Digital Commons Network^™

Unh Receives $1.8 Million For Biomolecular Research In Diabetes And Cancer, Robbin Ray

Media Relations

No abstract provided.

Germs 101, Jody Record

UNH Today Archive

No abstract provided.

Stoichiometrically Coupled Carbon And Nitrogen Cycling In The Microbial-Mineral Carbon Stabilization Model Version 1.0 (Mimics-Cn V1.0), Emily Kyker-Snowman, William R. Wieder, Serita D. Frey, A. Stuart Grandy

Faculty Publications

Explicit consideration of microbial physiology in soil biogeochemical models that represent coupled carbon–nitrogen dynamics presents opportunities to deepen understanding of ecosystem responses to environmental change. The MIcrobial-MIneral Carbon Stabilization (MIMICS) model explicitly represents microbial physiology and physicochemical stabilization of soil carbon (C) on regional and global scales. Here we present a new version of MIMICS with coupled C and nitrogen (N) cycling through litter, microbial, and soil organic matter (SOM) pools. The model was parameterized and validated against C and N data from the Long-Term Inter-site Decomposition Experiment Team (LIDET; six litter types, 10 years of observations, and 13 sites …

The New Hampshire, Vol. 110 [111], No. 37 (Sep. 17, 2020), The New Hampshire

The New Hampshire Print Edition

An independent student produced newspaper from the University of New Hampshire. This volume was printed as 110, but it is the 111th volume in the series. This was corrected in pencil.

Globe Student Research Symposia 2019 Evaluation Report, Eleanor M. Jaffee, Globe U.S. Coordination Office

Publications and Media

No abstract provided.

Office Of Research, Economic Engagement And Outreach Update, September 2, 2020, Office Of Research, Economic Engagement And Outreach

Office of Research, Economic Engagement and Outreach

No abstract provided.

Encouraging Entrepreneurship And Innovation Through Regulatory Democratization, Seth C. Oranburg

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] "Entrepreneurship provides a path to prosperity for many people. In particular, women and minorities prefer entrepreneurship as their path to achieve the American Dream. In their striving, their startups and small businesses benefit our entire society. Entrepreneurial innovation has a positive impact on social welfare. For these reasons, the federal government has implemented numerous policies designed to support small businesses and promote startup innovation."

Unh: The Magazine Of The University Of New Hampshire, Fall 2020, Unh Magazine

UNH Magazine

This editon of UNH Magazine was digital only due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. This is an archived version of web content originally found at https://magazine.unh.edu/

Exploring Student Motivation In Quantitative Biology, Alexander Richard Kulacki

Master's Theses and Capstones

The field of biology is becoming increasingly reliant on quantitative tools, methods, and techniques, driving a need for incoming biologists to have robust quantitative skills. However, efforts to incorporate more quantitative skills at the undergraduate level are hampered by low student engagement with math in biology. Students’ motivation towards quantitative biology can provide insight into how best to increase their engagement and thus performance with these topics. This thesis examines students’ motivation towards math in biology through two key constructs: 1) students’ self-efficacy, through the theoretical lens of Social Cognitive Theory; and 2) students’ task-values, through the theoretical lens of …

A Biogeochemical-Economic Model For The Valuation Of Cover Crops Ecosystem Services Under Climate Change, Karen M. Moran-Rivera

Master's Theses and Capstones

Cover crop (CC) adoption is a promising conservation practice that provides multiple ecosystem services, such as reduced nitrate pollution and increased soil health. These CC ecosystem services have been demonstrated in the biogeochemistry literature. However, widespread adoption of CC in the Midwestern U.S. is still low, in part because there continues to be a debate about whether adopting CC is privately optimal for farmers and how climate change might affect the private incentives to adopt. Economic analyses of CC adoption are complicated by the difficulty to account for the economic benefits of CC ecosystem services, in a changing climate.

In …

The House That Built Lee: Reinterpreting Robert E. Lee Through His Life At Arlington House, Cecilia Paquette

Master's Theses and Capstones

Since 1955, Arlington House has been a memorial to Confederate General Robert E. Lee, despite his beliefs in slavery and white supremacy. For almost a century, scholarship on Lee has been comprised of more positive interpretations, yet historians have recently begun to challenge these versions of Lee by examining his life more fully. This study aims to view Lee through the history of Arlington House, in order to more closely understand his character and to underscore that he is not as noble as was once thought. Building on the history of Arlington’s enslaved community this thesis asks: how did the …

Fuel From Within: Can Resuspended Organic Phosphorus Stimulate Harmful Cyanobacteria Blooms In Western Lake Erie?, John Martin Taylor

Master's Theses and Capstones

Lake Erie, the shallowest of the Laurentian Great Lakes, has been historically plagued with summertime blooms of potentially toxic cyanobacteria (Microcystis spp.) that originate in the shallow western part of the lake (average depth 10 m). The onset of Microcystis blooms often follow wind-driven resuspension events, indicating that internal loading of growth limiting nutrients (mainly phosphorus, P) may stimulate cyanobacterial growth. We hypothesize that wind-driven sediment resuspension releases particulate P (PP) in the form of organic (POP) or inorganic phosphorus (PIP), fueling cyanobacterial growth in the water. To test this hypothesis, we exposed replicate sediment cores from two sites in …

Unh Receives $3.6 Million To Examine Climate Change Effect On Ecosystems, Robbin Ray

Media Relations

No abstract provided.

Identification Of Type Three Secretion System Effectors Linked To Clinical And Environmental Prevalence Of Vibrio Parahaemolyticus, Sarah Eggert

Master's Theses and Capstones

Vibrio parahaemolyticus is an emergent human pathogen that is the leading cause of seafood-borne bacterial infections in the United States and worldwide. Recently, clinical prevalence of V. parahaemolyticus has increased in the United States, especially from the North Atlantic Ocean. The majority of clinical isolates of V. parahaemolyticus harbor a hemolysin gene (tdh and/or trh) and a Type III Secretion System (T3SS)-containing mobile Vibrio Pathogenicity Island (VPaI). The VPaIs are evolutionary related yet distinct. These VPaIs include VPaIα (tdh+), VPaIβ (trh+), and a mosaic VPaIγ (tdh+/trh+). Strains harboring VPaIα cause the most infections globally, whose major effectors are known. In …

Distributed Cooperative Control Of Multi-Agent Systems Under Detectability And Communication Constraints, Himadri Basu

Doctoral Dissertations

Cooperative control of multi-agent systems has recently gained widespread attention from the scientific communities due to numerous applications in areas such as the formation control in unmanned vehicles, cooperative attitude control of spacecrafts, clustering of micro-satellites, environmental monitoring and exploration by mobile sensor networks, etc. The primary goal of a cooperative control problem for multi-agent systems is to design a decentralized control algorithm for each agent, relying on the local coordination of their actions to exhibit a collective behavior. Common challenges encountered in the study of cooperative control problems are unavailable group-level information, and limited bandwidth of the shared communication. …

Demography Of A Recovery: Tracking The Rebound Of Little Brown Bat (Myotis Lucifugus) Populations, Katherine Ineson

Doctoral Dissertations

As the emergence of novel diseases in wildlife becomes more common, a better understanding of the impact of disease on populations and their demographic rates will be critical for their conservation. Populations naturally fluctuate over time as a function of the rates of birth, death, immigration, and emigration, while at the individual level the chances of mortality and reproduction may be influenced by age and physiological condition. Diseases, particularly emerging infectious diseases, can cause immediate and severe changes in demographic rates. While some populations and species may go extinct due to high mortality rates, others may persist in smaller, but …

Effects Of Nearshore Processes On Carbonate Chemistry Dynamics And Ocean Acidification, Melissa Melendez

Doctoral Dissertations

Time series from open ocean fixed stations have robustly documented secular changes in carbonate chemistry and long-term ocean acidification (OA) trends as a direct response to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). However, few high-frequency coastal carbon time series are available in reef systems, where most affected tropical marine organisms reside. Seasonal variations in carbonate chemistry at Cheeca Rocks (CR), Florida, and La Parguera (LP), Puerto Rico, are presented based on 8 and 10 years of continuous, high-quality measurements, respectively. This dissertation synthesizes autonomous and bottle observations to model carbonate chemistry and to understand how physical and biological processes affect …

Nutrient Cycling Along Microbial And Lithologic Gradients And Fostering Student Self-Confidence In Science, Kiley Remiszewski

Doctoral Dissertations

Increased understanding of the impact of biology on weathering rates and its response to environmental factors will lead to more accurate global models and enhanced management practices to optimize productive, healthy forests. Although biological contributions to weathering are established in the literature, more data to translate these observations for implementation in a predictive framework should be obtained (e.g. Taylor et al., 2012). Mycorrhizal fungi have implications for global carbon cycling and increasing carbon storage in soils (Soudzilovskaia et al., 2019) but the extent of their impact is still an area of active research with more studies of local weathering sites …

The Trophic Ecology Of Coral Reef Sponges In Caribbean Mesophotic Ecosystems, Keir John Macartney

Doctoral Dissertations

Emergent sponges are crucial to the functional ecology of coral reef ecosystems, playing key roles in benthic-pelagic coupling, biogeochemical cycling of key nutrients, and provision of food and habitat to a variety of coral reef fauna. In mesophotic coral reef ecosystems (MCEs), sponges show a repeatable pattern of increasing abundance and diversity with increasing depth. Mesophotic coral reef ecosystems are typically found between 30 – 150 m and are characterized by depth-dependent gradients in photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), and trophic resources such as increases in particulate organic matter (POM) and decreases in dissolved organic matter (DOM). Increased concentrations of POM …

Dynamic Performance Of Partially Saturated And Unsaturated Soils, Sayedmasoud Mousavi

Doctoral Dissertations

The vast majority of surface structures are located on or surrounded by unsaturated and partially saturated soil deposits. Previous studies revealed that degree of saturation in soils can significantly impact the seismic performance of geotechnical systems. Yet, the fundamental understanding of the mechanisms by which the degree of saturation impacts their performance during seismic loading is not mature. This Ph.D. dissertation aimed to evaluate and characterize the dynamic response of soils including excess pore pressure generation, induced volumetric deformation, shear modulus, and material damping at different states of saturation and a wide range of degrees of saturation. Three different desaturation …

Evaluating Recirculating Aquaculture System Nutrient Production, Alexander J. Sitek

Master's Theses and Capstones

While aquaculture production accounts for half of the world fish production, a growing problem emerges with the amount of effluent being produced. Waste treatment of aquaculture effluent is expensive and energy- intensive as conventional approaches to waste remediation have remained mostly unchanged. To improve the economic sustainability, the aquaculture industry needs to integrate with other production systems similarly as terrestrial animal agriculture has done with soil-based crop production. Integrating waste production in a wastes-to-resources approach as fertilizer for hydroponic cropping systems will allow aquaculture producers to monetize waste treatment. However, a full accounting of aquaculture nutrient production is necessary to …

Enhancing Gravel Roughing Filter Performance With Zero Valent Iron And Anion Exchange Resin, Anthony Guidice

Master's Theses and Capstones

Gravel roughing filters (GRFs) are used as a way to buffer small systems that are sensitive to contaminant spikes within influent waters, however they tend to fall short in the removal of contaminants such as arsenic or organic precursors. A possible solution to this shortcoming is the addition of granular Zero Valent Iron (ZVI) or Ion Exchange Resin to the GRFs. ZVI is non-proprietary and non-deleterious to biofiltration systems. Ion exchange resins are proprietary however they are non-deleterious to biofiltration systems. ZVI or resin can be added as a portion of the media in a vertical upflow filter and as …

The Effect Of Cold Pool Variability On Zooplankton Dynamics Of The Eastern Bering Sea Shelf, Jennifer Johnson

Master's Theses and Capstones

Interannual variability of ocean temperatures and sea ice extent has been observed on the eastern Bering Sea (EBS) shelf, where annual conditions have resulted in regional “Cold” or “Warm” years. Consecutive years of Cold or Warm year characterization has resulted in regime states within the past two decades. A characteristic feature of the EBS is a subsurface layer linked to seasonal sea ice (SSI) and defined by bottom temperatures less than 2°C, termed the Cold Pool. Cold Pool variability is tied to the dynamics of fish distribution in the Arctic and subarctic ecotones. Water column, multifrequency acoustic backscatter data were …

Chronic Strain, Gendered Coping, And Health Outcomes In A Rural Context, Deirdre Ann Laselva

Master's Theses and Capstones

Although there is a considerable body of literature examining mental and physical health outcomes among adolescents and adults, there is less research that focuses on emerging adulthood and how emerging adults - especially within a rural context – experience mental and physical health. Furthermore, less is known regarding how or if gender impacts the relationships between coping style and outcomes among this population. Studies historically show that women report higher rates of anxiety, depressed mood, and chronically debilitating physical illnesses than men. The differences in rates of disorders between men and women is often explained by citing traditional gender roles; …

Pesticide Treated Crop Seeds And Tillage Alter Seed Coat Fungal Communities On Amaranthus Retroflexus In A Maize-Soybean Cropping System, Samuel Arrington Palmer

Master's Theses and Capstones

Soil fungi, by damaging or decaying weed seeds in the soil seed bank, are important agents of biological weed control. Pesticide seed treatments (PST) that include fungicides may alter the communities of soil fungi that colonize weed seeds in the soil and therefore the nature and efficacy of this important source of biological weed control. Tillage, by disrupting fungal networks and spatially redistributing the fungicides associated with PST throughout the soil profile, may mediate the effects of PST on seed coat fungi. We conducted a two-year experiment at two sites with two levels of PST (treated and untreated crop seeds) …

Evaluating The Acute And Chronic Toxicity Of Potassium Carbonate And The Interactive Effects Between Sodium And Potassium On Rainbow Trout (Oncorhynchus Mykiss), Ashutosh Rao

Master's Theses and Capstones

Capture-and-reuse of recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) effluents as hydroponic fertilizer can mitigate the high costs of waste treatment and disposal. However, RAS operators must address limitations in macro- (K, Ca) and micro-nutrients (Fe, Zn, Mo, Cu) and the phytotoxic sodium concentrations (>50 mg/L Na) present in solution. One option is to replace sodium-based pH buffering salts such as sodium bicarbonate with potassium-based derivates such as potassium carbonate or bicarbonate. However, findings in previous studies demonstrate adverse sublethal impacts on fish health due to elevated potassium concentrations. Lethal effects of potassium salts (KCl, KHCO3, and K2SO4) have been demonstrated in …

The Development Of A Naturally-Derived Hydroponic Nutrient Solution From Recirculating Aquaculture System Effluent Using Microbial Digestion, Joseph Tetreault

Master's Theses and Capstones

The United States imports more seafood than any other country in the world. Supporting the development of a sustainable aquaculture industry will allow the United States to meet domestic seafood demand and compete in international markets. However, conventional aquaculture production methods such as pond and net pen systems are limited in capacity to meet the market demands for variety and local production. Instead, recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) are a promising option for domestic aquaculture expansion. RAS is a controlled environment agriculture production model which is location-independent, offers significant water conservation, and optimizes environmental conditions to maximize fish production year round. …

Impact Of Coagulation And Ozonation Pretreatment On Ceramic Microfiltration, Meghan Rita White

Master's Theses and Capstones

Globally drinking water sources are under pressure. In many places, there is unintended closure of the water cycle. This means that the wastewater treatment plant effluent with all its pollutants ends up in the source of drinking water treatment plants that are not designed to treat this type of water. Impacts on water sources from factors such as climate change and high population density make unintended reuse, indirect reuse, and potable reuse more accepted and explored. Known reuse schemes use high end treatment technologies such as ceramic microfiltration. While ceramic microfiltration is a beneficial treatment option, its effectiveness can be …

Characterization Of A Variable Diameter Bioreactor (Vdb), Zhe Su

Master's Theses and Capstones

Bioreactors for cell culture or fermentation are widely used for the production of proteins and other value-added products. Operation of bioreactors at large scale involves progressively increasing the culture volume in 4 to 10 folds increments to inoculate the culture and scale it up stepwise. To initiate the cell growth in a typical bioreactor of 20,000L, it often requires a train from benchtop scale at 1L to 10L, 100L, 1000L, 4000L and finally the 20,000L bioreactor. The transfer of cells from one bioreactor to the next one inevitably involves “lag phase” at the beginning of each culture, during which cells …

Dynamic And Structural Analyses Of A Gravity Fish Cage Employing Copper Alloy Netting, Michael James Osienski

Master's Theses and Capstones

Aquaculture, the process of growing marine plants and animals in the ocean, has been rapidly expanding due to increased seafood consumption coupled with the steady decrease of wild fish stocks. Increasing environmental concerns due to near-shore farming practices have pressured farmers to expand into more energetic open ocean sites. Environmental loading in these off-shore sites can deform common non-rigid aquaculture fish cages, reducing the cage’s net chamber volume, which can severely impacting the health of the rearing fish.

Copper alloy nets have emerged as a possible alternative to traditional polymer (nylon) twine used in the net chamber of fish cages. …