussels at nine Oregon water bodies during the July to August period coinciding with water temperatures favorable for mussel spawning. A total of 113 plankton samples were collected and over 1.6 million liters of lake water were filtered through 63-μm mesh nets during plankton sample collection. The greatest sampling effort occurred in East Lake, Prineville Reservoir, and Paulina Lake; these water …

Aquatic Invasive Species Surveys Of Eastern Oregon Waterbodies In 2013 And 2014, Rich Miller, Mark D. Sytsma

Center for Lakes and Reservoirs Publications and Presentations

Early detection aquatic invasive species (AIS) surveys were conducted at 33 Eastern Oregon waterbodies during the summers of 2013 and 2014. Submerged aquatic plants, gastropods, bivalves, and crayfish were collected using a thatch rake, benthic dredge, plankton net, and modified minnow traps. Shoreline aquatic noxious weeds were noted when present and water quality characteristics were measured. Two AIS snail species, one AIS crayfish species, and five AIS plant species were detected during the surveys. Big-ear radix snails (Radix auricularia) were newly detected at 14 waterbodies distributed across the survey area. Chinese mystery snails (Cipangopaludina chinensis) were …