Digital Commons Network^™

The Potential Role Of Soil Depth And Land Management History In Rangeland Soil Seed Bank Community Dynamics., Owen K. Palsic, Akasha Faist, Madeline Mayorga

University of Montana Conference on Undergraduate Research (UMCUR)

Rangelands provide critical ecosystem services for societies across the globe, yet land use changes, climate change, and invasive species are causing large-scale rangeland degradation. To maintain effective rangeland ecosystem function, it is critical we understand the comprehensive ecological dynamics of these systems. One crucial ecological variable that is often overlooked is the soil seed bank, which is otherwise defined as the community of germinable seeds stored in the soil of a given system. Many ecological studies and models leave out soil seed bank communities, despite their undeniable importance in rangeland ecosystems, and instead only consider the aboveground vegetation community. In …

How Do Individual And Environmental Covariates Impact The Immune Response Of Deer Mice In Western Montana?, Rachel A. Throckmorton, Angela Luis

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Sin Nombre Virus (SNV) is an exceptional model system for studying wildlife disease because of how simple it is to capture, take samples, and obtain disease status from the primary host. Immune response is an important factor to consider when testing for SNV because it can affect susceptibility of the host as well as transmission of the virus. We examined individual and environmental conditions that may predict immune response and therefore possibly SNV transmission in wild populations. We investigated whether SNV infection status, reproductive status, sex, and season correlate with immune response through examining total white blood cell (WBC) counts …

Growing Agroecology: Two Case Studies From The U.S. Student Farm Movement, Amelia B. Armstrong

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Scholars and activists identify agroecology as a crucial science, practice, and movement to move towards more just, equitable, and sustainable agriculture and food systems. Yet, the exploitative industrial food system, that deepens inequalities like food insecurity (Clapp et al., 2025), reduces farmer autonomy (Rotz, 2015), and contributes to increased carbon emissions (Lin et al., 2011) and biodiversity decline (Rotz, 2015), still dominates. Understanding and mobilizing the different spaces that teach agroecology, then, is a crucial step in challenging the dominant industrial food system. Agroecology education in university settings is an important domain to investigate as potential contributors to this movement, …

Impacts And Insights: Assessing The Aftermath Of Yellowstone’S 500-Year Flood In Montana, Melissa Weddell, Kara Grau, Patrick Holland-Stergar, Christina S. Barsky, Lauren K. Mckeague

Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research Publications

Tourism is shaped by many elements, including natural disasters and unexpected events, which can profoundly affect visitor patterns and destination choices. While disasters typically reduce tourist numbers, occasionally they can have a positive influence. The purpose of this report is to document the flood event, analyze its impact, recovery process, and the economic losses to the region, particularly in terms of tourism visitation and revenue to the area and its gateway communities. The project was a coordinated effort among researchers from the University of Montana’s Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research (ITRR), the Department of Public Administration and Policy, and …

Aspen Stands Enrich Bird Communities Following A Wildfire In A Montane, Mixed Conifer Forest, Cody Q. Lane

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Fire is a major ecological force in most terrestrial systems, but the responses of animal communities to fire vary markedly across ecosystems due to variability in fire regimes and vegetation communities. Quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) is unique within coniferous forests of western North America for its ability to regenerate following wildfire via vegetative resprouting. As managers employ techniques to restore fire regimes and conserve declining aspen forests, it becomes important to understand how aspen alters postfire communities. Our objectives were to (1) assess how aspen interacted with fire severity and years since fire to influence avian species and …

Organization Of Lithic Technology At 48ye240 Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming: Bifaces As Indicators Of Environmental Predictability, Hunter Alan Watry

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

48YE240 within the Hayden Valley of Yellowstone National Park is a pre-contact hunter-gatherer site recorded on two separate terraces along the Yellowstone River. This site and the two terraces are divided by the Grand Loop Road. The higher terrace is west of the road, while the lower terrace is east of the road, adjacent to the Yellowstone River. The lower terrace was excavated in 1999 and included a hearth feature dating to the Middle Archaic. The higher terrace was excavated in 2020 and contained intact cultural deposits. This thesis presents a lithic analysis of the assemblage recovered from the higher …

Binoculars To Bytes: Development And Field Validation Of An Ai-Driven System For Avian Monitoring, Christian J. Dupree

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Autonomous camera-trap arrays coupled with artificial-intelligence (AI) vision can lift bird monitoring beyond the spatial, temporal, and labor limits of traditional field surveys. We present Binoculars to Bytes (B2B), an open-source pipeline that turns 180–360° time-lapse imagery into analysis-ready avian data. At Freezout Lake Wildlife Management Area (Montana, USA) the system ran four-hour morning deployments during spring and fall migrations (2023–2024). A YOLO-NAS detector, incrementally refined with a “Specialized Localized Iterative Model” workflow, quadrupled local accuracy and, after confidence-based species-binning, cut false-positive rates in half. Daily AI species lists were benchmarked against contemporaneous eBird citizen-science checklists and recovered ≥ …

Gwayak Ateg Onaakonigewi Dibenjigewin: Decolonizing Jurisdiction In Anishinaabe Tribal Courts, Kekek Jason Stark

Faculty Law Review Articles

It is generally understood as a matter of federal Indian law that determinations of tribal law should properly be interpreted by tribal courts. This is because tribal courts do not always adhere to the same legal philosophy as their settler colonial counterparts. Many tribal courts subscribe to traditional law, which is an “essential source” of tribal jurisprudence. Anishinaabe communities have maintained a rich body of traditional tribal law since time immemorial. However, these customary law principles are only recently being included in modern day Anishinaabe tribal court determinations. This article builds upon the Anishinaabe law principles articulated in recent opinions …

(De)Composition: Earthen Storytelling For Collective Liberation, Priya Subberwal

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

This interdisciplinary portfolio is an investigation into ecological communication through pedagogical design, online collaborative learning spaces, digital and print media, and creative writing. Braiding lenses of queer ecology, decolonial studies, anarchism, and collaborative and creative practice, this work hopes to explore the field of environmental communication through avenues that are reciprocal, community-driven, and oriented towards environmental justice and collective, intersectional liberation. Through the three distinct components of 1) the creation and facilitation of an online learning community, the Spiritual Ecology Study Club at Advaya, 2) the editing and production of two issues of Camas Magazine, an environmental literary magazine based …

Estimation Of Probability Of Habitat Use Of Roosevelt Elk On The Olympic Peninsula, Vincent Michael Gugliotti

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Estimating the probability of habitat use for a particular species is crucial to the direct management and conservation of that species. Without knowledge of habitat preferences, managers cannot effectively focus efforts on vital resources or landscape types. However, modelling probability of habitat use can be done in several ways which leaves room for variation and uncertainty in the estimates produced by each method. This study is an examination of the variation between two estimates of probability of habitat use while focusing on a particular subspecies of elk that inhabits a unique ecosystem relative to other elk subspecies. I modeled elk …

Effects Of Timber Harvest On Understory Vegetation Succession: A Time Series Study, Reese A. Poindexter, Trevor Weeks, Chad Bishop, Akasha Faist

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Timber harvest, as a necessary and common global practice, can significantly affect the ecosystems being harvested through opening the canopy, disturbing the understory, and resetting successional trajectories. This study examined how timber harvest influenced understory plant functional group dominance, understory species richness, and understory species dominance along a 40-year, or older, harvest timeline across two forest types (mesic and xeric) in Northwestern Montana, U.S.A. In our two forest types, vegetation sampling was completed at 208 sites with 1,040 quadrats across six timber-harvest timelines. Harvest timelines varied from the most recent at 1-5 years post-harvest to over 40 years as the …

Understanding The Drivers Of Body Condition In Female Elk: Implications For Nutritional Ecology On Changing Landscapes, Nicole P. Bealer

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Ungulate body condition is often understood to reflect the nutritional resources on the landscape but is ultimately influenced by more than forage because body condition integrates both energetic costs and benefits. Factors driving variation in female body condition can be classified in both individual vs. environmental and bottom-up vs. top-down frameworks. My research evaluates how individual vs. environmental and bottom-up vs. top-down frameworks explain variation in ingesta-free body fat (IFBF) in female elk (Cervus canadensis). I used seven years (2015-2021) of IFBF data from monitored and recaptured female elk (n = 139) in the Ya Ha Tinda (YHT) population in …

Variation In Body Composition In Deer Mice: The Biogeography And Ecophysiology Of Energy Allocation, Cole Joseph Wolf

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Body composition, the percent of lean and fat mass, is a snapshot of an individual’s energetic state at a moment in time. Wild organisms should allocate energy to optimize fitness, so tracking changes in body composition provides a window into how priorities may shift throughout the year or across environments. While seasonal variation in body composition is wellcharacterized in systems such migrating birds (Scott et al. 1994) and hibernating mammals (Hellgren 1998), much less is known about how this trait varies across species ranges and thus how organisms modify their body composition and to meet local environmental challenges. For my …

Seasonality And Depth Variability In The Microbial Ecology Of A Large, Oligotrophic Lake, Kate A. Evans

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Planktonic microorganisms are the primary drivers of energy flow in aquatic ecosystems, and their ability to rapidly respond to changing environmental conditions makes them key sentinels of ecosystem variability. However, understanding how microorganisms respond to variations in their environment requires improved understanding of microbial physiology and metabolism. Microorganisms that live in fluid environments experience a dynamic world, where resources needed for growth can be scarce or plentiful. In some cases, such variation can be directly linked to the physical movement of water, for example, vertical mixing. Temperate lakes experience strong seasonality in stratification and mixing, so resolving the relationships between …

Evaluating Nurse Engagement With And Opportunities For Human Papillomavirus (Hpv) Vaccine Promotion In Montana, Juthika Jayendra Thaker

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Purpose: Parental vaccine hesitancy is a known driver of sub-optimal vaccine uptake in the United States.1 Even though a study analyzing parental responses in National Immunization Survey-Teen found that HPV vaccine hesitancy has slightly declined (69% in 2010 v/s 63% in 2019) over the years, only about 52.6% of adolescents in Montana had received all the required doses of the HPV vaccine series in 2021.2,3 Nurses are at the forefront of healthcare provision and possess a unique ability to influence parental vaccine decisions.5 By listening to and addressing parents' concerns about immunizations, nurses can dispel misinformation and help change parents' …

Linking Life History And Population Dynamics Of An Ice-Associated Seabird, The Kittlitz’S Murrelet (Brachyramphus Brevirostris), Michelle Lynn Kissling

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Mechanistic understanding of population dynamics requires linking population change and demographic processes. However, for some species, accurate estimation of population parameters can be difficult owing to their life histories, resulting in reduced or biased inference. Mobile species that are not territorial or use dynamic habitats are susceptible to estimation problems arising from variable exposure to sampling, or temporary emigration, and common approaches to account for it like robust design are not feasible. The outcome is a population mismatch whereby the statistical population, or what was sampled, is not aligned with the biological population, which is what we want to know …

Stories From Superfund, Rachel M. Neal

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Superfund sites are the most contaminated places in the nation, but they do not exist in isolation. Stories from Superfund examines Superfund sites in three different communities, sharing the stories of people with varying relationships to these sites.

An audio story explores how the largest Superfund complex in the U.S., the Clark Fork River, serves as a living laboratory. Researchers and agency staff explain what we can learn from the nation’s most contaminated places.

A graphic, written piece uses data to understand environmental justice in a community in Southeast Georgia. Environmental inequities are visualized through graphs and maps showing demographic …

Accumulation By Dispossession In Protected Areas, A Literatrue Review And Case Study To Create A More Unified Understanding, Leon Russell Miller

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

An Investigation Of Rural And Mental Health Disparities Across Five Dimensions Of Healthcare Access, Nicholas Charles Coombs

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Access to healthcare is a complicated public health challenge. Healthcare access is multi-dimensional and combines characteristics of individuals, their households, and their social and physical environments with system-level characteristics of healthcare delivery systems, organizations and healthcare providers. Access encompasses five dimensions: approachability, acceptability, availability, affordability and appropriateness. This dissertation investigates these five dimensions of access to healthcare in the context of two populations of interest: 1) persons who reside in rural areas and 2) persons who experience mental health challenges. Both persons in rural areas and persons with mental health challenges have structural barriers to healthcare access. Additionally, rural health …

Understanding The Utilization Of Woody Biomass Through The Perspectives Of Southwest United States Forest Service Land Managers: A Qualitative Study, Mary-Ellen Reyna

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Dry ponderosa pine/mixed conifer stands in the Southwestern United States create an overabundance of woody biomass during restoration and fuel treatments. It has been the job of land managers and resource specialists to develop management goals and practices to treat stands and lower the risk of catastrophic wildfires while managing for accumulations of woody biomass. Knowing the limitations, setbacks, and successes will help researchers, the United States Forest Service, and other land managers better improve woody biomass utilization. In conjunction with three previous ForBio Southwest studies, we present results from ten phone interviews from three Arizona and New Mexico ranger …

Seeding Resilience: An Examination Of The Impacts Of A Seed Saving Network In Western Montana, Christina Leas

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Seed saving, a worldwide practice as old as agriculture, continues even in the context of an increasingly industrialized and globalized agricultural system. While some scholarship has focused on informal seed saving practices that continue to thrive in the global South, few studies have examined the dynamics of these practices in the global North, particularly in the American West. Informal seed saving systems have implications for the resilience of agroecosystems. The concept of resilience has become an important framework for conceptualizing agroecosystems as social-ecological systems, both in scholarship and in policy. However, operationalizing the concept of resilience, particularly in agroecology research, …

December 2021 News Releases, University Of Montana--Missoula. Office Of University Relations

University of Montana News Releases, 1928, 1956-present

No abstract provided.

Ensc 594.01: Applied Ecology, Ethan Alexander Smith

University of Montana Course Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Ensc 360.01: Applied Ecology, Ethan Alexander Smith

University of Montana Course Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Wild 485.01: Aquatic Invertibrate Ecology, Diana L. Six

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Utilizing Suicide Death Certificates To Evaluate Suicide Prevention Programs: A Descriptive And Ecological Study, Nathan A. Munn

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

Objective: Suicide rates continue to increase despite various suicide prevention efforts. This study’s objective is to examine suicides in the State of Montana to ascertain suicide decedents’ demographics and the effectiveness of interventions to guide future prevention programs.

Method: Data from 1,665 suicide decedents’ death certificates were analyzed for age, ethnicity, veteran status, gender, education level, and means of suicide. Four types of suicide prevention strategies were examined for association with regional suicide rates: psychotherapist concentration, gatekeeper training, presence of county public health suicide prevention programs, and pre- post-implementation of statewide public service announcements.

Results: Compared with the general Montana …

The Ecology Of Puha: Identity, Orientation, And Shifting Perceptions Reflected Through Material Culture And Socioreligious Practice, Aaron Robert Atencio

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This dissertation explores the assertions that changes in form, function, practice, and perceptions of puha primarily arose from the dispossession of landscapes and oppression of specific religious practices due to Euro-American contact, resource depletion, and reservation confinement. The reservation era placed the indigenous populace into a state of purgatory where treaties and peace relations were consistently repositioned and reneged. The perceptions of the indigenous inhabitants pre and post Euro-American contact detail critical moments that assisted in shaping the dynamic relationship between socioreligious perceptions and the Eastern Shoshone’s identity. What is displayed is a unique set of circumstances that assisted in …

Ensc 594.01: Graduate Seminar - Applied Ecology, Leonard Broberg

University of Montana Course Syllabi

No abstract provided.

March 2020 News Releases, University Of Montana--Missoula. Office Of University Relations

University of Montana News Releases, 1928, 1956-present

No abstract provided.

Selection Of Forage And Avoidance Of Predation Risk By Partially Migratory Mule Deer, Collin Jeffrey Peterson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Migration by ungulates has traditionally been thought of as a strategy that increases access to forage quality or reduces exposure to risk of predation, but the benefits of migration may be waning globally. In partially migratory populations, the persistence of both migrant and resident strategies is an intriguing ecological phenomenon, because migrants and residents often face contrasting fitness consequences. Partial migration is common in mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), a species that has experienced widespread declines across the western United States during recent decades. Mule deer seldom switch between migratory strategies throughout their lifetime, which may make them less resilient to …