Digital Commons Network^™

Life After Dobbs, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

The article begins, "The  Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now over rule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives." It is now one year, and one full election cycle, since the Supreme Court closed its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization with those words. That is time enough to gauge how the "people and their elected representatives" have used the authority "return[ed]" to them.

Financial Strain Of Covid-19 And Its Impact On Willingness-To-Pay For Equine Care, Jada M. Thompson, Michelle Kibler, Jennie L.Z. Ivey

Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness Faculty Publications and Presentations

The novel COVID-19 virus caused a global pandemic disrupting lives, industries, and economies. The result was an impact on prices due to challenges with production and supply chain distribution. This study investigates the financial strain COVID-19 had on equine owners and leasers, what the market for equine care would bear if costs for care increased, and what factors contribute to their willingness to pay (WTP) for increasing cost of equine care. An online survey was distributed for 4 weeks to adult U.S. residents. Respondents reported their involvement in the equine industry, financial response to COVID-19, and responses to …

Informationalism Beyond Managerialism, Salome Viljoen

Articles

It is now commonplace to observe that digital platforms are both affecting and reshaping markets. The focus of this Article is not the anticompetitive effects of digital platforms upon the markets they enter. It instead focuses on digital platforms themselves as market mechanisms. Information—especially datafied information about people and their behavior—and information technologies have transformed how many markets function in the digital economy. Markets have become market machines: highly engineered and computationally intensive market-like mechanisms that make up a key layer of technological infrastructure within digital platforms.

The American Tradition Of Self-Made Arms, Joseph G.S. Greenlee

St. Mary's Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Object Detection And Classification In The Visible And Infrared Spectrums, Domenick D. Poster

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The over-arching theme of this dissertation is the development of automated detection and/or classification systems for challenging infrared scenarios. The six works presented herein can be categorized into four problem scenarios. In the first scenario, long-distance detection and classification of vehicles in thermal imagery, a custom convolutional network architecture is proposed for small thermal target detection. For the second scenario, thermal face landmark detection and thermal cross-spectral face verification, a publicly-available visible and thermal face dataset is introduced, along with benchmark results for several landmark detection and face verification algorithms. Furthermore, a novel visible-to-thermal transfer learning algorithm for face landmark …

Advancing Assessments Of Climate Change Vulnerability Of West Virginia Watersheds, Joseph T. Molina

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

As climate change is becoming increasingly recognized as a threat to aquatic ecosystems, climate adaptation planning, in both the long- and short-term, is becoming more common in natural resource management. There is a need within conservation agencies to develop methodologies and assessments that support adaptation planning to efficiently disperse conservation dollars and effectively strengthen ecological and community resilience as climate changes continue. My thesis aims to provide West Virginia natural resources managers with climate vulnerability assessments that can be used to determine where and how conservation efforts should be administered. Additionally, I demonstrate a methodology that can be built upon …

Specialized Metabolism In Retina, Retinal Pigmented Epithelium, And Testis, Siyan Zhu

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The retina and its neighboring retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE) are high energy-demanding and metabolically active tissues with specialized and complementary metabolism. They are metabolically interdependent and impact each other’s viability. Interestingly, many of the metabolic features in the retina and RPE are shared with the testis. For example, testis is also energy costly due to continuous sperm differentiation and it has similar metabolic inter-dependence between different testis cells. Both the retina and testis are vulnerable to mitochondrial metabolic impairments.

We conducted three research projects to understand 1) the nutrient utilization and communication in retina and RPE; 2) The profiling of …

Leveraging Data Science To Promote Sustainable Resource Recovery From Organic Waste Streams In Rural Regions, Mohammed Tamim Zaki

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Conventional organic waste management practices such as landfilling contribute to global warming and degrade environmental and human health. Alternatively, organic waste can be treated to recover energy, nutrients, and carbon through resource recovery technologies. Data science could benefit such technologies by improving their efficiency through data-driven process modeling along with reducing environmental and economic burdens via life cycle assessment (LCA) and techno-economic analysis (TEA), respectively.

A critical review of 616 peer-reviewed articles published during 2002–2022 was conducted on the use of data science methods in resource recovery from organic waste. Although applications of machine learning (ML) methods have drastically increased …

Opening The Range: Reforms To Allow Markets For Voluntary Conservation On Federal Grazing Lands, Shawn Regan, Temple Stoellinger, Jonathan Wood

Utah Law Review

For nearly a century, the federal government has authorized ranchers to graze livestock on large areas of federal lands in the western United States. Federal-land grazing has generated substantial conflict in recent decades, as conservation interests and others have lobbied and litigated against what they view as inappropriate and destructive use of federal lands. This has produced a predictable backlash among ranching interests, including efforts to roll back the regulations relied on by environmental litigants and aggressive confrontations with federal regulators. But such conflict is not inevitable. Competing demands on these lands can be resolved through voluntary means and positive …

Owning The Right To Migrate: A Proposal For Migration Corridors In The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Alyssa Florack-Hess

Utah Law Review

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), one of the world’s most treasured regions, consists of an interconnected patchwork of federal, state, and private lands. The GYE’s elk, mule deer, and pronghorn antelope (pronghorn) rely on this vast range to complete their seasonal migrations, but development increasingly threatens this natural cycle. Moreover, the GYE’s existing wildlife management framework fails to resolve the tension between wildlife and growth, leaving both wildlife and local communities vulnerable. After reviewing the scope of the GYE’s ecological challenges, this Note proposes a new solution: a policy establishing affirmative easements across designated migration corridors in the GYE and …

Assessing The Efficacy Of A Novel Galactooligosaccharide To Promote Fish Health And Robustness, Lucy May Sykes

School of Biological and Marine Sciences Theses

Aquaculture has been steadily increasing global production; however, there remains a progressively greater demand for sustainable sources of protein, whilst the prevalence of disease represents a major constraint to industry growth. Feed additives are gaining traction as useful tools to help combat disease and promote health, and previous research has documented benefits to the mucosal surfaces and microbial communities within a range of teleost species. Three experimental in vivo feeding trials were undertaken using a range of in-depth analyses, such as growth performance, haematology, immunology, intestinal histology, intestinal gene expression and intestinal bacterial 16S rRNA sequence libraries. Studies were conducted …

The Role Of Circadian Entrainment In Rice Blast Disease, Ciaran Griffin

School of Biological and Marine Sciences Theses

A circadian clock is present in some capacity in almost all forms of life, and is useful for a wide array of traits, but crucially allows organisms to predict future conditions and adapt their behaviour to synchronise with, and thrive under, their dynamic environment. Accordingly, plant environmental stress responses are gated in a circadian manner, including that for pathogenic defence and immunity. Comparatively less work has been carried out on the plant pathogens, but there are increasing reports of pathogens capable of rhythmically altering their behaviour and virulence-related traits. Magnaporthe oryzae, the fungal pathogen responsible for the destruction of enough …

Microplastic Ingestion In Invertebrates Within Rockpool Communities, Abigail Outred

School of Biological and Marine Sciences Theses

Microplastics (<5 mm) are abundant across the world in the marine environment and so it is vital that we gain further understanding of their fate and their possible impacts on marine life. Due to their size, microplastics can interact with small marine organisms which are part of the lower trophic levels and the main interaction with these plastics is ingestion. Chemical characteristics and changes to the plastic properties, due to, for example, adsorbed chemicals and colonisation of biofilms, may affect how readily plastics are ingested. Research into the interactions of a range of organisms with microplastics enables for a better understanding of how they could be taken in, impact the organism as well as predict potential trophic transfer. This in turn could aid in predicting bigger impacts in the marine environment and on humans themselves. Rockpools are a key environment and nursery for many important marine and intertidal species, particularly those that we rely on commercially, such as crab species. This study exposed three key rockpool species of three feeding types - Beadlet anemone (Actinia equina), common prawn (Palaemon serratus), Thick top shell (Phorcus lineatus) to nylon fibres within ex-situ mesocosms. These species represent three feeding types found in a rockpool community – Suspension feeding, Filter feeding of the whole water column and deposit feeding. The organisms were exposed to either biofouled or non-biofouled, blue, black, red, or white in colour and 0.5 mm or 2 mm microfibres for six hours. This was undertaken when individuals were individually housed as single species, as well as a mixed community with a representative of all three species. Once biofouling was complete, dissection to observe the digestive tract was undertaken and then an alkaline digest was completed to obtain evidence of retention other than in the digestive tract. Beadlet anemones ingested the most microfibres and thick top shell the least. This study shows that overall, biofouled fibres are significantly more likely to be ingested than 6 that of non-biofouled (H(1)= 16.780 , p<0.001). Some ingestion and interaction colour patterns were found – black in anemones and shrimp ((H(1)= 6.224 , p=0.013 and (H(1)= 6.008 , p=0.014) and black (H(1)= 12.270 , p=0.007) and white in shrimp (H(1)= 8.143 , p=0.043). This could possibly be to do with the dye chemicals on the plastics rather than visual cues. The 0.5mm fibres were ingested and retained more than 2mm (H(1)= 20.924 , p<0.001). Thick top shells were the only organism with a difference between housing with more microfibres ingested/retained when housed individually than when housed in a mixed community. This study provides further evidence of the potential ingestion and retention of microplastics in a rockpool setting and therefore highlights the potential impact on these organisms and predator species. This may likely cause negative impacts within that rockpool as well as present a route for microfibres to expose other intertidal organisms to microfibres, particularly as the three study organisms are prey animals to many other species.

Diversity, Duplication, And Genomic Organization Of Homeobox Genes In Lepidoptera, Peter O. Mulhair, Liam Crowley, Douglas H. Boyes, Amber Harper, Ot Lewis, Pwh Holland

More Faculty of Science and Engineering Research

Homeobox genes encode transcription factors with essential roles in patterning and cell fate in developing animal embryos. Many homeobox genes, including Hox and NK genes, are arranged in gene clusters, a feature likely related to transcriptional control. Sparse taxon sampling and fragmentary genome assemblies mean that little is known about the dynamics of homeobox gene evolution across Lepidoptera or about how changes in homeobox gene number and organization relate to diversity in this large order of insects. Here we analyze an extensive data set of high-quality genomes to characterize the number and organization of all homeobox genes in 123 species …

The Effects Of Husbandry On Reproductive Output And Behaviour In Captive Saddle-Billed Storks (Ephippiorhynchus Senegalensis), Arlin Douglas Slater

School of Biological and Marine Sciences Theses

Zoos are required to understand specific husbandry requirements of animals in captivity, and there have been significant developments in husbandry research for captive breeding programmes. However, there is no ‘one size fits all’ and in some species, complications have led to low success and failure in breeding. Saddle-billed stork are notoriously difficult to breed in captivity, with low productivity reported in AZA and EAZA populations. Reproductive output, breeding behaviour and interspecific behaviour were measured in saddle-billed storks within European and American zoological institutions using a questionnaire. The effects of birth origin, enclosure provision, nesting provision and wing condition on reproductive …

Phenomics: An Integrative Approach To Comparative Developmental Physiology, James Mccoy

School of Biological and Marine Sciences Theses

Phenomics, the high-throughput acquisition of phenotypic data at the scale of the whole organism, has led to considerable advancements in plant biology and medicine, yet applications within animal environmental physiology and evolutionary biology are rare. The main aim of this thesis is to understand what phenomics can contribute to our understanding of Comparative Developmental Physiology (CDP), in terms of how environmental and evolutionary change affects the development of physiological function in aquatic embryos. Additionally, I aim to understand the consequences of changes in high-dimensional phenotyping methods used throughout the thesis within the context of embryonic life history. To achieve this, …

The Influence Of Migratory Distance On Atlantic Salmon Salmo Salar Population Responses To Interannual Variation In Sea Surface Temperature., Joshua Cook

School of Biological and Marine Sciences Theses

As a species, the Atlantic salmon Salmo salar is undergoing a range wide population decline. In the last 40 years alone, wild stocks have specifically declined due to continuing human pressures and global climate change. During the marine life stages, North Atlantic Sea surface temperatures (SST) have specifically impacted stocks, inducing range wide declines in abundance and morphometrics as temperature rises. Recent studies have indicated that SST’s effects on S. salar are more severe at the southernmost ranges, however we lack an explanation for why this may be the case. Acknowledging this trend, we hypothesise that while declines in returning …

Assessing The Effect Of Temperate Mpas On Elasmobranch Communities, Chloe Renn

School of Biological and Marine Sciences Theses

Global chondrichthyan (sharks, skates, rays and chimaeras) populations are experiencing alarming declines, driven by intense targeted and incidental extraction. Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) represent one potential solution, which has gained traction in recent years. When implemented effectively, MPAs demonstrate potential to rebuild populations and enable ecosystem recovery. However, their value as an elasmobranch conservation tool remains contested, particularly in temperate waters such as the UK. One essential component of MPA efficacy is the implementation of robust ecological monitoring regimes that allow species trajectories to be characterised and responded to, in real-time. However, several challenges, inherent to both elasmobranchs and temperate …

Personality And Parental Care In The Corkwing Wrasse (Symphodus Melops), Benjamin Ellis

School of Biological and Marine Sciences Theses

Parental care in many species is a repeatable aspect of the behavioural phenotype, in some cases covarying with other behavioural traits within wider behavioural syndromes. It is well understood that in several freshwater fishes, recreational and commercial fisheries often (directly or indirectly) impact traits concerning parental care adversely, in some cases through selection on covarying behavioural traits. In contrast, studies on commercially fished marine species that exhibit parental care are scarce. The corkwing wrasse (Symphodus melops) is a marine fish with complex reproductive behaviour, with parental males exhibiting nest building and parental care behaviours. This species is also subject to …

Metabolism, Swimming Performance, And A Behavioural Syndrome In Schoolmaster Snapper (Lutjanus Apodus), Peter Malorey

School of Biological and Marine Sciences Theses

Commercial overexploitation and climate change can alter the physiology and behaviour of affected marine organisms, although depending on the environment, species, and severity, intraspecific phenotypic response to such changes can vary greatly. Under the Pace-Of-Life Syndrome (POLS) hypothesis, behaviour, physiology, and life history traits can be linked and thus affected both directly and indirectly by selection targeting any aspect of behavioural physiology. However, such links are often understudied in tropical marine fish, with work needed to better understand the impacts of fisheries and climate change on fish stocks. Moreover, tropical regions have greater reliance on fisheries, thus investigations should focus …

Towards The Validation Of Novel Cognitive And Physiological Indicators Of Affective State In Horses (Equus Caballus), Sarah Kappel

School of Biological and Marine Sciences Theses

Assessing animal emotions reliably is crucial for making accurate decisions about animal welfare, but subjective affective (emotional) states are inaccessible for direct measurement. We know that negative affect modulates attention in humans and some animals. The overarching aim of this thesis is to investigate if the preferential attention allocation towards certain information (i.e. attention bias, AB) could be a potential proxy measure of affective valence in horses. First, I provide an overview of the theoretical background to attention and AB by reviewing the literature on AB in humans and animals (Chapter 2). I examine which methodological aspects need consideration when …

Does Connectivity With Nature Alter Consumer Behaviour? Linking Ocean Connectedness And Consumer Views On Single-Use Packaging, Sohvi Katariina Nuojua

School of Biological and Marine Sciences Theses

Single-use packaging items constitute a large proportion of the plastic litter found in the marine environment. Consumer behaviour is a key contributor to the accumulation of this pollution in the environment. This thesis outlines correlational and experimental research on consumer responses to environmentally relevant qualities of single-use packaging. Furthermore, it considers a novel concept of ocean connectedness as a psychological moderator of consumer response. Studies 1 and 2 investigated consumer responses to recyclability of packaging as well as its raw material (plastic, glass, carton and aluminium) in undergraduate students and in a broader UK public sample. Ocean connectedness was assessed …

Improvements In The Phylogeny Of Epilobium And Chamaenerion Inferred From Nrdna And Cpdna Data Focusing On Türkiye, Suzan Kundakçi, Serdar Makbul, Mutlu Gültepe, Murat Erdem Güzel, Seda Okur, Kami̇l Coşkunçelebi̇

Turkish Journal of Botany

Epilobium and Chamaenerion included 165 and 8 species over the world, respectively. The members of the genera are distributed particularly in moist habitats from subpolar to tropical regions.This paper aims to provide improvements in the phylogeny of the genera Epilobium and Chamaenerion using Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS) of nuclear DNA and matK gene sequence data evaluation with maximum parsimony, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian inference criterations. A total of 188 individual accessions belonging to 28 taxa were newly generated and 110 sequences imported from GenBank (NCBI) were analysed. The nrDNA and plastid DNA gene trees supported to treat Epilobium and Chamaenerion …

Protective Potential Of Mokko Lactone From Cheilocostus Speciosus (J. Koenig) C.D.Specht (Costaceae) Rhizomes Against Fulminant Hepatic Failure, Ahmed Altyar, Ikhlas Sindi, Dina El-Agamy, Wael Elsaed, Ahmed Shehata, Hossam Abdallah, Gamal Mohamed, Abdelsattar Omar, Sabrin Ibrahim

Turkish Journal of Botany

Cheilocostus speciosus (Syn: Costus speciosus) (Crepe or spiral ginger) is one of the species of the family Costaceae that is widely used in various traditional medicines for treating various ailments. Mokko lactone (ML) belongs to the guaianolide family of sesquiterpenes, which has been separated from C. speciosus. It showed noticeable antiinflammation and antioxidative capacities. The current study explored the ML hepatoprotective potential against FHF (fulminant hepatic failure) in mice. FHF was successfully established using intraperitoneal injection of ?-galactosamine (?-GalN, 700 mg/kg)/lipopolysaccharide (LPS, 10 µg/kg) in male Swiss-albino mice. The mice were pretreated with ML (20 or 40 mg/kg, orally) daily …

Moose (Alces Alces) Herbivory Is The Main Driver Of Spatial And Temporal Variation In The Nitrogen And Carbon Content Of Balsam Fir Foliage, Jasmine Fairbanks Terry-Shindelman

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

To adequately manage forested ecosystems in the face of climate change, there is an urgent need to study how tree growth and biochemistry vary in response to changes in weather and levels of herbivory across different landscape types. However, few studies have assessed how both free-ranging herbivore populations and weather influence the foliar chemistry of boreal tree species over relatively large temporal and spatial scales. In this study, I assessed the extent to which the nitrogen (N) content and the carbon-to- nitrogen (C/N) ratio in the foliage of Balsam fir (Abies balsamea), a key boreal forest species, was …

Treating Contaminated Water: Predicting Reactivities Of Aqueous Organic Contaminants With Hydrated Electrons, And Development Of A Biogarden To Manage Greywater Discharge In Monteverde, Costa Rica, Rose C. Daily

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Advanced reduction processes (ARPs) that generate highly reactive solvated electrons (e^-_aq) are a promising method for the destruction of conventional and emerging aqueous organic contaminants. While there is a large database of contaminant reactivity with e^-_aq in the literature, there is little information on the detailed elementary mechanisms for reduction of multifunctional group compounds and the impact of those functional groups on reactivity. As it is difficult to determine specific mechanisms through experiments and time consuming to measure reactivity, the development of computational approaches to elucidate mechanisms and predict reactivity is becoming increasingly important. In …

Machine Learning And Deep Learning Approaches For Gene Regulatory Network Inference In Plant Species, Sai Teja Mummadi

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The construction of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) is vital for understanding the regulation of metabolic pathways, biological processes, and complex traits during plant growth and responses to environmental cues and stresses. The increasing availability of public databases has facilitated the development of numerous methods for inferring gene regulatory relationships between transcription factors and their targets. However, there is limited research on supervised learning techniques that utilize available regulatory relationships of plant species in public databases.

This study investigates the potential of machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and hybrid approaches for constructing GRNs in plant species, specifically Arabidopsis thaliana, …

White-Tailed Deer In A Winter-Wonderland: Long-Term Deer Yard Use And Methodological Considerations For Ungulate Fecal Dna Metabarcoding, Melanie A. Ottino

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Northern white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) mitigate the increased energetic costs of severe winter conditions through obligate migration to densely congregated areas with abundant conifer cover, a behavior referred to as yarding. “Deer yards” in the Western Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan are principally located within the reduced snowpack and increased ambient temperature microclimates of densely canopied eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) stands, but specific drivers of long-term site fidelity and utilization are largely uncharacterized. As an important game species of high economic and cultural value and a keystone herbivore with critical impact of plant community composition and structure, identifying winter yarding …

Nanomaterials For Cardiovascular Engineering, Roya Bagheri

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Cardiovascular diseases and disorders (i.e., those related to heart and blood vessels) are the main reasons for mortality worldwide. Nanomaterials, with their unique morphologies and properties, have a great potential for advancing cardiovascular engineering to treat diseases and disorders. In this dissertation, several cardiovascular applications of conductive nanomaterials were investigated. First, a conductive nanomaterial was explored to fabricate biohybrid nanomaterial-cardiomyocyte (CM – heart muscle cell) systems. Using Carbon Nanotube (CNT) forest as a 3D porous and conductive scaffold was investigated. The influence of the CNT forest on the viability, attachment, and spreading of CMs and their genetic information was …

Benchmarking Model Predictive Control And Reinforcement Learning For Legged Robot Locomotion, Shivayogi Akki

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This research delves into the realm of quadrupedal robotics, focusing on the comparative analysis of Model Predictive Control (MPC) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) as predominant control strategies. Through the comprehensive dataset compiled and the insights derived from this analysis, this research aims to serve as a valuable resource for the legged robotics community, guiding researchers and practitioners in the selection and implementation of control strategies. The ultimate goal is to contribute to the advancement of legged robot capabilities and facilitate their successful deployment in real-world applications.

In this study, we employ the Unitree Go1 quadrupedal robot as a testbed, subjecting …