Digital Commons Network^™

Balancing Root-Zone Oxygenation And Rhizosphere Stability: The Impact Of Aeration And Hypoxia On Hydroponic Plant Growth, Christian D. Baker

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

As the global population and food demand continue to increase, growers must look to innovative and sustainable methods for plant cultivation. Hydroponics is a popular method of sustainable plant cultivation where plant roots are suspended over a liquid nutrient solution. Hydroponics uses less water compared to traditional agriculture because there is no evaporation or solution runoff. It also maximizes land use, requires fewer pesticides and herbicides, and enables year-round cultivation in controlled environments. However, indoor hydroponic systems rely on artificial lighting, which has higher energy costs than traditional farming methods. Optimizing growing conditions is therefore critical to ensure long-term economic …

Efficacy And Engagement In Digital Acceptance And Commitment Therapy: A Meta-Analysis And Investigation Of Mechanisms, Korena S. Klimczak

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Digital mental health interventions offer a more accessible, affordable, and flexible option for mental health support. These apps and websites draw from the same therapeutic models as face-to-face therapy, but are available on demand at a fraction of the cost. In exchange, digital formats give up the personal relationship, accountability, and scheduled structure that keep people connected to treatment. This places a greater burden on users to stay involved on their own, and as a result, engagement is widely believed to be the main bottleneck limiting the impact of digital mental health care.

This dissertation examined engagement in digital programs …

International Aid And Post-Conflict Recovery In The Western Balkans, R. Mary Wall

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

After violent conflicts end, communities often receive international support to help rebuild their governments and economies. This study asks whether aid targeted toward physical reconstruction and institutional reform produces measurable outcomes in those areas. 

Examining five Western Balkans countries between 2000 and 2021, the study finds that infrastructure aid is associated with improved access to clean water and reductions in displaced populations, while aid directed toward strengthening government institutions shows no measurable association with improvements in government effectiveness within the same period. These findings suggest that in the years immediately following conflict, physical reconstruction produces more observable improvements than institutional …

Adaptive Active Snore Noise Control Using Microphone And Loudspeaker Arrays, Nathan Walker

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Snoring can wreck a good night’s sleep, not just for the snorer but for their partner, and over time it can strain relationships. Common fixes like CPAP machines, nasal strips, and earplugs either have to be worn or don’t do much against the deep, low-pitched rumble that makes snoring so hard to ignore.

This research explores a different approach, a device that doesn’t need to be worn at all. It uses a small set of microphones to listen to the snoring and a set of speakers to play back carefully timed anti-snore noise, which is sound designed to cancel out …

Scalable Quality Assessment Of Ground Motion Records Via Interpretable Deep Learning Architectures, Ali Montazeri Namin

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Earthquake engineers rely on accurate recordings of ground shaking to design safe and resilient buildings. However, sorting through thousands of these recordings to find the reliable ones and throwing out those ruined by sensor errors or background noise is traditionally done by hand. Because modern seismic networks collect massive amounts of earthquake data every day, this manual checking process is much too slow. To fix this, researchers are turning to artificial intelligence to automatically check the quality of these recordings.

While artificial intelligence offers a fast solution, there are limitations. These computer models can become massive and expensive to run, …

Cascaded Pid Control Of A Passive Bio-Inspired Rotating Empennage Aircraft, Zachary T. Jenkins

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

This thesis presents an autopilot for a Bio-Inspired Rotating Empennage (BIRE) aircraft. Most airplanes control yaw using a vertical stabilizer and a moving rudder, a design that has stayed essentially unchanged for nearly a century but adds weight, drag, and surface area to the aircraft. The BIRE removes the vertical tail entirely and instead allows the horizontal tail to rotate about the body x-axis of the airplane; tilting the horizontal tail produces a yaw force, doing the job of a rudder. This thesis first develops a controller for the BIRE where the empennage angle is commanded directly, then extends …

Instructional Coaching And Teacher Self-Efficacy, Ryan E. Rarick

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Instructional coaching is one way schools help teachers grow in their practice, but it is not always clear how frequently coaching should occur. This study looked at whether teachers’ confidence was related to the support they received from instructional coaches and how often that support occurred. 

The study included 252 teachers in the Early Years Enhancement (EYE) program, including first-, second-, and third-year teachers, as well as experienced teachers who were new to their district. Overall, teachers who reported stronger coaching support also tended to report higher confidence in their teaching. This connection was strongest for first-year and third-year teachers, …

Physics-Data-Hybrid Modeling And Control For Vtol Aircraft, Samantha Dawn Burton

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft are hybrid aircraft having both a helicopter flight mode and a fixed-wing plane flight mode. The objective of this dissertation is to examine and evaluate a new approach, physics-data-hybrid (PDH), for VTOL aircraft modeling and control. The PDH approach combines traditional, physics-based methods (Newtonian mechanics) with data driven methods (a machine learning technique called a Koopman operator model) to create an efficient and accurate modeling and control framework—mitigating the disadvantages of the purely physics-based and purely data-driven methods. The PDH approach is used to model scenarios when the VTOL aircraft transitions between helicopter mode …

Wildfire And Fuel Treatments In Utah: A Practical Guide And Outcomes From An Oak-Maple Ecosystem, Annie E. Prescott

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Wildfire is a natural part of Utah’s landscapes, but as wildfires become more extreme and communities continue to expand into wildland areas, it is increasingly important to understand how wildfires behave and how their negative effects can be mitigated. One way to reduce wildfire risks and protect life, property, and ecosystem services is through fuel treatments — actions that reduce the amount and arrangement of flammable vegetation through mechanical removal, wildland fire, or other methods.

Information on wildfire behavior and fuel treatments is abundant but often scattered, ecosystem-specific and difficult to access. In addition, most research in the Western U.S. …

Toward Optimizing Fruit Production In Utah Soils: Apple Salt Tolerance Screening And Tart Cherry Fertility Management, Kaitlin Dabbs

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Fruit production in Utah can be challenging due to local climate and soil conditions. Tart cherries and apples are major fruit crops in Utah, and improvements to these cropping systems would be beneficial for farmers and local consumers. Two experiments were conducted to evaluate desired improvements for these crops. The first study looked for salt tolerance in ten new apple rootstocks. Salty soils can be found throughout the state limiting the land suitable for apple production. When grown in salty soils apple trees often have reduced growth and production potential. A specialized drip irrigation system was constructed in a greenhouse …

The Willing And The Compelled: How Power And Place Shape Human-Bison Coexistence In Poland And The United States, Patrick Orville Kelly

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Wildlife recovery programs depend not just on animals, but on how people feel about living with them. The degree to which people accept the disruptions wildlife brings to their lives, known as social tolerance, can determine whether a recovery program succeeds or fails, yet it remains understudied and underapplied in management plans. This dissertation studies how people in Poland and the western United States feel about living with the two living species of bison, the largest land animals in Europe and North America. In Poland, we surveyed 242 residents living at different distances from European bison habitat. Surprisingly, the most …

Flight System Development For A Bio-Inspired Rotating Empennage Experimental Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Ashton Gilbert

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Unmanned aerial systems, commonly known as drones, are increasingly used for research, environmental monitoring, and testing new aircraft concepts. Many commercially available drone flight controllers work well for standard aircraft designs, but they can be difficult to adapt for experimental vehicles that use unconventional control methods or require detailed monitoring during testing. This creates challenges for researchers who need flexible and reliable tools to safely evaluate new flight technologies. This work presents the development of a custom drone flight control system designed specifically for experimental research. The system integrates custom electronics and software that allow researchers to easily modify control …

Pieces Solving A Puzzle: Emerging Roles And Cross-Field Analogies During A Distributed Epistemic Game, Jenna Matthews

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

In an effort to describe why some problems can’t be solved, a character compared them to a cubic meter of platinum - a block so dense that all the people who could squeeze around it still couldn’t lift it off the ground. In the same way, these problems simply can’t have enough people gathered around and communicating about them - and so they remain unsolved.

This research looks at the first Polymath Project (2009) as an example of a distributed epistemic game to examine how groups engage with complex problems. and without a locally omniscient individual. In this setting of …

Quasi-Poisson Analogs Of Regular Poisson Varieties, Casen Thompson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Let G be a complex semisimple linear algebraic group with 𝐶 a conjugacy class of parabolic subgroups of G. In previous work, Dr. Crooks defines 𝑢_𝐶→ B_𝐶 , a universal flat family of a fine Hamiltonian Lagrangian G-bundles over 𝐶, and shows that 𝑢_𝐶 is a family of regular Poisson varieties. This manuscript introduces a natural candidate for a quasi-Poisson analog of Dr. Crooks’s construction, 𝑢_𝐶, using the framework of quasi-Poisson geometry established by Alekseev, Kosmann-Scwarzbach, and Meinrenken. It will be shown that this proposed quasi-Poisson analog indeed has a valid quasi-Poisson structure and …

Providing Effective Student Feedback: Effects Of Sociotropy, Student-Teacher Connectedness, And Expressed Disappointment And Praise On Students' Self-Esteem And Motivation, Emily Davied

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

This study examined how different types of teacher feedback (i.e., expressed pride, expressed disappointment, and near-neutral feedback) impact students’ motivation to learn and self-esteem. It also explored whether such effects vary depending on students' personality and how connected they feel to their teacher. Undergraduate students (N = 221) imagined receiving feedback from a teacher and completed surveys assessing their motivation, self-esteem, sociotropy, and connectedness with the teacher. The results showed that feedback expressing disappointment lowered students' self esteem compared to expressing pride and lowered students' motivation compared to near neutral feedback. Although sociotropy (i.e., dependence on others' approval) and teacher …

Psychometric Evaluation And Cognitive Correlates Of The Tactile Mental Cutting Test: Investigating Reliability, Validity, Gender Differences In Spatial Ability, Executive Function And Social Emotional Competence Among Native American Elementary Students, Sujata Basnet

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Spatial ability-the ability to understand, visualize, and mentally manipulate shapes and objects-is important for learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). However, many traditional spatial ability tests rely heavily on drawings and other visual representations and have often been developed and evaluated with populations that do not adequately represent culturally diverse students. As a result, there is a need for assessment approaches that are developmentally appropriate, engaging, and potentially more inclusive for young learners. The Tactile Mental Cutting Test (TMCT) provides one such approach by allowing students to explore three-dimensional objects through touch and physical manipulation while solving spatial …

Faculty Senate Agenda November 2, 2026, Utah State University

Faculty Senate & Faculty Senate Executive Committee

• 3:00 Call to Order
• 3:05 University Business
• 3:20 Faculty Senate Business
• 3:35 Report
• Library Advisory Council Annual Report
• Athletic Council Annual Report
• 3:50 Information
• EPC Report - October 1, 2026
• 4:05 Additional Business
• Adjourn: 4:30 pm

The Effects Of Pediatric Asthma On Daily Activities And Family Life In Cache Valley, Utah: Exploring Parental Perceptions Of Air Quality, Saeed Ahmad, Mehmet Soyer, Landon Lloyd, Mayu Mecham

Transforming Communities

Asthma is one of the main chronic health conditions affecting children living in Cache Valley, Utah particularly due to poor air quality during the winter season. It is very important to understand how families manage asthma both within and outside the household. Therefore, this research brief highlights how parents are managing pediatric asthma, and how asthma influences daily activities and family life. It is based on a qualitative study that extracted the data from 20 in-depth interviews with parents of asthmatic children. Participants were recruited through purposive snowball sampling. Data were collected through an interview guide that included some basic …

Part Ii: Sustainable Irrigation Practices For Cut Flowers, Chloe Seeborg, Melanie Stock, Burdette Barker, Alex Rodriguez, Jonathan D. Meyer

All Current Publications

Sustainable irrigation uses crop and environmental information to guide the frequency (how often) and amount (how much) of water to apply. Without this balance, poor irrigation practices can result, causing crop stress from too little or too much water, nutrient loss and contamination, or wasted water that drains below the root zone. This fact sheet covers the basics of soil water storage, crop water demand, considerations for designating irrigation zones, using free weather stations, and water conservation strategies for gardens and small farms, with a focus on cut flowers.

Summit County, Utah: Changes To Climate, Snowpack, And Wildfire (1979-2025), Scott Hotaling, Gordon O. Gianniny, Joseph D. Birch, Elizabeth Cohen, Kendall Becker

All Current Publications

Summit County is climatically unique from the rest of Utah due to its high mean elevation. It’s also economically unique, with world-class ski resorts near working agricultural lands. In this fact sheet, we synthesize how Summit County’s environment is changing, with an emphasis on the last 50 years. We focus on changes in temperature, precipitation, and snowpack; growing season length; and wildfire because of their impacts on the economy, natural resources, and local communities' well-being. Our goal is to support the region's future planning efforts. To that end, we highlight risks to Summit County’s future and opportunities that may arise …

Enhancing Inclusion For Youth With Disabilities, Allison Marquina, Jared Hawkins, Anna Gilliam

All Current Publications

This fact sheet aims to empower adults who work with youth with tips for promoting inclusion for youth with disabilities.

Nutrition During Adolescent Growth Spurts: What Changes And What To Expect, Georgia Wilde, Stacy Bevan, Mateja R. Savoie-Roskos

All Current Publications

This fact sheet explains the nutritional changes that occur during adolescent growth spurts and provides practical, evidence-based guidance to caregivers on supporting healthy growth and development.

Cow Size And Reproductive Efficiency: A Western Ranch Perspective, David Secrist

All Current Publications

Production costs and reproductive efficiency are critical elements to the survival of cow-calf operations in the West. A cow’s ability to produce a healthy calf at a marketable weight is closely tied to her maintenance requirements and management’s ability to meet those needs from ranch resources at a low cost. This fact sheet explores public-land grazing, cow reproductive efficiency, and solutions for producers.

Outdoor Floral Hemp Research In Utah, Matt Yost, Tina Sullivan, Bruce Bugbee, Earl Creech

All Current Publications

Floral hemp producers in the Intermountain West face numerous management decisions: which cultivar to plant, which irrigation system to use, and how much water and fertilizer to apply. Utah State University field research near Logan, Utah, from 2020 to 2022 evaluated these questions in outdoor, irrigated conditions.

Faculty Senate Executive Committee October 19, 2026, Utah State University

Faculty Senate & Faculty Senate Executive Committee

• 3:00 Call to Order
• 3:05 University Business
• 3:20 Faculty Senate Business
• 3:35 Report
• Library Advisory Council Annual Report
• Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee Annual Report
• Athletic Council Annual Report
• 4:00 Information
• EPC Report
• 4:15 Additional Business
• Adjourn: 4:30 pm

Agrivoltaics: Combining Food And Solar Power On Agricultural Lands, Dharla Soteros, Kendall Becker, Spencer J. Good, Ngoni Mufute, Matt Yost, Logan Mitchell, Scott Hotaling

All Current Publications

Utah’s ranchers and farmers face pressure to sell land to developers, conserve water, and manage increasing production costs (Li et al., 2019). One way producers can keep growing food while diversifying and increasing revenue is by integrating agriculture and solar electricity generation on the same land, a practice known as agrivoltaics. In this fact sheet, the authors describe agrivoltaic setup options, summarize agrivoltaics' impacts on livestock and crop production, and discuss implementation economics.

Wilson's Phalarope, A Migratory Bird, Depends On The Declining Great Salt Lake, William Christenson, Kendall Becker, Spencer J. Good, T.J. Clark-Wolf, Scott Hotaling

All Current Publications

This fact sheet describes how declining water levels and increasing salinity degrade habitat for brine flies and other prey Wilson’s phalaropes rely on. Because human use drives low water levels, changes to water management could reverse the lake’s decline and improve habitat quality for Wilson’s phalaropes and other species that depend on the Great Salt Lake.

Top 5 Tree Planting Mistakes, Miles Becker, Daniel Allen

All Current Publications

Planting mistakes can substantially shorten a tree’s life. The consequences of planting mistakes may show up within a year or two or remain hidden until a tree dies inexplicably years later. In many cases, these planting mistakes are easy to avoid, saving the tree owner substantial money and time. Homeowners can use this list of five common planting problems to check the quality of work by hired professionals, as instructions for gardeners or landscapers, or as a quick reminder for more experienced tree planters. By making a few simple changes to tree planting, we will all benefit from longer-lived, larger …

Hagfish Intermediate Filament Proteins: From A Natural Protein System To Functional Biomaterials, Oran Wasserman, Kristin K. Durrant, Katee Stromberg, Brianne E. Bell, Paula E. Oliveira, Justin A. Jones

Biology Student Research

Sourcing protein-based biomaterials directly from nature presents persistent challenges in scalability, processing, and batch-to-batch variability. Recombinant engineering has focused largely on spider silks, and hagfish intermediate filament (HIF) proteins remain a comparatively unexplored alternative, with small non-repetitive subunits that have been produced full-length at high yield. This review examines the biology of naturally produced HIF protein threads from the Pacific hagfish, Eptatretus stoutii, advances in recombinant expression and purification, and their translation into functional biomaterials. We first describe the tripartite domain architecture and biochemical classification of the threonine-rich α- and γ-keratin-like subunits, and then the defensive biomechanics of HIF …

Do Soil Amendments Improve Crop Production And Poor Water Infiltration?, Matt Yost, Megan Baker, Tejinder Singh, Grant Cardon

All Current Publications

Soil amendments are widely promoted as tools to improve aggregation, porosity, water holding capacity, nutrient availability, and water infiltration of soils. These benefits are possible, but they depend on the specific soil problem being treated, amendment type and rate, soil chemistry, soil texture and structure, and the time since application. Studies at Utah State University provide a useful short-term test of what growers can reasonably expect from a single surface application of these amendments.