Digital Commons Network^™

Optimization Of Simulations In Opensimpplle, Robin Lockwood

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Computer software has become an integral tool in exploring scientific concepts and computational models. Models, such as OpenSIMPPLLE, use a complex set of rules developed by experts to predict the impact of fires, disease, and wildlife on large scale landscapes.

OpenSIMPPLLE’s simulations are time-consuming when projecting far into the future. OpenSIMPPLLE needs to execute more efficiently to allow for faster completion of simulations. The increase in speed will also enable users to run simulations with more timesteps in shorter periods. There are plenty of ways to accomplish this.

The work described here identifies three different methods for increasing efficiency. The …

Utilization Of Various Methods And A Landsat Ndvi/Google Earth Engine Product For Classifying Irrigated Land Cover, Andrew Nemecek

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Methods for classifying irrigated land cover are often complex and not quickly reproducible. Further, moderate resolution time-series datasets have been consistently utilized to produce irrigated land cover products over the past decade, and the body of irrigation classification literature contains no examples of subclassification of irrigated land cover by irrigation method. Creation of geospatial irrigated land cover products with higher resolution datasets could improve reliability, and subclassification of irrigation by method could provide better information for hydrologists and climatologists attempting to model the role of irrigation in the surface-ground water cycle and the water-energy balance. This study summarizes a simple, …

Toward A Comprehensive Worldview Measure, Shailee R. Woodard

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Worldview is an individual difference construct that has been linked to various behavioral and health outcomes. However, very little is known about how worldviews develop and how worldview beliefs, values, and attitudes coalesce into different worldview factors. One obstacle that has impeded research on worldviews is the lack of a robust worldview measure. The creation of a new, more valid worldview measure will aid in answering these important questions. This research project is the first step in the creation of a more comprehensive worldview measure. The primary aims of Study 1 were to compile existing published worldview measures and reduce …

Encouraging Discourse In High School Mathematics, Sarah Piper

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

The Common Core State Standards in Mathematics increased the emphasis on the skills of reasoning, justifying, and critiquing. Mathematics educators have struggled to meet this requirement, as it requires a distinct shift in classroom culture that both students and teachers find challenging. Visibly random groupings have been suggested as a way to effect a change in classroom norms, as students are asked to work with all members of the class. They thus learn to share their ideas as well as offer feedback on the thinking of other classroom participants. Students in three high school geometry classrooms were observed in an …

Second Wind, Anne A. Yoncha

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

Second Wind is a kinetic, responsive art installation which examines invisible processes taking place in and around a Ponderosa pine tree. Wind speed data, measured at 20', 25', 30', 35', and 40' in the canopy of a Ponderosa on the University of Montana campus, is translated into the gallery in real time using two Raspberry Pi single-board computers. This data determines the velocity of five fans in the gallery. Each fan interacts with a suspended vellum paper structure which moves more or less depending on wind speed. The vellum is painted with an ink made of fermented pine needles from …

Ice Flow Impacts The Firn Structure Of Greenland's Percolation Zone, Rosemary C. Leone

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

One dimensional simulations of firn evolution neglect horizontal transport as the firn column moves down slope during burial. This approach is justifiable near Greenland's ice divide, where ice flow is near vertical, but fidelity is lost in the percolation zone where horizontal ice flow advects the firn column through climate gradients. We simulate firn evolution processes under advection conditions using a transient, thermo-mechanically coupled model for firn densification and heat transfer with various schemes for meltwater penetration and refreezing. The simulations isolate processes in synthetic runs and investigate an ice core site and four transects of Greenland’s percolation zone. The …

Zero-Knowledge De Novo Algorithms For Analyzing Small Molecules Using Mass Spectrometry, Patrick Anthony Kreitzberg

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In the analysis of mass spectra, if a superset of the molecules thought to be in a sample is known a priori, then there are well established techniques for the identification of the molecules such as database search and spectral libraries. Linear molecules are chains of subunits. For example, a peptide is a linear molecule with an “alphabet” of 20 possible amino acid subunits. A peptide of length six will have 20⁶ = 64, 000, 000 different possible outcomes. Small molecules, such as sugars and metabolites, are not constrained to linear structures and may branch. These molecules are …

Use Of Computer Software To Do Mathematics And The Mathematics Achievement Of Students In Puerto Rico Using Restricted 2015 Naep, Ricela Feliciano-Semidei

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This quantitative study explored the relationship between the mathematics achievement patterns of eighth grade students in Puerto Rico and their use of computer software application programs for doing mathematics. The theoretical framework used is the educational production function, which allowed the use of a function to analyze this relationship. The researcher analyzed 2015 restricted National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics data. Data analysis consisted of descriptive statistical analysis and multilevel modeling analysis. Control variables to measure socioeconomic status and absenteeism were included in the multilevel model. Results of this study showed that average scores on NAEP 2015 were higher …

Probing Denatured State Conformational Bias In 3-Helix Bundles With Foldable Or Intrinsically Disordered Domains, Moses Joseph Leavens

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Protein misfolding is associated with several life threatening diseases – Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Cystic fibrosis, Sickle cell anemia, and the Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, to include Chronic Wasting disease, Scrapie, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. To provide insight into protein misfolding, it is beneficial to understand how an amino acid sequence encodes structure. Once thought to behave as random coil polymers under denaturing conditions, an abundance of recent evidence suggests denatured proteins retain ‘non-random’ or residual structure, which may bias a protein chain to fold efficiently to its native conformer. Probing energetics of residual structure in denatured proteins is challenging, given the shortage of …

Pragmatist Ecological Economics: Focusing On Human-Nature Relationships And Social-Ecological Systems, Christopher Aden Armatas

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

I propose pragmatist philosophy as a companion for ecological economics, a research tradition with a focus on addressing sustainability issues and integrating ecological principles, economics, and the broader social sciences. Ecological economics laudable goals include balancing competing values, tradeoffs, and insights for more equitable decision-making. However, the field is built upon somewhat tenuous philosophical and theoretical foundations, which has resulted in a muddled body of literature, concerns about relativistic science, and questions about the future viability of the field. To address such concerns, I propose and articulate pragmatist ecological economics. Generally, joining pragmatism and ecological economics provides established beliefs about: …

Development Of An Open-Source, Custom Environmental Data Logger For Spatially Scalable Data Collection, Tim Anderson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Characterizing the processes that lead to differences in ecosystem productivity and watershed hydrology across complex terrain remains a challenge. This difficulty can be partially attributed to the cost of installing networks of proprietary data loggers that monitor differences in the biophysical factors contributing to vegetation growth or hydrological processes. Studies that aim to compare concurrent time-series data sets across multiple locations must therefore balance the high cost of these data logger systems with the need for spatial resolution in their data. Here, we present the design, implementation, and case study for an open-source “Pinecone” data logger system, released under the …

Tapering For Triathlon: Current Concepts, Effects, And Applications, Bruce Edward Rose

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The practice of tapering for competition is an integral component of training for triathlon competition. Coaches and athletes alike need to understand where tapering is effective and under what conditions in order to optimize race performance. Triathlon training poses some distinctive challenges for coaches in that it encompasses multiple sub disciplines and likewise presents special challenges in scientific evaluation. This review of both scientific and lay literature sought to evaluate the present state of tapering in academic, coaching, and athletic practices in order to guide present and future recommendations and investigations. Searches for key terms were performed in PubMed, an …

Silicone Wristbands As Passive Samplers For Quantitative Measurement Of Wood Smoke Exposure, Hannah J. Wright

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Human exposure to biomass smoke is a health concern worldwide. Although many studies have measured particulate matter in wood smoke as a health concern, exposure to mutagenic and carcinogenic volatile and semivolatile compounds remains understudied. This research introduces a novel method of quantitative measurement of exposure to these compounds using silicone wristbands. The study developed a method to extract analytes of interest from the wristbands and quantify a few volatile organic compounds and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons with known ill health effects, and then performed linear regressions between extracted levels and exposure to those analytes using controlled exposure studies. Results indicate …

Assessing The Robustness Of Time-To-Event Abundance Estimation, Kenneth E. Loonam

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Abundance estimates can inform management policies and are used to address a variety of wildlife research questions, but reliable estimates of abundance can be difficult and expensive to obtain. For low-density, difficult to detect species, such as cougars (Puma concolor), the costs and intensive field effort required to estimate abundance can make working at broad spatial and temporal scales impractical. Remote cameras have proven effective in detecting these species, but the widely applied methods of estimating abundance from remote cameras rely on some portion of the population being marked or uniquely identifiable, limiting their utility to populations with naturally occurring …

Extremal Problems For Forests In Graphs And Hypergraphs, Omid Khormali

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Turan number, ex_r(n; F), of an r-uniform hypergraph F is the maximum number of hyperedges in an n-vertex r-uniform hypergraph which does not contain F as a subhypergraph. Note that when r = 2, ex_r(n; F) = ex(n; F) which is the Turan number of graph F. We study.

Turan numbers in the degenerate case for graphs and hypergraphs; we focus on the case when F is a forest in graphs and hypergraph. In the first chapter we discuss the history of Turan numbers and give several classical results. In the second chapter, we examine the Turan number for …

Connections, 2018, University Of Montana--Missoula. Mansfield Library

Connections

No abstract provided.

Metal Contamination And Food Web Changes Alter Exposure To Upper Trophic Levels In Upper Blackfoot River Basin Streams, Montana, Jack E. Landers, Sean Sullivan, Lisa Eby, Andrew C. Wilcox, Heiko Langner

Geosciences Faculty Publications

Reduced invertebrate abundance and diversity are common responses to metals contamination in mining-impacted streams. The resulting changes in community composition may have implications for metals accumulation and transfer through the food web. We investigated how changes in invertebrate community composition (abundance, species richness, and food web complexity) influence metals bioaccumulation and exposure risk to upper trophic levels along a contamination gradient in the upper Blackfoot River Basin, Montana. Invertebrate species richness exhibited the strongest decline with increasing sediment metals concentrations, driven by the loss of metals-sensitive taxa. These changes in invertebrate community composition resulted in a decline in the proportion …

Resistive Mhd Evolution Of Shaped Rfp Equilibria, Joe Newman, Andrew S. Ware, Nimrod Team, University Of Montana, Missoula

UM Plasma Group Publications

Computational modeling of the resistive MHD evolution of reverse-field-pinch (RFP) plasmas with boundary shaping is undertaken. The VMEC code obtains equilibria that are similar to quasi-single helicity (QSH) states in an RFP with a helical axis and a symmetric boundary [J.D. Hanson, et al., Nuclear Fusion 53, 083016 (2013)]. Previous work has shown that axisymmetric boundary shaping affects whether an axisymmetric or QSH equilibrium is obtained in VMEC and it affects the extent of the swing of the helical axis in the QSH state. In this work, these equilibria are used as initial conditions for the NIMROD code [C.R. …

Montana Kaimin, October 31, 2018, Students Of The University Of Montana, Missoula

Montana Kaimin, 1898-present

Student newspaper of the University of Montana, Missoula.

Primary Emissions Of Glyoxal And Methylglyoxal From Laboratory Measurements Of Open Biomass Burning, Kyle J. Zarzana, Vanessa Selimovic, Abigail R. Koss, Kanako Sekimoto, Matthew M. Coggon, Bin Yuan, William P. Dubé, Robert J. Yokelson, Carsten Warneke, Joost A. De Gouw, James M. Roberts, Steven S. Brown

Chemistry and Biochemistry Faculty Publications

We report the emissions of glyoxal and methylglyoxal from the open burning of biomass during the NOAA-led 2016 FIREX intensive at the Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, MT. Both compounds were measured using cavity-enhanced spectroscopy, which is both more sensitive and more selective than methods previously used to determine emissions of these two compounds. A total of 75 burns were conducted, using 33 different fuels in 8 different categories, providing a far more comprehensive dataset for emissions than was previously available. Measurements of methylglyoxal using our instrument suffer from spectral interferences from several other species, and the values reported here …

Documents From The October 17, 2018 Meeting Of The Associated Students Of The University Of Montana (Asum), University Of Montana--Missoula. Associated Students

Senate Meeting Agendas and Minutes, 2007-Present

Agenda and meeting minutes from the October 17, 2018 meeting of the Associated Students of the University of Montana (ASUM). The following resolution was discussed:

SB09-18/19: Resolution Regarding Administrative Transparency

Speciated Online Pm1 From South Asian Combustion Sources-Part 1: Fuel-Based Emission Factors And Size Distributions, J. Douglas Goetz, Michael R. Giordano, Chelsea E. Stockwell, Ted J. Christian, Rashmi Maharjan, Sagar Adhikari, Prakash V. Bhave, Puppala S. Praveen, Arnico K. Panday, Thilina Jayarathne, Elizabeth A. Stone, Robert J. Yokelson, Peter F. Decarlo

Chemistry and Biochemistry Faculty Publications

Combustion of biomass, garbage, and fossil fuels in South Asia has led to poor air quality in the region and has uncertain climate forcing impacts. Online measurements of submicron aerosol (PM1) emissions were conducted as part of the Nepal Ambient Monitoring and Source Testing Experiment (NAMaSTE) to investigate and report emission factors (EFs) and vacuum aerodynamic diameter (dva) size distributions from prevalent but poorly characterized combustion sources. The online aerosol instrumentation included a qmini aerosol mass spectrometer (mAMS) and a dual-spot eight-channel aethalometer (AE33). The mAMS measured non-refractory PM1 mass, composition, and size. The AE33-measured black carbon (BC) mass and …

Minutes From The October 11, 2018 Meeting Of The University Of Montana Faculty, University Of Montana--Missoula. Faculty

University of Montana Faculty Senate Meeting Minutes

Meeting minutes from the October 11, 2018 meeting of the University of Montana faculty.

Montana Kaimin, October 10, 2018, Students Of The University Of Montana, Missoula

Montana Kaimin, 1898-present

Student newspaper of the University of Montana, Missoula.

Department Of Mathematical Sciences Newsletter, Fall 2018, University Of Montana--Missoula. Department Of Mathematical Sciences

Newsletters from the Department of Mathematical Sciences at UM

Greetings from a Griz-turned-Cat / Charles Katerba -- Budapest Semesters in Math-Ed / Rachael Blackman -- Endowment Threshold Reached for Scholarship Honoring Gloria Hewitt -- Notes from the Chair / Emily Stone -- Alumni News -- Once Again, a Math Professor leads UM’s Largest College / Nikolaus Vonessen -- A New Approach to Teaching: Learning Assistants in the Classroom / Kelly McKinnie -- The Howard and ChinWon Reinhardt Peony Garden / Alayne Dolson -- Department News -- Math Donors Help Establish UM’ s New Lightboard Studio / Nikolaus Vonessen

Minutes From The September 20, 2018 Meeting Of The University Of Montana Faculty, University Of Montana--Missoula. Faculty

University of Montana Faculty Senate Meeting Minutes

Meeting minutes from the September 20, 2018 meeting of the University of Montana faculty.

Csci 444.01: Data Visualization, Jesse V. Johnson

University of Montana Course Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Montana Math Teachers’ Circle, Fredercik Peck

University Grant Program Reports

During the grant period the project team collected data from 12 field sites across the state, analyzed portions of the data, presented two papers at scientific meetings, submitted a paper to a scientific journal, and submitted a research proposal to the NSF.

M 171.04: Calculus I, Theodore E. Owen

University of Montana Course Syllabi

No abstract provided.

M 132.00: Number And Operations For Elementary School Teachers, Richard A. Darnell

University of Montana Course Syllabi

No abstract provided.