Digital Commons Network^™

Population Demography, Spatial Ecology, And Habitat Use Of The Florida Box Turtle (Terrapene Bauri) On A Barrier Island, Michael D. Mills

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Turtles are one the most threatened vertebrate groups in the world due to anthropogenic threats such as habitat loss and overexploitation. In addition to occupying a range that has been vulnerable to major habitat loss, the Florida box turtle (Terrapene bauri) is particularly at risk of overexploitation due to its popularity in the pet trade. Sanibel Island is a barrier island in southwest Florida that has experienced major habitat loss and is the site of a recent poaching event. In response to these threats, studies of both the population demography and spatial ecology were conducted on Sanibel’s Florida box turtle …

Recognition Of Modern Modulated Waveforms With Applications To Abms And Vdats Test Program Set Development, Sylwester Sobolewski

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A newly developed, near real-time, well-performing and potentially universally applicable Automatic Modulation Recognition (AMR) technique for discrimination of numerous modern modulated waveforms found in commercial as well as military communication systems applicable to the new Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management & Surveillance (ABMS) framework as well as Versatile Depot Automatic Test Station (VDATS) Test Program Set (TPS) development is presented. It involves generating complex feature vectors composed of High-Order Direct Cumulant, Cyclostationary and Fourier of Wavelet Transform features created with the help of Principal Component Analysis and Variance Data Compression.

Twelve modulated waveforms are used to evaluate the performance of …

Make The Effort, Take The Time: A Qualitative Study Of Inclusive Managerial Interactions At A Canadian Energy Company, Gregory M. Kober

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Workplace inclusion both maximizes the benefits of a diverse workforce and simultaneously reduces its negative consequences. However, a majority of the inclusion research takes an explicit or implicit management-focused perspective. This is problematic because management has more power than employees and executives are usually exemplars of the dominant organizational culture. In order to be more holistic, inclusion research should be much more deeply informed by a subordinate-centered understanding of workplace inclusiveness. Those with less power, those who are minoritized, and those who are marginalized have critical perspectives that must be brought to bear on the construct of workplace inclusivity.

This …

Information Dissemination And Perpetual Network, Harshit Srivastava

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Social networks have attracted increasing attention from both physical and social scientists. Social networks are essential elements in societies, serving as channels for exchanging various benefits, such as innovation, information, and social support. Moreover, research in social networks helps explain macro-level social phenomena, such as social polarization and social contagion. An understanding of social networks has significant implications, such as improving social welfare and political participation. Modeling social network formation has typically employed game theory or agent-based modeling. These studies typically propose simple and tractable micro-level rules for link formation mechanisms and show that these rules have implications for known …

Airspace Design And Strategic Deconfliction For Urban Air Mobility, Hualong Tang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Urban Air Mobility (UAM), a part of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), focused on transporting passengers in low-altitude urban airspace, has attracted extensive attention among industry, government, academia, and the public. Compared to existing commercial flights, to be able to succeed, UAM is envisioned to move to highly automated and high-density operations in low-altitude urban airspace in the future. Providers of services for UAM (PSU), rather than the legacy Air Traffic Control, are anticipated to support operators with operational planning, aircraft deconfliction, conformance monitoring, and emergency information dissemination. Such services, for hundreds to thousands of simultaneous UAM operations in constrained airspace, …

Data Driven Approaches For Understanding And Improving Urban Mobility, Yujie Guo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the adoption of advanced information technologies, the transportation system keep innovating. It now offers more travel options, becomes smarter, but meanwhile gets more complicated and imposes more challenges to researchers and practitioners. For example, demand responsive public transit operates according to user demand instead of traditional timetable-based and fixed route services, which brings a lot of convenience to users. These emerging services also reshapes the way people travel. With the popularity of ride sharing services such as Uber and Lyft, people are more accessible to vehicle use without an ownership. Given the increasing popularity of emerging services, it is …

Neroimaging Of Brain Activaion Using Diffuse Optical Tomography, Jingyu Huang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research has two parts. The first part focuses on the use of non-invasive imaging technique, diffuse optical tomography (DOT), to study the brain activation during the stimulation in the clinical room. It further extends the application of DOT by using it to monitor the hemodynamic response during the TMS stimulation in different parameters. Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) is based on NIR light that exploits the relative transparency of biological tissue. The part two and three extends the application in the hospital for delirium patient study and arm muscle dystrophy by adding the sources and detectors to monitor the brain …

Biochar Amended Biological Systems For Enhanced Landfill Leachate And Lignocellulosic Banana Waste Treatment, Xia Yang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Biochar is an inexpensive and environmentally friendly carbonaceous pyrolysis byproduct with a high surface area, pore volume, and adsorption capacities for inorganic and organic compounds. The goal of this dissertation is to evaluate the feasibility of biochar application in biological treatment systems for enhanced waste management. Three major objectives guided this research to provide a compressive understanding of biochar enhancement effects on biological treatment systems for contaminant removal, energy recovery, and environmental impacts as well as essential factors influencing biochar production and properties.

In Objective 1 a low-cost hybrid Constructed Wetland (CW) system modified with biochar/zeolite was developed for enhanced …

Data-Driven State Estimation For Improved Wide Area Situational Awareness In Smart Grids, Md Jakir Hossain

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Wide area situational awareness (WASA) in smart grids includes automatic monitoring, perception and detection of anomalies in these systems. The goal of WASA is to make smart grids aware of their physical and operational state for more effective operational decisions and control. As such, tracking the system's state or state estimation is one of the key objectives of WASA. The extensive integration of cyber elements into smart grids, such as large deployment of various monitoring and measurement devices, provides new opportunities to improve WASA. However, the tight coupling of power grids with cyber components introduces vulnerabilities to cyber and physical …

A Multiple Input Multiple Output Framework For The Automatic Optical Fractionator-Based Cell Counting In Z-Stacks Using Deep Learning, Palak Dave

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Quantifying cells in a defined region of biological tissue is critical for many clinical and preclinical studies, especially in pathology, toxicology, cancer, and behavior. Unbiased stereology is the state-of-art method for quantification of the total number and other morphometric parameters of stained objects in a defined region of biological tissue. As part of a program to develop accurate, precise, and more efficient automatic approaches for quantifying morphometric changes in biological tissue, our group has shown that both deep learning-based and hand-crafted algorithms can estimate the total number of histologically stained cells at their maximal profile of focus in extended depth …

Dynamic Study Of Inverter-Based Resources In Weak Grids, Zhengyu Wang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the main technology behind renewable energy resources, such as solar PV and wind turbines, inverter-based generation penetration is increasing aggressively. Besides the congestion concerns when interconnecting a large-scale inverter-based resource (IBR) into the power grid, stability issues are commonly existing. The stability events occur more frequently when the resources are in remote area because the transmission line is long and grid strength is weak. One of the most representative and widely observed phenomena of IBR instability is low-frequency oscillation. And this dissertation focuses on investigating the low-frequency oscillations of IBR in weak grids.

The main objectives of the investigation …

Quantifying A 21-Year Surface Water And Groundwater Interaction In A Ridge And Valley Lake Environment Using A Highly Constrained Modeling Approach, Richard T. Bowers Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Karst lakes are ubiquitous in ridge terrain settings in limestone aquifer coastal plain environments. In west-central Florida, these lakes are frequently connected to the Upper Floridan aquifer and have unique aquifer recharge characteristics. They have been selectively studied because they commonly have no or very limited surface water discharge and limited drainage areas, have appreciable surface water and groundwater interaction and leak to the deep aquifer. An innovative modeling approach was developed to collectively understand and more precisely quantify this vertical leakage, both from a lake-specific and regional water budget standpoint, for a 21-year study period (2000-2020). A unique, calibrated …

Stochastic Models For Resilience Assessment And Improvement, Weimar Ardila Rueda

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Resilience refers to the ability of a system to absorb and mitigate the impact of potential disruptions and return to normal operational conditions. The above notion of resilience allows us to distinguish two stages in a system's post-disruption response, the absorptive dimension and the recovery dimension. The absorptive dimension is related to a system's robustness and capacity to mitigate initial loss posterior to a disruption. Meanwhile, the recovery dimension is the system's rapidity to return and reach an acceptable level of functionality after the disruption occurrence.

A social-physical (SP) system's post-disruption response is related to its resilience capacity so building …

Quantifying Environmental Sensitivity Of Marine Resources To Oil Well Blowouts In The Gulf Of Mexico, Emily Chancellor

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focused on oil spill risk assessment techniques historically utilized for coastal resources (e.g., environmental sensitivity indices (ESIs), vulnerability assessments, species-specific vulnerability frameworks) and their application and expansion to offshore resources found in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM). Additional included techniques (e.g., multi-sector trade-off analysis, marine spatial planning (MSP) software) provide support in decision making processes regarding the potential siting of oil production sites and/or the withdrawal of areas from oil and natural gas production. Chapter 1 included an overview and justification for this study. Chapter 2 demonstrated an initial methodology for the creation of offshore ESIs and how …

Climate Action And Indigenous Land Relations: A Case Study In Nagaland, Northeastern India, Osensang Pongen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research grew out of my interest in the implications of climate action, especially its effects in natural-resource-rich peripheral regions like my home state of Nagaland. This study will be of interest to anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the ways in which global ecodevelopment programs expand and mutate at the micro-scales in Indigenous communities. This includes structural transformations to their Indigenous socio-economic and political lifeworlds, their cosmologies, and their affective relations with their ancestral lands and environment. More broadly, the study draws attention to the growing challenges confronting Indigenous peoples in the Global South who are being seduced by …

Relationship Between Individual Characteristics And Received Social Support Among People With Serious Mental Illness, Samantha Dicorte

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Past research on social support has mainly focused on perceived social support. Relatively less research has been done on received social support and how it can promote positive behavior outcomes. This study examines the importance of received social support, including background on social support, social support outcomes, and a theoretical foundation overview of the social stress model. In addition to a literature review, this study investigates the association between individual characteristics (i.e., diagnosis and substance abuse including alcohol, race/ethnicity, gender, age, and marital status) and different types of received social support (i.e., daily, mental health, and adherence support). Simple linear …

Essays On Contributions In Social Knowledge-Sharing Platforms And Their Impact On Employee Performance And Job Mobility, Moe Esmaeili

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, the interest of practitioners and managers in social networking applications and social knowledge-sharing has increased. While these platforms allow individuals to collaborate, form/maintain social ties, and share/receive knowledge and expertise, and share/receive knowledge/expertise, they also provide a unique collaborative environment for organizations, enabling leaders to promote communication and collaboration among employee silos, engage them with others, and promote corporate core values once adopted internally.

Despite increasing efforts by scholars to uncover the underlying factors that influence members' participation in such platforms, there is still a lack of understanding of the fundamental motivating factor for such contributions and …

Optimizing Lake Okeechobee Watershed Management And Reservoir Operations For Water Quality Improvement, Osama Mahrous Mossad Tarabih

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Rivers around the globe have been altered as people have constructed water resources infrastructure to store water for different human needs, causing negative impacts on ecosystem processes and functions. Environmental flows have been introduced to restore deteriorated riverine ecosystems; however, environmental flows have not always been practical or adequate to restore environment conditions in rivers globally. Lake Okeechobee is a large subtropical lake that plays a pivotal role in South Florida water system providing various water demands for the surrounding communities as well as providing crucial services to the ecosystem of South Florida. However, hydrologic alterations and nutrient (phosphorus and …

Reproduction In Relation To Heavy-Metal Contamination Along An Urbanization Gradient In Aninvasive Florida Lizard Species (Anolis Sagrei), Elizabeth Hauck

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Environmental contamination is accumulating rapidly worldwide due to increasing urbanization rates. Heavy metals are known to be particularly toxic to organisms, to accumulate in biological systems, and to be found in higher concentrations in animals located in areas of high urban levels. However, the physiological impacts of these toxic heavy metals in wildlife remain largely unknown. Lizards are excellent bioindicator species for environmental contaminants due to their trophic level as mesopredators and their susceptibility of exposure via air, water, diet, and soil through egg deposition. To assess the impacts heavy-metal contamination has on reproductive parameters in lizards and how these …

Volcano And Tectonic Hazard Modeling Using Interdisciplinary Geophysical And Geodetic Methods, Mitchell Scott Hastings

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Volcanic and tectonic hazards such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis present risks to about ~45% of the global population. They have caused at least 1.5 trillion dollars in damages worldwide since the start of the 20th century, and the costs are accelerating as population increases. In this dissertation, new data are combined with existing information and novel modeling approaches to quantify volcanic, earthquake and tsunami hazards.

The Blackfoot Reservoir Volcanic Field (BRVF) is a bimodal volcanic field on southeastern margin of the Eastern Snake River Plain in Idaho. In the BRVF, gravity anomalies reveal two shallow silicic intrusions that …

Evaluating The Effect Of Public Health Governance Structure And Public Opinion On Covid-19 Disease Control Interventions, Daniel Chacreton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Background

Since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, the responses to the pandemic varied greatly from nation to nation. In the US, state-level variance in responses has likely contributed to the disparate COVID-19 infection-related state-level outcomes such as incidence and case fatality rates. The large variances in national and sub-national responses to COVID-19 when combined with the abundance of factors that influence disease transmission rates has created a number of important research opportunities.

Methods

In this vain, this research study aims to describe the relationship that exists between public health governance structure and public sentiment and COVID-19 control measure effectiveness …

Structural And Biochemical Characterization Of Epigenetic And Fusion Tyrosine Kinase Cancer Targets For Drug Development, Melissa Bikowitz

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cancer is a significant global health burden, as ~40% of the human population is diagnosed with cancer over a lifetime, half of which succumb to the disease. To develop novel compounds as potential cancer therapeutics, an in-depth structural and biochemical understanding of proteins involved in oncogenesis is key. This dissertation centers around the comprehensive structural and biochemical characterization of two classes of proteins critical for cancer cell survival: bromodomain-containing proteins (BRDs) and fusion tyrosine kinases (FTKs).In 2010, small molecule inhibitors targeting bromodomains (epigenetic reader proteins) became heavily popularized due to the druggability and potent anticancer effects of BET inhibitors. …

Community Heritage: A Source Of Health/Medical Aspirational Capital For Black Males, Lafrance Clarke Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There is a recognized need for more Black male healers who pursue careers in medical fields.Thus, the purpose of this study was twofold: to explore historical documents to tell the histories of men of African descent who practiced healing in Florida and, from those histories, create a virtual heritage tour to support teaching about leadership through African American history and narratives of healing. The research questions were: How does the heritage curriculum history about Black men healers of FL provide a historical counter-narrative about Black men and their leadership in connection to health/medicine?How do historical counter-narratives about Black men support …

The Effects Of Motivationally Enhanced Digital Game-Based Learning On Undergraduate Students’ Learning Motivation, Mathematics Achievement, And Learning Retention In College Algebra, Dennis Ward

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to design, develop, and test the effects of digital game-based learning on undergraduate students’ learning motivation, mathematics achievement, and learning retention in a college algebra course. Digital games utilize interactive digital media that offer rules-based challenges and react to the individual’s choices. Digital games have been used in preschool, K-12, higher education, and workplace environments in a wide range of subject areas, including language arts, secondary language acquisition, social studies, science, and math. Specifically, the effectiveness of digital game-based learning on students’ learning and motivation has been studied in college-level mathematics courses. However, previous …

An Exploration Of Accelerated Student Perspectives On Participation Experiences And Making Career Choices, Jennifer Meier

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Acceleration program options have grown rapidly in Florida and have been used to help students pursue an associate or bachelor’s degree. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the experiences that former dual enrolled students had with selecting a major and a career. A snowball sampling approach was used to identify ten participants from the southwestern region of Florida with 12 or more credit hours from dual enrollment. Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) was the conceptual framework used to help guide this study. The instrumentation for data collection included a short survey followed by a semi-structured interview. The …

Development Of Lipidated Antimicrobial Polycarbonates, Ruixuan Gao

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Antimicrobial resistance is a global challenge owing to the lack of discovering effective antibiotic agents. Antimicrobial polymers containing the cationic groups and hydrophobic groups which mimic natural host-defense peptides (HDPs) show great promise in combating bacteria. Herein, we report the synthesis of lipidated polycarbonates bearing primary amino groups and hydrophobic moieties (including both the terminal lipid alkyl chain and hydrophobic groups in the sequences) by ring-opening polymerization. The hydrophobic/hydrophilic group ratios were adjusted deliberately and the lengths of the lipid tails at the end of the polymers were modified to achieve the optimized combination for the lead polymers, which exhibited …

Standardization Of Care For Transition-Age Youth At Emancipation: An Analysis Of Service Provision, Sarah K. Sheffield

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Florida Department of Children and Families notes community-based care (CBC) agencies are competent entities who present with their own method of service delivery and design. Recent evaluations show concerns in service selection to include a tendency to choose programming based on face validity, a lack of capacity and availability of services by geographical location, and a failure to systematically encompass stakeholder voice. The purpose of this study was to gain insight on how agencies make decisions regarding the selection of services for transition-age youth at emancipation.

A set of direct care providers from CBC and non-profit agencies participated in …

An Examination Of Parental Coping Strategies During Catastophic Events, Vivian K. Mills

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

On March 11, 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Sars CoV-2 a global pandemic. The virus that originated in Wuhan, China, had spread to several other countries causing governments to shut down and issue safety mandates to slow and stop the spread. The pandemic caused global changes to normal routines and highlighted the importance of coping during these tough times. Although the global COVID-19 pandemic encompassed much of the news during the past few years, it is not an isolated catastrophic event to have impacted society. Natural disasters, such as hurricanes and wildfires, wars, and other disasters have …

Farmer Adoption Of Advanced Technology In Agribusiness, Justin W. Belcher

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Normally, family-owned farms are slow to adopt advanced technologies though these technologies can provide several benefits to the farm and have the potential to increase farm production volumes to help meet future population growth. The goal of this study was to document the factors that influence the adoption decision of advanced technologies by family-owned farms and what strategies can be used to motivate adoption. Case study research was conducted to gather data in a more structured way from family-owned farms typically excluded from past research for the purpose of comparing similarities across similar and dissimilar farms. For generalizing similarities, a …

Anthropogenic Fecal Pollution Affects Microbial Water Quality And Multidrug Resistance In Tropical Aquatic Environments, Adriana González-Fernández

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although an often-overlooked issue, fecal pollution at recreational beaches should concerneveryone. Worldwide more than 80% of wastewater is discharged into rivers or the ocean without any treatment. Untreated and inefficiently treated wastewater can introduce diseasecausing microorganisms into the aquatic environment. Fecal-borne pathogens can also originate in animal waste, and humans can be exposed to these pathogens from poorly managed animal feces that make their way into the aquatic environment. Exposure to waterborne pathogens in recreational waters is a public health hazard, as it facilitates the transmission of waterborne illness, and surface waters serve as natural reservoirs of antibiotic resistant bacteria …