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The Anatomy Of Extinction: Stories Of People As Place, Mason Parker

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Adaptive Potential To Camouflage Mismatch: Plastic And Evolutionary Responses To A Climate Change Stressor, Marketa Zimova

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Animals that occupy temperate and polar regions have specialized traits that help them survive in harsh, highly seasonal environments. One particularly important adaptation is seasonal coat colour (SCC) moulting. Over 20 species of birds and mammals distributed across the northern hemisphere undergo complete, biannual colour change from brown in the summer to completely white in the winter. But as climate change decreases duration of snow cover, seasonally winter white species (including the snowshoe hare Lepus americanus, Arctic fox Vulpes lagopus and willow ptarmigan Lagopus lagopus) become highly contrasted against dark snowless backgrounds. The negative consequences of camouflage mismatch and adaptive …

The Genetic Mechanisms Underlying Pigmentation And Their Evolutionary Importance In Birds, Nicholas David Sly

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Integumentary pigmentation is a phenotype of fundamental importance to animals, with major impacts on survival and fitness. Thus, understanding the mechanisms underlying pigmentation can help illuminate general principles about how adaptive variation is generated and maintained in populations. Here, I present a dissertation that is aimed at understanding the developmental, regulatory, and genetic mechanisms that underlie variation in avian plumage color, and their evolutionary importance.

In my first chapter, I addressed how the modular organization of plumage traits may impact their evolution. The production of color in developing feathers is a modular process, with several mechanisms combining to produce the …

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 …

Walking With The Wild: Finding An Ethic Of Compassion In Conservation, Jane Hallie Mcguire

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This collection of five creative nonfiction essays and one poem examines the author's personal encounters with wild life and wild places, primarily through experiences working as a field biologist. Reflections on nature’s fragility, interconnectivity, the autonomy of all living things, and the ethics of conservation are central to each piece. Walking with the Wild invites readers to consider the benefits of integrating compassion and empathy into scientific study, and more generally, into our interactions with the natural world.

"Fenced-In Place": White Settler Colonialism As Opposition To Increased Tribal Management Of The National Bison Range, Brittany Lee Palmer

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Since the Tribal Self Governance Act was passed in 1994, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) in western Montana have sought increased management responsibilities at the National Bison Range, which is fully encompassed by the Flathead Indian Reservation. Though the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has managed the Bison Range since it was established in 1908, the Tribes assert that they were the original stewards of bison in the area, and have requested both the reinstatement of the National Bison Range to Tribal trust ownership and increased management responsibilities through negotiated Annual Funding Agreements with the Department of Interior. …

Why The Weird Wings? Investigating The Morphology, Function, And Evolution Of Unusual Feathers In Pigeons And Doves (Columbidae), Robert Lawrence Niese

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The feathers of the wing that power flight in birds (the remiges) are morphologically constrained by the demands of aerial locomotion, but peculiar morphologies exist in many taxa in spite of these constraints. In the family Columbidae (pigeons and doves) in particular, we found that atypical remex morphologies have evolved dozens of times and occur in over a third of all species in the family. In members of the genus Columbina, we tested the sound-producing abilities of modified P7 feathers and determined that they are sonations that serve a signalling function during flight. In 56 species we identified a highly-attenuated …

Harvesting Forest Biomass In The Us Southern Rocky Mountains, Lucas Patrick Townsend

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) and other mixed conifer forests of the United States southern Rocky Mountains (SRM) evolved under a low-severity, high-frequency fire regime. With the arrival of Euro-American colonists, fire was excluded from most forests, causing stands to grow dense and become prone to uncharacteristic high-severity crown fires. To combat wildfire threat, restoration treatments are frequently used to restore historic stand structure and function, effectively reducing high-severity fire risk. However, these treatments may be costly and little information is available regarding the forest operations used in the SRM. In this thesis, five forest operations were studied in 2017 to …

Eu-U.S. International Education Connections: U.S. Opportunities To Participate In Erasmus Programs And The Case For A Renewed Commitment To Transatlantic International Education Collaboration, Peter N. Baker

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Abstract The European Union’s suite of Erasmus programs are an ambitious effort to facilitate educational mobility and research across the EU’s 28 member countries and with partners around the world. It is one of the primary means to achieve a sense of European identity among the citizens across the Union, and governmental and educational organizations in the U.S. are keen to learn more about how they can also engage with it. The Departments of State and Education, because of their respective work in international education, are particularly well-positioned to lead that effort. Erasmus is ambitious in its social objectives and …

Community-Centered Sustainable Conservation And Ecotourism Planning In The Bossou Forest Reserve, Guinea, West Africa, Destina Samani

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Ecotourism management has evolved over the years towards responsible conservation of the natural environment, sustaining the well-being of local people, enriching personal experiences and increasing environmental awareness. The development of a forest reserve is characteristic of the management–visitor–host community interface and the attendant competing interests in the face of new challenges, ideas and theories. In particular, host community participation in the conservation of the forest space tends to breakdown under weak ecotourism management, partly evident by the imbalanced exploitation of ecosystem services resulting in wildlife and society’s inability to cope effectively with the changes (Walker et al., 2016).

The Bossou …

Mechanisms Driving Territorial And Social Behavior In A Cooperative Carnivore, Sarah Nelson Sells

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Territoriality is a fundamental and conspicuous behavior of numerous species, including many carnivores. Although relatively uncommon, carnivore sociality is likewise a conspicuous behavior where it occurs. Territorial and social behavior are of theoretical, empirical, and conservation interest because these behaviors can strongly shape demographic processes. Natural selection has likely shaped animals to make decisions that maximize benefits and minimize costs, but the mechanisms driving territory selection and social decisions remain uncertain. Our goals were to increase understanding of these mechanisms. We furthermore sought to develop reliable methods to predict outcomes of territorial and social behaviors, absent costly monitoring efforts. Gray …

Genomic Inference Of Inbreeding In Alexander Archipelago Wolves (Canis Lupus Ligoni) On Prince Of Wales Island, Southeast Alaska, Katherine Emily Zarn

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Habitat loss and climate change are increasingly resulting in reduction and fragmentation of wildlife populations. Populations that have experienced fragmentation and decreases in abundance are at heightened risk of inbreeding due to reduced opportunities to mate with unrelated conspecifics. Prolonged or extensive inbreeding can result in inbreeding depression via the exposure of deleterious alleles in long runs of homozygosity. Alexander Archipelago wolves (Canis lupus ligoni) on Prince of Wales Island (POW) in Southeast Alaska are a small, isolated population of conservation concern that have experienced habitat loss and high harvest rates, and present an ideal system in which …

An Investigation Of Historic Euro-American Inscriptions At Madison Buffalo Jump, Jay Thomas Vest

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis explores the cultural significance and interpretive potential of historic inscriptions left behind by primarily Euro-Americans at Madison Buffalo Jump; a Native American bison jump situated in the Madison Valley of southwestern Montana. The inscriptions are analyzed through the lens of Cultural Landscape Theory and their typology, distribution, and content are examined in detail. By looking at these inscriptions in this manner, opportunities for ongoing research are highlighted, the future potential of these types of inscriptions to contribute to a new interpretive is examined, and the challenges of appropriate conservation strategies is considered. This thesis presents the argument that …

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 …

Causes Of Variation In Dispersal Distance In The Stream Salamander Gyrinophilus Porphyriticus, Brett Rebekah Addis

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Dispersal is expected to evolve as an adaptive mechanism to optimize individual fitness across the landscape. While there is evidence that active dispersers base emigration decisions (i.e., stay vs. leave) on perceived costs associated with environmental variation and inbreeding, it is less well understood how and whether these same factors influence dispersal distances– a more comprehensive measure of dispersal. More generally, the challenge of quantifying dispersal in the field has resulted in a paucity of data on the fate and fitness of dispersing individuals, leaving us with little understanding of the factors influencing individual variation in dispersal distance.

In my …

Final Vowel Devoicing In Blackfoot, Samantha Leigh Prins

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis presents a study of final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot, an indigenous language of Montana and Alberta. Previous research on final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot variously suggests word-final, phrase-final, and utterance-final vowel devoicing processes (e.g. Taylor 1965, Bliss & Gick 2009, Frantz 2017), though, the conditioning environment for this phenomenon had not been a research focus prior to this study. The present study investigates intonation units (IUs) as the conditioning domain for final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot.

Final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot is investigated here by examining the common word-final suffixes –wa (3SG.AN) and –yi (4SG) in two recordings …

Ecological Wonder In Annie Dillard's Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, Mary Morgan Beavers

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Through a close reading of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, this thesis presents an argument for the ecological value of a sense of wonder in our engagements with the more-than-human world. The first chapter explores Dillard’s desire to see truly, like the Romantics, and follows her journey of attention into the natural world, analyzing her epiphanic, enchanting, and enlivening experiences of deeply intimate engagement with things both minute and massive. The second chapter considers how Dillard’s practice of close attention opens her perception in a way that allows her to see the full reality of the more-than-human world, including …

The Environmental Imaginations Of Moby-Dick: Technology And Vulnerability In Human/More-Than-Human Relationships, Jensen A. Lillquist

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In the twenty-first century, the relationship between the human and the more-than-human is a problem of massive proportions, as we live in an age of climate change, mass-extinction, over-population, and resource depletion. Evaluating how we have arrived where we are and re-thinking the issues at play as we move forward is crucial for future adaptation of human/more-than-human relationships; this is the primary goal of my analysis of the environmental imaginations of Moby-Dick.

I argue that the four primary environmental imaginations—the providential, the utilitarian, the Romantic, and the ecological—that have influenced United States culture since European settlement are represented by Herman …

No Man's Land, Jesse Daniel Durovey

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

The Forever Baby, Carlos Javier Medina

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

“Out Of The Mother . . . And Home To The Mother”: Essays On Medieval Literature And Climate Crisis, Rachel Kuhr Smith

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Triple Double Diamond: Nevada Stories, Kylie Michelle Westerlind

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In a collection of fictional short stories, Triple Double Diamond explores the relationships and grit of people who dwell in the Nevadan landscape. The stories roam between neon cities like Reno and Las Vegas to small high-desert towns like Wells and Gerlach, focusing on the people who live within these places. The people in this collection are restaurant servers, fur trappers, part- time gold miners, gamblers, park rangers, and veterans, and the stories look at the inner lives of these characters.

Anatomy Of Breath, Melissa C. Phelan

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

A Multifactorial Cytochrome P450 2d6 Genotype-Phenotype Prediction Model To Improve Precision Of Clinical Pharmacogenomic Tests, Rachel Dalton

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

BACKGROUND: CYP2D6 is difficult to accurately genotype due to a large number of single nucleotide variants (SNVs), indels, and structural variation such as deletions, duplications, and CYP2D6/CYP2D7 hybrid genes. CYP2D6 targeted genotyping panels are of limited utility; clinically relevant variants that are not genotyped will be missed. Sequencing solves this problem but requires additional tools to address structural variation. The goal of our study was to determine the predictive power of Stargazer, a novel allele-calling program, which combines SNV/indel calls with structural variation identification.

METHODS: In a panel of 309 human livers, CYP2D6 diplotypes and activity scores were initially assigned …

The Psychological And Physiological Effect Of Performing The Primal Reflex Release Technique On Female, Division I Collegiate Athletes, Erika K. Vichcales

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Anxiety is a cognitive, behavioral, and physiological reaction to stress, and athletes have an increased risk being in a high-stress environment. One of the effects of increased stress on the body is a condition known as central sensitization (CS) where the central nervous system amplifies sensory input across many organ systems causing a pain response in normally non-painful areas or hypersensitivity to stimuli. The Primal Reflex Release Technique (PRRT) is a manual-therapy approach for evaluating and relieving musculoskeletal pain in patients, and is meant to facilitate a “neural reboot” of a hyper-aroused nervous system. The purpose of this study is …

Finding Home After Fallout: The Future Of Fukushima's Forests, Katy N. Spence

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This long-form journalistic piece is about radioactive forests in Yamakiya, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, and how locals are dealing with it. Residents of Yamakiya were forced to evacuate their village in April 2011 following an explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

One Yamakiyan, Hidekatsu Ouchi, stepped into the role of community leader and is the focus of this story. He hopes Yamakiya can use the radiation, rather than condemning it. Ouchi’s devotion to his community is connected to the Japanese concept of furusato, which refers to an individual’s obligation and nostalgia for family, community and place. The story asserts …

Investigating The Thru-Hiking Experience: A Study On The Pacific Northwest National Scenic Trail, Taylor Rose Cole

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The phenomena of thru-hiking has been on a dramatic rise, spurring hikers to venture onto increasingly remote and challenging trails over extended periods of time. Despite the recent popularity of thru-hiking, the field remains relatively unstudied. In recreation, the expectations held beforehand have been linked to perceptions after an activity, but this has not been explored in thru-hiking. For example, there is little known on the challenges associated with thru-hiking and how these challenges are navigated. Additionally, the social experience associated with thru-hiking on and off the trail has not been studied. Further, research is lacking on immersive experiences such …

Confronting The Challenges Of Whale Avoidance By Large Vessels To Reduce Collision Risk: A Quantitative Approach, Jennifer E. Helm

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Disturbance of wildlife by human transportation infrastructure is ubiquitous. This type of human-wildlife conflict has the potential to negatively impact wildlife population growth rates, especially for at-risk species like large whales. While many whale populations are rebounding as a result of a moratorium on commercial whaling, increasing ship traffic constitutes a significant threat to whale conservation efforts in the form of ship-whale collisions (“ship strikes”). Ship strike avoidance is difficult because vessel operators can only see whales when they are breaking the surface of the water, or “available for detection,” and even then, they will only see them a fraction …

Breaking Chains Of Oppression: Popular Culture And The Plundering Of Blackness, Corina Sacajawea Ambrose

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis focuses on the ways in which white supremacy created mass incarceration, specifically mass incarceration of black individuals, and how this continues to perpetuate a racial caste system in the United States. First, I examine contemporary novelist Colson Whitehead‘s The Underground Railroad to provide a historical background of white supremacy and slavery. Then, I argue that pop culture is one area in which artists are focused on the abolition of the prison-industrial complex and ending mass incarceration. Finally, I focus on JAY-Z‘s music video “The Story of O.J.“ and Beyoncé‘s visual album Lemonade and her 2018 Coachella performance to …

Weed Control As A Collective Action Problem: Quantifying Group Effects On Individual Behavior, And Clarifying The Theoretical Frame, Alice Lubeck

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Weeds reduce the biodiversity and productivity of agricultural systems, and are a problem both around the world, and in Montana. Weeds are challenging to control because their effective dispersal mechanisms enable cross-boundary colonization, and so managers must engage diverse groups of private landowners. Researchers have recognized weed control is a collective action problem, but there is little research quantifying the role of collective factors on an individual’s decision to control. To fully understand the motivations behind independent weed control, I initiated a study to quantitatively assess different types of landowners and their weed control behaviors, the relationship between collective interest …