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2022-2023 Course Catalog, University Of Montana--Missoula. Office Of The Registrar

University of Montana Course Catalogs, 1895-2024

An annual catalog of courses and course descriptions offered at the University of Montana.

Facing The Fire - Challenges And Triumphs Of Western Firefighters In A Changing Climate, Mak Sisson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The American West sits at a dangerous position in the age of climate change. Wildfires burn hotter, longer, and cover more area than ever measured. Decreased snowpack, early spring run-off, a glut of built-up timber in parks and public lands, and longer droughts all build upon one another, and it just takes one spark to start a raging wildfire that devastates a community. As such, a firefighting force is needed to deal with this changing landscape.

However, that force is dwindling, especially at the federal level. A reported 20% of wildland firefighting positions are vacant, and the Bureau of Land …

Connected By Change: Tribes Confront Mounting Climate Threats, 2022, University Of Montana--Missoula. School Of Journalism. Native News Honors Project

Native News Honors Project, 1992-2026

An annual publication that is reported, photographed, edited, and designed by students in the University of Montana’s School of Journalism.

Making “Habitat Quality” Meaningful: Quantifying Demographic Effects Of Habitat In Two Sympatric Species, Anna Katherine Moeller

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Habitat quality may be an underlying factor driving or exacerbating mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) population declines across their range and concurrent white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) population increases. A clearer understanding of how the two species respond to habitat variables is needed to disentangle the drivers of mule deer decline and identify opportunities to change population trajectories through habitat management. Capitalizing on extensive monitoring data for sympatric populations of mule deer and white-tailed deer, this dissertation improves understanding of habitat quality by exploring and developing modeling approaches that connect habitat and demographics in these two species.

Using a resource selection function …

Mitigating The Damaging Effects Of Covid-19 Isolation In The Elderly, Hailey Powell, Addie Slanger, Mazana Boerboom, Brenna Spurling, Maria Goheen

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

In an effort to both analyze how COVID-19 has impacted traditionally isolated communities and prevent loneliness, we have created a pen-pal program between UM students and senior adults. We have implemented a pilot pen-pal program to create lasting social bonds without exposing seniors to COVID-19. The program is currently running through the Davidson Honors College “Intro to Honors” course, with plans to leave the program self-sustaining in future semesters. To pair partners, we distributed interest surveys and matched relevant interests. To inform people of how loneliness affects seniors, we created a brochure that highlights our research, with plans to distribute …

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, …

Tales From A Placeholder: A Relational Journey With Land, Place, People And Self, Kalle O. Fox

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The proposed thesis is a collection of place-based, long- and-short-form creative nonfiction essays. The places of interest are where the author spent different amounts of time in during her twenties, including Iceland, Miami and Seaside, Florida, Butte and Missoula, Montana, and a series of National Parks on the western side of the Continental Divide. This thesis is informed what cultural geographer Yi Fu Tuan coined as topophilia: the affective bond between people and place. “Place” and “sense of place,” while each having their own array of definitions in environmental scholarship, are considered interchangeable in the context of my work. A …

Re-Storying Grant Creek: A Case Study Of Relational Dynamics On A Degraded Montana Stream, Seamus Rucci Land

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration began in 2021, and after a history of contentious ethical debates, ecological restoration is increasingly portrayed as a viable framework for combating environmental degradation and supporting more healthy and stable social-ecological systems. The proposed ecological restoration of Grant Creek, a degraded stream near Missoula, Montana, offers an opportunity to connect a restoration site to the broader, rapidly growing field of restoration practice. It also allows the opportunity to forward the ‘relational turn’ proposed by many in the sustainability sciences as an ontological and methodological means to move beyond positivist portrayals of social-ecological systems, which …

Wilderness As An Aesthetic Concept, Nathan A. Pagel

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In this paper I argue that many of the philosophical problems with the concept of wilderness can be mitigated by thinking of wilderness as an aesthetic concept rather than as a real feature of the world or a special metaphysical category. In Section 1, I respond to arguments for wilderness no longer being extant in the world as well as being conceptually contradictory by examining the ways in which people continue to experience wilderness in spite of these challenges. To resolve this tension, I offer an account of wilderness as an aesthetic concept, that is, as something that cannot be …

Trailing Fire: Working In The Woods And The Future Of Forests In A Chaotic Climate, Claire Kilchrenan Thompson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Our national conversation about wildfire is shifting. As wildland fires become larger, more frequent, more severe, and more expensive—and as climate change and land-use patterns drive the trend toward more fire—we’re scrambling to find a different paradigm for engaging with fire. Scientists now call this age of increasingly extreme burning the Pyrocene, and we’re just beginning to grapple with its impacts on the way we work, play, and live on the land.

As a longtime trail worker for the U.S. Forest Service, I’ve spent hundreds of days clearing trails in burned forests. In Trailing Fire, I draw on these …

Moccasin Economics: Entangled Museum Stories Of Niitsitapi Women, Labor, And Footwear, Michaela Ann Shifley

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This dissertation emphasizes how anthropologists can use museum collections as anthropological data banks (Sturtevant 1973) to uncover the unwritten histories of objects, people, and cultures. I show how museum collections are repositories for the untold stories of Native women’s economic histories and how objects embody women’s critical contributions to the economic, spiritual, and cultural survival of their communities throughout time. To reveal the complex, hidden labor processes involved in historical and contemporary moccasin-making, I draw on interviews with contemporary Niitsitapi moccasin-makers, as well as object-based analyses of 109 pairs of moccasins from five museum collections and numerous archival documents and …

A Novel Pathway For The Production Of Poly-N-Acetylglucosamine By Borreliaceae, Adam Matthew Drobish

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Poly-N-acetylglucosamine (PNAG) is an extracellular polysaccharide consisting of β-1,6 N-acetylglucosamine monomers. PNAG is a key component of biofilms produced by diverse bacteria including Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Yersinia pestis, Bacillus subtilis¸and many more. The structure of PNAG is highly conserved across the microbial world. Here, we demonstrate that PNAG is produced by two Borrelia species, Borrelia (Borreliella) burgdorferi and Borrelia hermsii. PNAG production in B. burgdorferi, the Lyme disease spirochete, depends on pngA (bb0620), a gene annotated to express a glycosyl hydrolase family 3 (GH3) enzyme, which is a novel pathway. Surprisingly, in B. burgdorferi, PNAG appears to be intracellular, …

"It Costs Us Something": Mike Mansfield And The Effort To Evaluate The American Foreign Aid Program In South Vietnam, 1953-1960, Kristin D. Gates

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Juvenile Temperature Regulation In Apis Mellifera (Honey Bee) And The Impacts Of Brood Temperature Requirements On The Colony, Scott Debnam

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Little is known about the energetic costs to insects of raising young. Honey bees collectively raise young, or brood, through a series of complex behaviors that appear to accelerate and synchronize the timing of brood maturation. These include maintaining the brood nest at warmer and consistent temperatures and the exceptional activity of "heater bees." The temperature at which juvenile insects are raised can profoundly affect their development. Apis mellifera (Honey bees) cope with temperature-dependent development via social behavior that maintains the relatively high and constant temperatures within the nest where the brood are raised. Yet juvenile honey bee development is …

Current(S), Austin Raye Navrkal

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Current(s) addresses my perspective of the subtle changes that happen as the seasons slowly transition to act as a metaphor for the subtle changes that have happened to me over the course of my time in graduate school.

No Diving From Bridge, Lia R. Mendez

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Lia Mendez grew up on the frontlines of America's breadbasket in the great Central Valley of California where Big Ag and Big Oil reign supreme. When Lia returns home after a long absence and joins local activists in her hometown's fight to reclaim its dying river from agribusiness, she discovers that the land holds secrets whose truths have been long hidden in plain sight. As Lia's love and concern deepen for the very place she promised herself she'd never wind up in, so, too, does her understanding deepen of the systems of oppression and extraction which rule her world. In …

Lidar-Landsat Covariance For Predicting Canopy Fuels, Margaret D. Epstein

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Managing wildfires in the western United States is becoming increasingly complex. Visualizing and quantifying canopy structures allows fire managers to both plan for fire and track recovery. Light detecting and ranging, or LiDAR can measure forests in three dimensions, but has limited spatial and temporal coverage. LiDAR-Landsat covariance uses machine learning to fill in the spatial and temporal gaps of LiDAR coverage with supplemental Landsat imagery. However, in order to capture real forest dynamics, a model needs to be stable enough to detect long term trends, sensitive to episodic disturbance, and general enough to work on multiple landcovers. The purpose …

Rewilding The Great Plains, Sarah E. Mosquera

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This long-form journalistic story and photo essay is about Tribes in Eastern Montana and their efforts to restore native species to the Great Plains ecosystem. Across the Great Plains, Tribes are working to bring native species back to their ancestral territories. The swift fox, black-footed ferret and buffalo were all pushed to the brink of extinction as colonizers took over. Now, Tribes on Fort Peck, Northern Cheyenne and Fort Belknap are partnering with conservation organizations to help repair the prairie ecosystem. Driven by cultural knowledge and a sense of responsibility, many Tribes are learning from past mistakes and nearby successes. …

Hydrogeomorphic Response Of Steep Streams Following Severe Wildfire In The Western Cascades, Oregon, David Matthew Busby

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Severe wildfire may alter the morphologic resilience of steep mountain streams by increasing peak discharges, elevating inputs of sediment and wood into channels, and increasing susceptibility to landslides and debris flows. In the Pacific Northwest, where mean annual precipitation is high and mean fire return intervals range from decades to centuries, understanding of steep stream response to fire is limited. In 2020, the Western Cascade Range, Oregon, experienced wildfire of historic magnitude and severity. The objective of this study was to evaluate the hydrologic and geomorphic response of steep streams to the 2020 fires. I assessed streamflow, instream wood, and …

Evaluating The Effects Of Tree Community Species Composition On Larix Occidentalis Growth, Christian M. Mercado

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Western larch (Larix occidentalis) is an important tree species exclusive to the inland northwest region of North America. It is very intolerant of shade but managed across a range of communities with both shade-tolerant and -intolerant species. Recent works have shown that tree and stand level competition in mixed-species communities can be modified depending on how the characteristics of species in a mixture interact. Such changes can alter the growth relationship of the participant species. Western larch growth has been well-characterized in empirical growth models, where growth is typically estimated from a complex of size, competition, density, and …

Traumatic Brain Injury: An Interdisciplinary Approach To Healthcare Oversight, Charles Robert Brown Gatlin

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Introduction: State licensing boards (SLBs) serve as overseers to protect the interests of the public by ensuring that individuals who operate under a license to practice in a state uphold the standards of their profession. However, resolving complaints regarding unprofessional conduct for conditions that necessitate interdisciplinary care, such as traumatic brain injury (TBI), may necessitate involvement from SLBs of other disciplines who are most qualified to evaluate the appropriateness of care. To date, there is no single pathway to address complaints regarding the interdisciplinary management of TBI as the mechanisms of the injury are complex, often do not address the …

“The Long Arm Of The Dreaded B.I.”: The Bureau Of Investigation And The Origins Of The Federal Surveillance State, William Schuman-Kline

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis looks to analyze and understand how U.S. government officials created the first domestic intelligence agency in the United States: the Bureau of Investigation (BOI). In so doing, this paper examines how intelligence collection functioned within the U.S. prior to the creation of the BOI, what domestic and international concerns prompted the creation of a centralized institution like the BOI, and how the press, congressmen, and public opinion constrained the creation and early years of the BOI. This paper argues that from its onset, the Bureau of Investigation dedicated significant time and resources to surveilling American citizens for threats …

Trading Financial Instruments Like A Video Game: Searching For Profit Using Deep Reinforcement Learning., Sebastian Coombs

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Buying and selling Stocks, Foreign Currencies (FOREX), Commodities, and Cryptocurrencies have been a source of wealth generation, and more often, wealth loss for many brave enough to enter the financial markets. In this paper, the author builds on the work of Williams, J. 2022 and develops an agent-based method to solve this wealth generation problem with the use of neural networks. The author points out some assumptions made by Williams, J. 2022 that were sound in theory, but made the implementation of the algorithm presented in their paper diverge from the theory. The author proposes a fundamentally different algorithmic method, …

Development Of The Novel Isoxazolo[3,4-D]Pyridazinone Scaffold, Which Positively Modulates The Metabotropic Glutamate Receptor Subtypes 2 And 4, Christina Ann Gates

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The seven transmembrane (7TM) superfamily, also known as G-protein coupled receptors (GPCR), are one of the largest superfamilies in the human genome. With approximately 30% of marketed drugs targeting the GPCRs, these proteins are among the most successful as therapeutic targets. Within the GPCR receptor family there is a subgroup called the metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluR). Compounds that target mGluRs are important for the treatment of a variety of central nervous system (CNS) disorders, as well as cancer. The mGluR2 subtype is a target for treatment of anxiety and schizophrenia. Activation of mGluR4 helps to ease the symptoms of Parkinson’s …

Growing Tiny Plants In Common Environments: Assessing Patterns And Mechanisms Of Drought Response Within Species, Mariah Kathryn Mcintosh

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

As climate changes and drought frequency and intensity increases, understanding how plants respond will be critical both for predicting potential for adaptation to future climate and for implementing effective ecosystem conservation and management at a time of rapid change. However, gaps in knowledge about the extent to which species vary in key traits across their ranges and the evolutionary and physiological mechanisms which underlie this variation limits both theoretical understanding and effective management. The broad theme of this dissertation is to address within-species variation both to improve understanding of adaptation to future climate and inform ecosystem conservation and management. The …

Morphometric Ancestral Analysis Of Infraorbital Foramen And Maxillo-Facial Landmarks Of Adult North American Skulls Using X-Ray And Computed Tomography Scans, Anna-Marie Lynn David

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Skeletal remains provide a variety of information about a species population and the sub populations within that species. The infraorbital foramen has previously been used to understand dietary niches, paleoecology, the nervous system, and the effect of the nervous system on other bone functions in the facial region in humans and other mammals. In medicine, the precise location of the infraorbital foramen has been studied to aid and guide maxillo-facial procedures and surgeries. In this research project, the null hypothesis states that the placement and location of the infraorbital foramen in relation to other facial landmarks were the same between …

The Influence Of The First-Year Seminar Participation On Student Retention, Sahar Sanavi

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

College student retention is a complex phenomenon influenced by a myriad of factors and with wide-ranging implications for university function. First-year seminar is one approach to increase first-year student retention through involvement, engagement, and integration. This quantitative study examines the influence of first-year seminar on retention of first-year, full-time, four-year degree-seeking students who matriculated during the fall 2016, 2017, 2018 semester and remained enrolled for fall 2017, 2018, 2019 semester at six institutions in two Northwest states in the United States.

This study utilized an odds ratio to investigate whether first-year seminar participation had a statistically significant influence on the …

Development Of Regional Landslide Susceptibility Models: A First Step Towards Model Transferability, Gina M. Belair

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Landslides are a globally pervasive problem with the potential to cause significant fatalities and economic losses. Although landslides are widespread, many at-risk regions may not have the high-quality data or resources used in most landslide susceptibility analyses. This study aims to develop regional susceptibility relationships that are versatile and use publicly available data and open-sourced software. Logistic Regression and Frequency Ratio susceptibility relationships were developed in 23 regions in Washington, Utah, North Carolina, and Kentucky, with a region referring to a unique area and data combination. Regions were diverse in their geology, morphology, climate, and nature and quality of their …

Facilitating Aquatic Invasive Species Management Using Satellite Remote Sensing And Machine Learning Frameworks, Sean C. Carter

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The urgent decision-making needs of invasive species managers can be better met by the integration of biodiversity big data with large-domain models and environmental data products in the form of new workflows and tools that facilitate data utilization across platforms. Timely risk assessments allow for the spatial prioritization of monitoring that could streamline invasive species management paradigms and invasive species’ ability to prevent irreversible damage, such that decision makers can focus surveillance and intervention efforts where they are likely to be most effective under budgetary and resource constraints. I present a workflow that generates rapid spatial risk assessments on aquatic …

Mansfield, Marines, And Mothers: The Politics Of Resistance To The American Intervention In North China From 1945-1946, James Robert Compton

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

At the conclusion of World War II, American citizens, including millions of deployed servicemen, reasserted the democratic freedoms they sacrificed to win the war. The American intervention in North China during the Chinese Civil War presented a ripe opportunity for civic restoration in late 1945. Controversial and seemingly at odds with the stated goals of the Second World War—namely the “Four Freedoms” and the Atlantic Charter—the US military presence in North China faced formidable domestic political obstacles. This thesis explores the nexus of domestic politics and foreign policy in the post-World War II era. Focusing on 1945-1946, this project steps …