Digital Commons Network^™

Genetic Rescue Of Isolated Cutthroat Trout, Donovan Alexander Bell

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Anthropogenic habitat destruction has isolated innumerable populations that now face increased extinction risk due to demographic and genetic factors. Although often the best strategy, restoring connectivity can be challenging or even harmful. Such is the case for westslope cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii lewisi; WCT) in the Missouri River basin, which are limited to completely isolated populations. Nonnative species threaten WCT in connected watersheds and barrier removal could be detrimental. My dissertation examines trade-offs and strategies for the management of isolated WCT. I first examined how nonnative trout species and climate change influence the distribution of WCT using a multispecies, dynamic …

Identifying Skeletal Trauma Markers Associated With Intimate Partner Violence (Ipv), Haley K. Omeasoo

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Objectives: This is a validation study of Biddle (2019), where much of the same materials are used, with the addition of new data from other databases to include more Native American and minority samples. A comparison database will also be analyzed against this data, with known cases of live individuals assaulted and assessed by health officials, some in IPV situations. All data is analyzed to discover which fracture locations are most common in IPV situations and which ethnic, sex, and age groups are most affected. Most fractures analyzed are those of the maxillofacial area, concentrating on the Zygomaticomaxillary Complex (ZMC) …

Alternative Splicing Regulates The Innate Immune Response To Viral Infection, Luke A. White

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Rift Valley fever virus (RVFV) is a mosquito-borne RNA virus that infects humans and livestock in sub-Saharan Africa and the Arabian peninsula, causing disease ranging from a mild flu-like illness to liver damage, blindness, hemorrhagic fever, death, and, especially in livestock animals, high rates of abortive pregnancies. There is no approved vaccine for RVFV, and as a disease with a high rate of spread that causes severe illness, it is listed as a Category A pathogen by the USA CDC. A better understanding of RVFV’s molecular virology will be instrumental to combating RVFV as climate change causes its mosquito host …

Combined Effects Of Temperature And Heavy Metals On The Performance Of The Giant Salmonfly., James Frakes, Amanda Andreas, Benjamin P. Colman, Aurthur Woods

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In many freshwater ecosystems, communities of aquatic insects are facing the combined stresses of warmer waters due to climate change and increased exposure to heavy metal toxicants. Although each stressor may threaten aquatic insects independently, they also likely interact in important ways to affect insect physiology and performance. Here we investigate this potential interaction using two populations of aquatic nymphs of the giant salmonfly, Pteronarcys californica, collected from adjacent rivers in Montana: naïve individuals from Rock Creek, a relatively pristine stream, and individuals from the Upper Clark Fork River, which has a history of heavy metal pollution and higher …

Examining The Interpersonal Psychological Theory Of Suicide In A Sample Of Individuals With Psychosis, Jennifer Villa

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Psychotic disorders confer high risk for suicidality. Previous research has found the symptom clusters of psychosis to have differential relationships with risk for suicidal ideation and behavior. Despite evidence for unique determinants of suicide among people with disorders on the psychosis spectrum, little research has examined theoretical models of suicide that aim to explore the transition from suicidal thoughts to behavior in this population. The Interpersonal-Psychological Theory of Suicide (IPTS) may be particularly useful in delineating this transition, as the constructs underlying the IPTS overlap with symptoms and experiences salient in people with psychosis. We examined baseline data from an …

Are Risk Attitudes And Rainfall Variability Determinants Of Diversification? Evidence From Rondonia, Brazil, Brenna Swinger

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Risk exposure and management are inherent to smallholder farmers. One of the risks they face is climate change. Climate change decreases rainfall, increases frequency of drought, adds heat stress to crops from higher temperatures, and leads to higher rainfall variability. The threat of rainfall variability causes higher production in some years and lower in others. Even if the average income remains the same, people’s welfare is reduced by the variability and the size of the loss will depend on their attitudes towards risk.

Diversification is one adaption strategy that may help reduce climate risk. Diversified farmers produce multiple types of …

The Contrasting Physiological Mechanisms Of Two Distinct Migratory Strategies, Joely Gabriel Desimone

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Migration allows animals to use resources that vary in time and space. The predictability of this resource variation underlies different migratory strategies. Obligate migrants, with predictable movements, use resources that covary with the seasonal phenology of temperature or rainfall patterns. Facultative migrants, with unpredictable timing and destination of movements, rely on unpredictably variable resources. In this dissertation I explore the physiological changes birds undergo in preparation for obligate vs. facultative migratory flight. Hormones facilitate rapid organismal responses to environmental and internal information, making them an ideal physiological system to understand mechanisms controlling migratory behavior. I focus on corticosterone (CORT), a …

Re-Modeling The Interior: Spatial Methods And Policy Revisions To Improve Inventory And Designation Of Blm’S Areas Of Critical Environmental Concern, Amy H. Katz

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages a vast amount of public land in the western United States, most of which they currently manage for multiple uses. Specific conservation and management of these lands could mitigate climate change impacts and contribute to the global initiative to conserve 30 percent of lands and waters by 2030. Particularly, the agency can achieve this through more effective administration of Areas of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC), a designation that is prioritized under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA). To do so requires updated regulations that set clear parameters around inventory and designation, …

Relationships Between Water, Sediment, Basal Resources, And Aquatic Insects In A Mine-Contaminated River On A Longitudinal And Habitat Patch Scale, Chelsea A. Wisotzkey

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

It is well established that aqueous exposure and dietary exposure both lead to the accumulation of metals and metalloids in aquatic organisms living in a contaminated environment, but the relative contribution of each remains unclear. To examine how a contamination gradient affects patterns of metal(loid)s among periphyton, BPOM (benthic particulate organic matter), water, and sediment, we collected samples from multiple sites across a 210km stretch of the mine-contaminated Upper Clark Fork River, Montana. To investigate metal(loid) accumulation patterns among basal resources and aquatic insects, we collected samples of periphyton, BPOM, and larval insects from discrete habitat types at a single …

Spermatogenesis Molecular Evolution In Murine Rodents, Emily Emiko Konishi Kopania

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Reproductive traits are fascinating from an evolutionary perspective because they are necessary for individuals to produce offspring and increase their evolutionary fitness. Given the essentiality of reproduction to fitness, genes involved in reproduction may be expected to be highly conserved. However, some genes involved in reproduction evolve very rapidly, including many spermatogenesis genes. This rapid evolution may result from intense sexual selection acting on reproductive traits, particularly in species where females mate multiply thus creating the potential for sperm competition. In addition to sexual selection, other evolutionary forces may shape rapid spermatogenesis evolution, including genomic conflict and relaxed pleiotropic constraint …

The Syndemic Landscape: A New Paradigm For Montana Suicide Prevention Grounded In Agricultural Renewal, Emory Chandler Padgett

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Montana has had one of the highest suicide rates in the nation for half a century, and since 2000, it has risen almost 50%. Despite suicide’s alarming persistence in the state, there has been minimal academic study of suicide or mental health specifically in Montana, so this thesis attempts to answer a few questions: Why does Montana have such a high suicide rate? Is there something culturally, historically, or socially unique about Montana that contributes to suicide? Are current prevention efforts helpful, harmful, or lacking? Could a consideration of culture and land benefit an understanding of suicide in Montana? What …

Agricultural Adaptation To Climate Change: How Montana Farmers Make Proactive Changes Despite Unpredictable Conditions, Austin Schuver

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In Montana, climate change is projected to increase interannual variability and the severity of weather events like drought. To sustain agricultural production, farmers must adapt to climate change within a complex decision-making process responsive to a range of climate and non-climate stressors. This study explores how Montana farmers approach proactive and long-term adaptation, two types of adaptation which are not well studied, but are expected to be increasingly important for adapting to the impacts of climate change. To understand Montana farmers’ approaches to adaptation, I conducted 30 in-depth interviews with farmers across the state. Farmers explained how unpredictability in weather …

Invasive Earthworms In The Crown Of The Continent System And Implications For Land Management, Meghan Elizabeth Scott

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The United States contains invasive earthworms originating from Europe and Asia; the majority are European lumbricids. Direct introduction occurs primarily through human activity and, once established, earthworm populations are difficult to address. When exotic earthworms engage in bioturbation, they negatively alter subterranean food webs and nutrient cycling by disrupting soil layering systems. The most prominent form of physical alteration is the change and removal of the topmost organic layer. This disruption is associated with altered nitrogen and carbon cycling, as well as altered forest floor plant communities.

The Crown of the Continent ecosystem is located in southwestern Alberta, southeastern British …

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 …

The Molly Hootch Schools After 40 Years: Successes, Failures, And Opportunities, Jody Lynne Drew

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This quantitative study was designed to understand the relationship between the variables of student attendance, educator experience and turnover, and student achievement at the Molly Hootch schools in rural Alaska in an effort to understand the current state of achievement according to data from 2002–2019 collected from the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development (AKDEED) database. Data revealed that Molly Hootch school attendance was at 90% and that proficiency among student dropped from 40% to 15% during the years under review. The researcher was not granted access to review further data that could provide more concrete answers to the …

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 …

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 …

The Effects Humidity & Temperature Has On Dna Contamination During Storage, Samantha L. Ramey

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Studies have been conducted on DNA cross-contamination throughout the criminal investigation process in order to evaluation the possibility that DNA from one sample could potentially influence the outcome of another. However, no published studies have examined the potential for contamination during the storage of genetic evidence after samples have been taken from crime scenes or suspects. This study is a continuation of a preliminary project, which examined storage drying time in relation to cross-contamination. The current study tested temperature and humidity for the potential of cross-contamination during storage prior to extraction. Prior to storage, 50 μl of male saliva was …

Characterizing Riverine Carbon: A Spatiotemporal Study Of Organic And Inorganic Carbon Variability And Evaluation Of Methods For Quantifying Pco2, Fischer Larson Young

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Carbon is a critical component of aquatic ecosystems. For inland waters, carbon is a basal resource for biological communities and is a key component of trophic transfer through ingestion and respiration processes. Additionally, carbon acts as a key biogeochemical tracer that can track chemical, physical, and biological processes from the terrestrial landscape to inland waters to the ocean. Riverine carbon, however, can be challenging to characterize and interpret due to the complexity of its sources and sinks along a riverine continuum. Included in this work are the biogeochemically relevant forms of carbon such as dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC), the partial …

Toward A Dialectical Account Of Nature, Georgia Rae Grimm

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The protection of nature has been a central aim of environmentalism for well over a century. However, the concept of nature has been subjected to abundant critiques in recent literature, threatening the conceptual tenability of this goal. In this paper, I discuss why I find the concept of nature too valuable to dismiss and offer an account of nature that I believe remedies existent critiques. In Chapter 1, I recount arguments for the protection of nature and illustrate their dualistic underpinnings. In Chapter 2, I discuss issues with dualistic accounts of nature and demonstrate why Steven Vogel’s monistic alternative is …

“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, …

Structural Mechanism Of Nuclear Receptor Biased Agonism, Michelle Deanna Nemetchek

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Nuclear receptors are a class of ligand-activated transcription factors that affect gene expression. Pharmaceutical drugs that target nuclear receptors make up (13%) of all therapeutics prescribed in the United States. Unlike signaling pathways, nuclear receptors have a wide variety of binding partners that can bind upon activation of a nuclear receptor to upregulate gene transcription. These binding partner proteins, called “coregulators”, are diverse in function. However, the determinants of their binding to nuclear receptors, and how binding to certain coregulators over others occurs, is not known.

In this work, we examine how ligands create a preference for nuclear receptors to …

Y-Chromosome Dna Extraction From Post-Cranial Skeletal Elements, Mykala D. Ward

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The use of DNA in forensic science has become an integral tool for victim and perpetrator identifications, missing person’s cases, paternity testing, etc. A major use of DNA is in the identification of unknown deceased individuals. With a reported number of individuals well over 8,000 in the United States, improved methods to accurately collect and analyze DNA from modern human bone are needed.

This project took the preliminary steps to improve DNA sampling and extraction methods by analyzing the Y-chromosome DNA yield from the two bone types. While both types are composed of the same materials, cortical bone is the …

Parent And Child Characteristics Impacting Identification Of Children With Developmental Language Disorder (Dld), Sarah E. Floyd

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Purpose: Previous research has shown that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and dyslexia are under-identified in the general population. Parent or caregiver concern is a primary referral tool for these conditions, but may fail to accurately align with the actual presence of a disorder. The purpose of this study was to examine child and parent characteristics related to a child’s likelihood of receiving a diagnosis of DLD.

Methods: Within a large, 5-year, longitudinal study, kindergartener performance on a battery of speech, language, and literacy measures was examined to identify children with and without DLD and possible risk of dyslexia. …

The Genetic And Demographic Outcomes Of Mixed-Source Reintroductions Of Westslope Cutthroat Trout In Montana, Colter Austin Feuerstein

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Deriving Surface Fuels From Uas Imagery Forfire Models, Matthew R. Cunningham

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Understanding how fuel, weather, and terrain interact to produce fire behavior continues to motivate fire science andhas resulted in development of new physics-based fire behavior models that place increased demands on input data such as fuels. Recent technological advancements in computing, unmanned aerial systems (UAS), and sensors (RGB, multispectral, thermal, and hyperspectral cameras) can provide new opportunities for land managers and scientists to advance knowledge of fuels and fire behavior and their interactions on the landscape. In this study, imagery from high resolution multispectral cameras mounted on UAS were used to build orthomosaics and point clouds of surface fuelbeds in …

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 …

Polya: A Tool For Adjudicating Competing Annotations Of Biological Sequences, Kaitlin Carey

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Annotation of a biological sequence is usually performed by aligning that sequence to a database of known sequence elements. When that database contains elements that are highly similar to each other, the proper annotation may be ambiguous, because several entries in the database produce high-scoring alignments. Typical annotation methods work by assigning a label based on the candidate annotation with the highest alignment score; this can overstate annotation certainty, mislabel boundaries, and fails to identify large scale rearrangements or insertions within the annotated sequence. Here, I present a new software tool, PolyA, that adjudicates between competing alignment-based annotations by computing …

Soda: An Open-Source Library For Visualizing Biological Sequence Annotation, Jack W. Roddy, Travis J. Wheeler

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Genome annotation is the process of identifying and labeling known genetic sequences or features within a genome. Across the various subfields within modern molecular biology, there is a common need for the visualization of such annotations. Genomic data is often visualized on web browser platforms, providing users with easy access to visualization tools without the need for installing any software or, in many cases, underlying datasets. While there exists a broad range of web-based visualization tools, there is, to my knowledge, no lightweight, modern library tailored towards the visualization of genomic data. Instead, developers charged with the task of producing …