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Strength Of Association Between High Blood Pressure And Dementia Mortality In Adults, Ryan J. Wells

High Impact Practices Student Showcase Spring 2026

Dementia refers to a number of conditions that lead to a decline in cognitive function, with several overlapping symptoms such as a disruptions in thinking, impairments of social abilities, and memory loss being a key indication, among many other signs. These factors may become more apparent as the aging population is at a significantly higher risk. With that being said, it remains important for dementia and its related conditions to receive the attention they deserve to promote the well-being of those affected.

The objective behind the study was to dive into the potential relationship between high blood pressure (hypertension) and …

The Association Between Sedentary Behavior And Heart Disease Mortality Rates Among Florida Residents., Umed Norkulov

High Impact Practices Student Showcase Spring 2026

This research project examines the association between sedentary behavior and Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) mortality among Florida residents. As heart disease remains the leading cause of death in Florida, identifying modifiable risk factors is a public health priority. This study utilizes an ecological design to analyze age-adjusted mortality rates across Florida’s 67 counties, correlating them with the prevalence of sedentary lifestyles reported via the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS).

Key findings indicate that sedentary behavior exceeding 10 hours per day is an independent risk factor for heart disease, increasing risk by 8% to 18%, regardless of other physical activity …

Noninvasive Monitoring Techniques: The Use Of Scat-Sourced Dna And Camera Traps To Monitor Mammalian Carnivore Species At The Ucf Arboretum, Zachary Montealegre

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The 800-acre University of Central Florida Arboretum Natural Lands functions as a conservation area, recreational space, and research site, making it essential to understand the ecological community it supports. Traditional wildlife monitoring methods such as mark-recapture and blood sampling can be effective but may stress animals or disrupt natural behaviors. To minimize these impacts, this study used non-invasive techniques, specifically scat-based DNA analysis and camera trapping, to assess carnivore species' presence. Two ecologically similar sites within the Arboretum were selected. Suspected carnivore scat was collected twice weekly over two months using both structured and opportunistic sampling. DNA was extracted, amplified, …

A Sensory Ecology Of Fear: Moonlight-Mediated Predation Risk And Foraging Behavior In Neotropical Electric Fish, Chiu Lok Poon

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

Animals must forage to acquire energy for survival and reproduction, yet foraging exposes them to predators. This creates a trade-off between energy intake and safety, wherein the perception of predation risk alone can alter activity patterns. Within this trade-off, risk, energetic needs, and sensory adaptations vary, shifting the balance and favoring different foraging strategies. Using Neotropical electric fish as a study system, I investigated how foraging under predation risk is shaped across biological scales, including environmental dynamics, interspecific sensory differences, activity-timing mechanisms, and intraspecific variations. These nocturnal fish emit continuous electric signals to sense their environment, allowing non-invasive monitoring of …

The Strength Of The Association Between Obesity And Mortality From Diabetes Among Adults In Florida, Diego A. Garcia, Jacob Bleasdale Phd,Ms,Ches, Cristobal Cintron Msc, Drph

High Impact Practices Student Showcase Spring 2026

Background: Diabetes mellitus is a leading cause of preventable death across the United States, with obesity being directly tied to this condition as one of its most significant and modifiable risk factors. Although national-level evidence strongly supports this association, Florida-specific population data is still limited.

Methods: County-level adult obesity prevalence and age-adjusted diabetes mortality data were obtained directly from the Florida Health CHARTS website (FL DOH,2024) for all Florida counties. The Pearson correlation (r) was used to evaluate the strength of association between the variables

Results: A statistically significant, moderate-positive correlation was found between adult obesity rates …

Irish Environmental Humanities, Emily Reiff

James Joyce Literary Supplement

No abstract provided.

Association Between Excess Body Weight And Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma Incidence, Taylor Parks

High Impact Practices Student Showcase Fall 2025

No abstract provided.

Evolving Perceptions Of Self And Others: The Effects Of Communing With Nature While Thru Hiking The Florida National Scenic Trail, Stella P. Arbeláez Tascón

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

This body of artwork comprises a thesis that documents and exposes the artist’s inner workings as she regained balance after experiencing deep emotional trauma. This individual’s healing transformation was prompted by her immersion in nature while walking the Florida National Scenic Trail in its entirety, 1,130 miles (or 1,818 km), from the Everglades to the panhandle, in three and a half months. The artistic research conducted, and autobiographical body of work created from it, aims to help others reconnect with their own strengths and to seek wellness in the restorative properties of Nature, while advocating for an empathetic approach to …

Does Assessment Of Distress Disclosure Enhance Prediction Of Suicidal Ideation In The Three-Step Theory Of Suicide?, Jessica A. Ruiz

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation 2023-2024

The three-step theory of suicide (3ST) proposes that suicidal ideation (SI) and behavior develops in the context of unbearable pain and hopelessness (Step 1), low social connection (Step 2) and acquired capability (Step 3 - not assessed in this study; Klonsky et al., 2016). Distress disclosure is one way a person may utilize their social network to mitigate feelings of distress and can be a critical measure of social connectedness. Building on efforts to diversify measurement of social connectedness in the 3ST, a sample of 549 college students (mean age = 19.27, SD = 1.28; 56.6% reporting history of SI) …

Teacher Agency In Dual Language Programs: Examining Constraining And Facilitating Factors Through An Ecological Lens, Marcio R. Soares Gomes

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

In the state of Florida (USA), several public schools offer dual-language education programs that include the equal use of Spanish and English to teach both English to speakers of other languages, the vast majority of whom are immigrants, and Spanish to school-age speakers of the majority language. Using the ecological approach (Priestley et al., 2015), as defined by Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998), this study seeks to understand how teachers in dual language programs achieve agency to protect the interests of their English learners. Through the lens of the ecological perspective, the study attempts to answer the following research questions: i) …

Altitude And Pitch Control Of A Tethered Multi-Rotor Autogyro Using A Reduced Order Model, Tasnia Noboni

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation 2023-2024

Long-duration deployment of UAVs for surveillance and communication purposes can be very energy-consuming and expensive. Tethered autogyro-based UAVs can provide an energy-efficient solution to this problem and produce energy in the presence of a strong and persistent wind field at higher altitudes. Instead of using an engine, the unpowered autogyro rotors produce lift by creating an upward thrust force while relative airflow passes up through the rotor blades. The tether provides mooring action and can be used bidirectionally for transmitting or receiving power from the autogyro. Thus, tethered autogyros can address recent environmental concerns by reducing carbon footprint via efficient …

The Influence Of Natural And Anthropogenic Drivers On Estuarine Food Webs At Various Spatio-Temporal Scales And Levels Of Complexity, Michelle Shaffer

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation post-2024

Global coastal ecosystems support human life by providing critical services like food, water purification, and coastal protection, yet these ecosystems are among the most threatened due to natural and human-driven disturbances. The long-term maintenance and restoration of these ecosystems is a complex challenge for resource managers due to the wide range of factors affecting these ecosystems ecological condition over long timespans. Most studies in marine ecology evaluate ecosystem change over relatively short temporal scales (ago), often resulting in shifting baseline syndrome. To effectively manage and restore these ecosystems, resource managers must consider long-term ecosystem baselines.

The Indian River Lagoon (IRL) …

Monitoring Faunal Responses To Biodegradable Oyster Reef Restoration Materials With Camera Traps, Tara L. Blanchard

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Restoration of the oyster reefs has become increasingly crucial due to great population declines around the globe. Intertidal oyster reefs provide essential foraging and loafing grounds to many faunal species, including several threatened/endangered wading bird species. Biodegradable oyster reef restoration materials have been introduced to avoid potential plastic pollution from traditional materials. Studies have shown success regarding oyster recruitment rates to these materials. However, their impacts on fauna using restored oyster reefs are unknown. This project aims to evaluate oyster reef restoration using biodegradable materials to increase faunal diversity, abundance, and foraging behaviors. Camera traps were deployed to observe fauna …

The Association Between Disease Burden And Alzheimer's Hospitalization Rates In Older Adults., Autumn Johnson

High Impact Practices Student Showcase Spring 2025

Dementia refers to symptoms that impair daily life, including social and intellectual abilities, with memory loss being a key feature. Conditions such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, Huntington’s Disease, and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) are major causes of memory loss. Alzheimer’s is a progressive disorder that deteriorates memory and thinking skills, characterized by withdrawal from social activities, mood changes, and confusion about time or place.

Age is the leading risk factor for Alzheimer’s, alongside non-modifiable factors like genetics and family history. Modifiable factors include physical activity, smoking, education, and social engagement. The Alzheimer’s Association’s 2024 fact sheet emphasizes the need for more research …

Refining The Use Of Stable Isotope Analysis In Detecting Wildlife Laundering, Kevin Guilfoyle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The international wildlife trade has caused significant declines in wild populations. Captive breeding can reduce the pressure on wild populations caused by overcollection, but if not properly monitored, wildlife laundering can lead to further population declines. Improving the forensic ability to detect wildlife laundering will assist in monitoring the wildlife trade and enforcing regulations, thereby aiding recovery of wild populations. Stable isotope analysis has grown in importance as a forensic tool, but improvements are needed. Here, stable isotope analysis (δ13C) on eggshells of captive bred and wild sourced island apple snails (Pomacea maculata) distinguished between the two; eggshells of captive …

Overtourism In Dichotomies: Uncovering Dynamic And Non-Dynamic Costs And Benefits In Three Tourism Destinations, Aarash Baktash

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation 2023-2024

The phenomenon of overtourism, characterized by its multifaceted impacts on destinations, has emerged as a major concern in the tourism industry. This dissertation aims to explore the dynamics of overtourism, emphasizing the dual impacts of main-source tourism markets on destinations in terms of their economic, social, and environmental consequences. Unlike existing literature, which focuses primarily on the negative aspects of overtourism, the present study illustrates the nuanced interaction between tourism markets by highlighting both their potential benefits and disadvantages. This study offers an in-depth analysis of cost and benefit factors based on a priori and a posteriori segmentation methodologies, combined …

Dormant Propagules In Demographic Studies: A Recurrent Bias And Potential Solutions, Federico Borghesi

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation 2023-2024

In the face of unprecedented anthropogenic change, we increasingly turn to emergent technologies and extensive data sets for solutions that complement much needed systemic changes in our societies. These technological solutions, however, must be approached with care. We must recognize and address biases in the way data has been accumulated. In demographic studies, dormant life stages, such as seed banks, and other cryptic factors have often been neglected. The potential consequences of these omissions have been extensively described in the literature. In the first chapter, I analyze patterns of seed bank omissions in demographic models, finding unjustified omissions are widespread …

Excess Body Weight And It’S Association To Diabetes Mortality Among Florida Adults, Shivanie M. Sharma

High Impact Practices Student Showcase Fall 2023

“Excess Body Weight and Its Association to Diabetes Mortality” is a topic that has been highly studied and researched. However, there has yet been a study that looks at excess body weight and its association to Diabetes Mortality among Florida Adults. Specifically, by utilizing data from the Florida Health Charts. This includes the analyzation by Person (Florida Blacks versus Whites), Place (Florida counties), and Time (rate of diabetes mortality though the years in Florida). This study further provides information on the idea of the “obesity paradox.” But, it also sheds light on the implications and limitations based on previous epidemiological …

Florida History In Publications, 2014, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Nature On A Leash: Tourism, Development, And The Environment On Amelia Island, Florida, Patrick H. Cosby

Florida Historical Quarterly

In the 2002 film, Sunshine State, writer and director John Sayles fictionalizes the recent history of Amelia Island, Florida. Sayles tells the tale of how unscrupulous developers attempted to acquire the most valuable beachfront properties from local African-American residents to build condominiums and golf courses, transforming Florida's weather and environment into a commodity to be sold to northern retirees and vacationers. Like the developers in Sunshine State, the Amelia Island Plantation sold dreams of "nature on a leash."1 Beginning in the early 1970s, the Amelia Island Plantation and its planners imposed a meticulously crafted, and prohibitively exclusive, version of living …

Pragmatism, Seminoles, And Science: Opposition To Progressive Everglades Drainage, Chris Wilhelm

Florida Historical Quarterly

Floridians have always had complex, contentious, and dynamic relationships with the Everglades. Most Floridians in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw the Everglades as a wasteland and supported draining useless swamp in order to facilitate economic progress. The publication of Marjory Stoneman Douglas' The Everglades: River of Grass (1947) and the advent of modern environmentalism encouraged Floridians to reconsider the identity and value of the Everglades, seeing it as a 'river of grass' that needed protection and restoration. These two views, however, only scratch the surface of the multiplicity of ways Floridians have perceived and interacted with …

Sharp Prose For Green: John D. Macdonald And The First Ecological Novel, Jack E. Davis

Florida Historical Quarterly

Hardboiled-fiction writer John D. MacDonald was known to fulminate with devastating eloquence against the profligate pillaging of the Florida Dream. Its post-World War II disintegration into a nightmare took form as a subtheme in numerous novels he produced between the 1950s and 1980s and ultimately as a subgenre that inspired a future generation of socially minded Florida writers.1 Having made the state his home, MacDonald sensed personal loss when the combined improvidence and greed of businesses and government leaders impaired the general quality of life. He put his concerns to creative use in cutting prose, saving his harshest words for …

Get The Facts - And Then Act": How Marjorie H. Carr And Florida Defenders Of The Enviornment Fought To Save The Ocklawaha River, Frederick R. Davis

Florida Historical Quarterly

Self described as a "Micanopy housewife," Marjorie Harris Carr seemed an unlikely candidate to develop and lead a successful grassroots campaign to save the Ocklawaha River and the wilderness surrounding it against the Army Corps of Engineers' federally mandated Cross-Florida Barge Canal. In spearheading the "Fight to Save the Ocklawaha," Carr revealed an innate sense of how to present environmental science to the public, the media, and legislators in a way that swayed opinion.

Long-Term Changes In Juvenile Green Turtle Abundance And Foraging Ecology In The Indian River Lagoon, Florida, Christopher Long

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Marine turtles are distributed in temperate, sub-tropical and tropical waters and beaches worldwide, often in areas heavily impacted by humans. Although there are many threats to marine turtle populations, the growing threats of nutrient pollution and harmful algal blooms are relatively understudied despite their widespread impacts on coastal marine ecosystems that marine turtles depend on. By studying juvenile green turtles (Chelonia mydas) in the Indian River Lagoon, Florida, where nutrient pollution and HABs are a widespread and longstanding issue, I aimed to conduct a case study of how these threats may affect this federally Threatened species. In Chapter 2, I …

Rural Disparities In Lung Cancer Mortality: An Ecologic Study In Florida, Batel Amouyal

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States and worldwide. The higher mortality among patients with lung cancer is related to cases being diagnosed in late stage where treatment is limited. Urban and rural health outcomes are potentially influenced by differences in accessibility to health care services. We are unaware of existing research examining geographic differences in or factors related to lung cancer mortality in Florida. Therefore, this study aims to examine lung cancer mortality differences between urban and rural counties in Florida. We examined all 67 counties in Florida to investigate if a rural …

Ribbeting Results: Emergent Infectious Diseases In Wetland Systems, Ariel Horner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

North American amphibians have recently been impacted by two major emerging pathogens, the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) and iridoviruses in the genus Ranavirus (Rv). Environmental, seasonal and host factors may play important roles in disease dynamics, but few studies incorporate these components into their analyses. Here, we investigated the role of environmental, seasonal, genetic and location effects on driving Bd and Rv infection prevalence and severity in a biodiversity hot spot, the southeastern United States. We used quantitative PCR to characterize Bd and Rv dynamics in natural populations of three amphibian species: Notophthalmus perstriatus, Hyla squirella and Pseudacris ornata and …

Long-Term Carbon And Copper Impact On Nutrient Removal Via Green Sorption Media In Dynamic Linear Ditch Environments, Diana Ordonez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nutrient-laden stormwater runoff causes environmental and ecological impacts on receiving water bodies. Biosorption Activated Media (BAM) composed of the sand, tire crumb, and clay have been implemented in stormwater best management practices due to its ability to efficiently remove nutrients from stormwater runoff, such as in roadside linear ditches, via unique chemophysical and microbiological processes. In this study, a set of fixed-bed columns were set up to simulate some external forces in roadside linear ditches and examine how these external forces affect the performance of BAM. In our experiment, scenario 1 simulates the impact that animals such as tortoises, moles …

Comparative Nutrient Removal With Innovative Green Soprtion Media For Groundwater And Stormwater Co-Treatment, Dan Wen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As indicated by the National Academy of Engineering, the understanding of nitrogen cycle has been deemed as one of 14 grand challenges in engineering of the 21st century. Due to rapid population growth and urbanization, the stormwater runoff increased in quantity as well as its nutrient concentrations, which may trigger serious environmental issues such as eutrophication in aquatic systems and ecosystem degradation. This study focuses on stormwater and groundwater quality control via Biosorption Activated Media (BAM) which can be applied to enhance the nutrient removal potential as an emerging Best Management Practices (BMPs). BAM was tested in this study with …

Investigating The Late Woodland Climate Of Old Tampa Bay, Florida, Jaime Rogers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Tampa Bay and the broader Central Gulf Coast region of Florida bear evidence of site reduction and population decline during the onset of the Late Woodland period (AD 500-1000). Concomitantly, Weeden Island culture flourished to the north, while climatic instability loomed to the south. It is unclear if the site abandonments in the area between the two are related to social or cultural change, an unstable climate, or a combination thereof. Interdisciplinary research has provided evidence for climate change and sea level regression during the sixth and seventh centuries in Southwest Florida, but these variables have yet to be investigated …

Acoustic Ecology And Sound Mapping The University Of Central Florida Main Campus, Robert Clarke

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Acoustic Ecology and Sound Mapping the University of Central Florida Main Campus" explores the intersection of place and space, sound studies and acoustic ecology, visualization, and archives. The end result consists of a collection of "soundwalk" and stationary recordings conducted from 2016-2019 at the University of Central Florida (UCF) main campus in Orlando presented as an online Sound Map. This archive previously did not exist and provides a snapshot of the various sounds heard throughout the campus as well as a starting point and context for future research into this still-emerging field of acoustic ecology and sound studies. While the …