Digital Commons Network^™

Food Policy For A Healthy, Sustainable, And Equitable Local Food System: Recommendations For Missoula, Erika Berglund

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Over the last several decades, food policy councils (FPCs) have led the effort to place food on local government policy agendas. While FPCs continue to make progress in supporting local food systems, they also face institutional and organizational challenges. In recent years, a handful of cities and counties have endeavored to further food system reform with the establishment of full-time food policy staff positions. Currently, there are 19 confirmed food policy positions housed in local governments across the U.S. While there is considerable literature on FPCs, little research has been published regarding governmental food policy staff positions. This study uses …

Alas, Poor Yorick: A Dna Analysis Of Ancestry Using Crania, Claire Hanson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Current methods for estimating ancestry in biological profiles provided to law enforcement and forensic collections rely heavily on the use of metric and non metric methods such as FORDISC 3.1 and “trait lists.” The reliance on these methods has led to inaccurate and ambiguous ancestry estimations, as many metric and non metric methods are subjective and cannot be statistically tested for error rates. As a result, forensic collections, such as the University of Montana Forensic Collection, could potentially house remains that have been inaccurately curated. In order to test the accuracy of curation in the UMFC, DNA samples were extracted …

Sing, Woman!, Emma Marie Spencer

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Belonging For Dementia Caregivers, Sabrina Singh

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Bird And Native Bee Responses To Habitat Treatments, Emily Bea Oja

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

As forests across the United States have been altered due to fire suppression in the last century, their structure has been altered, resulting in increased fuel loads. Subsequently, managers have been increasingly implementing habitat treatments including prescribed burning, mechanical thinning, and a combination of both treatments to reduce fuel loads and enhance habitat for ungulates. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation has partnered with agencies to complete over 10,000 of these treatments across the United States to enhance elk habitat. As treatment impacts to other wildlife species are not well understood, we evaluated the effects of these treatments on the bird …

Gvsu Undergraduate And Graduate Catalog, 2020-2021, Grand Valley State University

Course Catalogs, 1963 - Current

Grand Valley State University 2020-2021 undergraduate and graduate course catalog. Course catalogs are published annually to provide students with information and guidance for enrollment.

Modeling Hydrologic Impacts Of Tribal Water Rights Quantification And Settlement On The Flathead Indian Irrigation Project, Jordan Andrew Jimmie

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) of the Flathead Reservation are a federally-recognized group of tribes (Kootenai, Salish, and Pend d’Oreille) located in western Montana. On the reservation lies the expansive Flathead Indian Irrigation Project (FIIP), which supplies irrigation water to approximately 127,000 acres of tribal and non-tribal agricultural land. The 1904 Flathead Allotment Act opened “surplus” land to non-native homesteaders without tribal consent, initiating the land ownership fragmentation observed on the reservation today. This legacy, combined with historically unquantified tribal reserved water rights and the antiquated state of the FIIP infrastructure, including water losses from unlined earthen canals, …

Investigation Of Docosahexaenoic Acid As A Potential Treatment For Particulate-Induced Inflammation, Paige Lynn Fletcher

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Acute and chronic inflammation are vital contributing factors to pulmonary diseases which can be triggered by the exposure to airborne toxicants such as crystalline silica (SiO2) and nanomaterials. There has been an increasing trend in the use of nanomaterials; specifically multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT), in various consumer products that in turn will increase the risk of pulmonary diseases. Unfortunately, there is a lack of preventative and therapeutic treatments for these diseases. A potential treatment that has been shown to have anti-inflammatory effects is the common dietary supplement docosahexaenoic acid (DHA); an omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid most commonly found in fish …

Solving Russian Velars: Palatalization, The Lexicon And Gradient Contrast Utilization, Jeffrey R. Parker, Andrea D. Sims

Faculty Publications

The complexity of an inflection class system is the average extent to which elements in the system inhibit motivated inferences about the realization of lexemes’ paradigm cells. Research shows that systems tend to exhibit relatively low complexity in this sense. However, representations of inflectional systems tend to include only affixal and regular patterns, leaving questions about how irregular patterns and non-affixal ‘layers’ of inflectional exponence affect the complexity of a system. We address these questions by exploring four layers of inflectional exponence of Russian nouns, including irregular patterns within each layer. Our data show that the Russian noun system exhibits …

Macro-Appraisal And Professional Communities, Cory L. Nimer

Faculty Publications

This paper explores the application of social network analysis tools and other quantitative measures for the macro-appraisal of a research community in order to identify individuals from whom to solicit professional papers. While the contributions of individual scholars can be quantified and reviewed in a variety of ways, network analysis provides a useful approach for assessing the contributions of scholars in terms of their connections with other researchers. Using the faculty of a university department as a case study, this study considers how visualizing networks might be used as an additional metric in a professional papers program or subject-based archive …

Cross-Functional Collaboration: The Placement Of Archival Processing In Arl Libraries, Cory L. Nimer, Rebecca A. Wiederhold

Faculty Publications

This paper reviews the results of two studies of the administrative structures that support archival processing functions in academic libraries, assessing benefits and drawbacks of current models. With this research, the authors sought to determine whether best practices exist for the placement of processing units within academic libraries and whether these structures correlate with other statistical measures. The first study examined staff directories and organizational charts on Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member library websites. A follow-up study gathered qualitative data from ARL libraries, examining library administrators' experience with their organizational structure. The research results were used to inform an …

Periodic Atlas Of The Metroscape: Counting Oregon, Mac Cunningham, Xi Wei, Randy Morris

Metroscape

Every United States census has challenges ensuring that every person responds and is counted. Individuals who are missed in the census count or “undercounted” for various reasons are often referred to as “hard-to-count” populations. Hard-to-count populations include rural residents, people of color, immigrants, people experiencing homelessness, children under age five, renters, and more.

For the 2010 census, the final mail return rate in Oregon was 76 percent. Census tracts with a mail return response rate of 76 percent or less are highlighted on the map on this page. Response rates closest to the state’s final response rate are light yellow, …

Counting Everyone Because Everyone Counts: The Value Of Census Data For Local Decision Making, Uma Krishnan

Metroscape

Once every ten years the US Census Bureau conducts the decennial United States census, and 2020 is the year. The census is a national effort to count everyone in the United States. Unfortunately, this year the COVID-19 pandemic has captured the nation’s attention even as the 2020 census struggles to claim relevance and broaden its reach. At the same time, census data has emerged as a critical tool for examining stark inequities in the demographics of who is contracting and dying of COVID-19. This year, counting everyone is more important than ever.

Real-Time Evaluation Of City–University Partnerships For Sustainability And Resilience, Liliana Elizabeth Caughman, Lauren Withycombe Keeler, Fletcher Beaudoin

Institute for Sustainable Solutions Publications and Presentations

Cities face many challenges in their efforts to create more sustainable and resilient urban environments for their residents. Among these challenges is the structure of city administrations themselves. Partnerships between cities and universities are one way that cities can address some of the internal structural barriers to transformation. However, city–university partnerships do not necessarily generate transformative outcomes, and relationships between cities and universities are complicated by history, politics, and the structures the partnerships are attempting to overcome. In this paper, focus groups and trial evaluations from five city–university partnerships in three countries are used to develop a formative evaluation tool …

Comparing Diaries And Waste Compositional Analysis For Measuring Food Waste In The Home, Tom E. Quested, Griff Palmer, Laura Moreno, Christa Mcdermott, Kelsea A. Schumacher

Institute for Sustainable Solutions Publications and Presentations

Diaries have been used to obtain national and subnational estimates of household food waste (HHFW) in several countries. Furthermore, diaries have been proposed as a method for tracking progress towards goals that include HHFW reduction. However, multiple studies have suggested diaries substantially underestimate HHFW. This paper collates and analyses data from five studies in which diary estimates of HHFW can be directly compared to other, more accurate estimates from waste compositional analysis (WCA). This analysis finds that all diary estimates for HHFW were lower than the corresponding WCA estimates, with the degree of underestimation ranging from 7% to 40%. Four …

Acid Hydrolysis-Based Sugarcane Bagasse Biorefining For Levulinic Acid Production: Dynamic Mechanistic Modeling Under Varying Operating Conditions, Emília S. Lopes, Julio C.J. Gariboti, Luis H.Z. Feistel, Elmer Ccopa Rivera, Rubens Mac Iel Filho, Laura P. Tovar

Faculty Publications

© 2020, AIDIC Servizi S.r.l. The study on the lignocellulosic material conversion into bio-based platform chemicals, such as levulinic acid (LA), is one of the most promising routes to promote the development of advanced biorefineries. In this work, a dynamic mechanistic model is developed to simulate the LA production from lignocellulosic material. A wide operating range is used to estimate the parameters of the reaction kinetics. Because multi-parameter estimation problem is complex, a genetic algorithm-based optimization procedure is used to determine the optimum parameters values. Measurements are obtained for various reaction times (0 - 45 min) temperatures (150 - 200 …

Clerking For A Retired Supreme Court Justice—My Experience Of Being “Shared” Among Five Justices In One Term, Rory Little

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Politics Of Regulatory Enforcement And Compliance: Theorizing And Operationalizing Political Influences, Jodi L. Short

Faculty Scholarship

There is broad consensus in the literature on regulatory enforcement and compliance that politics matters. However, there is little scholarly convergence on what politics is or rigorous theorization and empirical testing of how politics matters. Many enforcement and compliance studies omit political variables altogether. Among those that address political influences on regulatory outcomes, politics has been defined in myriad ways and, too often, left undefined. Even when political constructs are explicitly operationalized, the mechanisms by which they influence regulatory outcomes are thinly hypothesized or simply ignored. If politics is truly as important to enforcement and compliance outcomes as everyone in …

The Covid-19 Vaccine Dilemma, Dorit R. Reiss

Faculty Scholarship

COVID-19 continues to lead to large numbers of deaths, harms, and financial costs. Without an effective vaccine, those will continue. The pressure to find a vaccine is high; and that pressure places a risk on the safeguards in place to assure that vaccines are safe and effective will be ignored. The United States has an extensive apparatus to oversee vaccine safety before and after licensing, including multiple federal committees and several monitoring systems, and that apparatus gave us, in 2020, an extraordinarily safe vaccine supply. This Article explains the different pressures that push for and against using the same apparatus …

Tax Macs: A Study Of M&A Termination Rights Triggered By Material Adverse Changes In Tax Law, Heather M. Field

Faculty Scholarship

A "Tax MAC" provision-one that triggers termination or other rights upon a material adverse change in tax law-can be crucial to a business deal if a change in tax law would change a party's interest in consummating the deal, particularly at the specified price and on the articulated terms. Tax MAC provisions may be particularly important when taxpayers make busi­ness decisions in a political climate like today's, when tax laws could change again, perhaps dramatically, if control of Congress and the White House changes. Yet little has been written about Tax MAC provisions. In response, I studied Tax MAC provisions …

A Critique Of Jurisdictionality, Scott Dodson

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last two decades, and culminating in a quartet of cases decided in the last two terms, the Supreme Court has erected a frame­ work for determining when a rule is "jurisdictional." This framework is important because questions of jurisdictionality routinely come up in federal litigation. Pressing the virtues of simplicity and clarity in jurisdictional rules to avoid the costs of mistaken assumptions of ju­risdiction, the framework deploys clear-statement rules and formalis­tic, rule-based tests in an effort to be, in the Court's words, "easy to apply" and "readily administrable." In this article, I expose the weak­ nesses of the …

Safe Money, John F. Crawford

Faculty Scholarship

This Article provides the first comprehensive survey and evaluation of proposed approaches to the central financial reform issue of our era: making all money held in account form "safe, " or non-defaultable, in the same way a dollar bill cannot default. Financial crises are at core a problem of def au/table money; preventing such crises requires making money safe. The goal is eminently achievable; indeed, a number of plausible proposals have been advanced. The project has two aspects: providing better safe money options and eliminating unsafe money. This Article analyzes safe money approaches and concludes that expanding "base" money-that is, …

Citizenship Denied: Implications Of The Naturalization Backlog For Noncitizens In Military, Ming Hsu Chen

Faculty Scholarship

The immigration system is in crisis. Long lines of asylum seekers at the border and immigrants in the interior spend years waiting for their day in immigration court. This is true in the agencies that process appli- cations for immigration benefits from legal immigrants as well. Since 2016, delays in naturalization have increased to historic proportions. The problem is even worse for military naturalizations, where delays are ac- companied by denials and overall declines in military naturalizations. It is the latest front in the battle on legal migration and citizenship. These impediments to citizenship demonstrate an extreme form of policies …

Making Litigating Citizenship More Fair, Ming Hsu Chen

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

How Much Procedure Is Needed For Agencies To Change Novel Regulatory Policies?, Ming Hsu Chen

Faculty Scholarship

The use of guidance documents in administrative law has long been controversial and considered to be one of the most challenging aspects of administrative law. When an agency uses a guidance document to change or make policy, it need not provide notice to the public or allow comment on the new rule; this makes changes easier, faster, and less subject to judicial review. Under the Obama Administration, guidance documents were used to implement policy shifts in many areas of administrative law, including civil rights issues such as transgender inclusion and campus sexual harassment, and immigration law issues such as deferred …

Factors Affecting The 2019 Atlantic Hurricane Season And The Role Of The Indian Ocean Dipole, Kimberly M. Wood, Philip J. Klotzbach, Jennifer M. Collins, Louis-Philippe Caron, Ryan E. Truchelut, Carl J. Schreck

School of Geosciences Faculty and Staff Publications

The 2019 Atlantic hurricane season exhibited above‐average Accumulated Cyclone Energy—60% of which was produced by Hurricanes Dorian and Lorenzo. Most tropical cyclone (TC) activity was concentrated in a ~6‐week period from late August to early October. During the early part of the season, relatively TC‐unfavorable conditions persisted in the main development region (MDR). The MDR environment became largely favorable in September, followed by an abrupt shift back to less conducive conditions in October coincident with a strongly positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). The IOD produced an El Niño‐like teleconnection pattern observed through 200‐hPa velocity potential anomalies. In the subtropical Atlantic, …

The Prebiotic Provenance Of Semi-Aqueous Solvents, Jennifer L. Lago, Bradley T. Burcar, Nicholas V. Hud, Rio Febrian, Christopher A. Mehta, Paul J. Bracher, Zachary D. Atlas, Matthew A. Pasek

School of Geosciences Faculty and Staff Publications

The numerous and varied roles of phosphorylated organic molecules in biochemistry suggest they may have been important to the origin of life. The prominence of phosphorylated molecules presents a conundrum given that phosphorylation is a thermodynamically unfavorable, endergonic process in water, and most natural sources of phosphate are poorly soluble. We recently demonstrated that a semi-aqueous solvent consisting of urea, ammonium formate, and water (UAFW) supports the dissolution of phosphate and the phosphorylation of nucleosides. However, the prebiotic feasibility and robustness of the UAFW system are unclear. Here, we study the UAFW system as a medium in which phosphate minerals …

Utilizing Ecological Niche Modelling To Predict Habitat Suitability Of Eastern Equine Encephalitis In Florida, Claire Burch, Rebecca Loraamm, Thomas R. Unnasch, Joni A. Downs

School of Geosciences Faculty and Staff Publications

Eastern Equine Encephalitis virus (EEEV) is a virus found predominantly east of the Mississippi River in the United States that can be fatal to both equines and humans. The disease has previously been most prolific in states like Florida, but there has been an increase in the prevalence in other states further up north on the east coast of the United States in recent years. The purpose of this research is to use the ecological niche modelling program Maxent to model EEEV habitat suitability probability. This research utilized data of fatality incidence in equine hosts, versus sentinel chicken infection data, …

Optimizing Arbovirus Surveillance Using Risk Mapping And Coverage Modelling, Joni A. Downs, Mehrdad Vaziri, George Deskins, William Kellner, Kristi M. Miley, Thomas R. Unnasch

School of Geosciences Faculty and Staff Publications

Diseases carried by mosquitoes and other arthropods endanger human health globally. Though costly, surveillance efforts are vital for disease control and prevention This paper describes an approach for strategically configuring targeted disease surveillance sites across a study area. The methodology combines risk index mapping and spatial optimization modelling. The risk index is used to identify demand for surveillance, and the maximum covering location problem is used to select a specified number of candidate surveillance sites that covers the maximum amount of risk. The approach is demonstrated using a case study where optimal locations for sentinel surveillance sites are selected for …

A Hydrologic Landscapes Perspective On Groundwater Connectivity Of Depressional Wetlands, Brian P. Neff, Donald O. Rosenberry, Scott G. Leibowitz, Dave M. Mushet, Heather E. Golden, Mark C. Rains, J. R. Brooks, Charles R. Lane

School of Geosciences Faculty and Staff Publications

Research into processes governing the hydrologic connectivity of depressional wetlands has advanced rapidly in recent years. Nevertheless, a need persists for broadly applicable, non-site-specific guidance to facilitate further research. Here, we explicitly use the hydrologic landscapes theoretical framework to develop broadly applicable conceptual knowledge of depressional-wetland hydrologic connectivity. We used a numerical model to simulate the groundwater flow through five generic hydrologic landscapes. Next, we inserted depressional wetlands into the generic landscapes and repeated the modeling exercise. The results strongly characterize groundwater connectivity from uplands to lowlands as being predominantly indirect. Groundwater flowed from uplands and most of it was …