Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Effects Of Anthropogenic Noise On The Provisioning Behavior Of Western Bluebirds And Artificial Light At Night On Nestling Development, Kerstin H. Ozkan
Effects Of Anthropogenic Noise On The Provisioning Behavior Of Western Bluebirds And Artificial Light At Night On Nestling Development, Kerstin H. Ozkan
Master's Theses
Sensory environments are rapidly changing due to increased human activity in urban and non-urban areas alike. For instance, background sounds can interfere with parent-offspring communication and mask cues reflective of predation risk, resulting in elevated vigilance at the cost of provisioning. In chapter 1, we studied nestling provisioning behavior among Western Bluebirds (Sialia mexicana) in response to short-term (1 hr) and long-term (continuous exposure throughout nesting period) noise exposure. Provisioning rates were lower at nests exposed to short-term experimental traffic noise compared to exposure to ambient background sounds. Trial order strongly influenced provisioning behavior, with the decline in …
Automated Tree Mortality Detection Using Ubiquitously Available Public Data, Michael T. Huggins
Automated Tree Mortality Detection Using Ubiquitously Available Public Data, Michael T. Huggins
Master's Theses
Understanding the dynamic interplay between fire severity, topography, and tree mortality, is crucial for predicting future forest dynamics and enhancing resilience against climate change-induced wildfire regimes. This thesis develops a multi-sensor approach for automated estimation of tree mortality, then applies it to examine trends in tree mortality over a six-year period across a fire affected study site in the Trinity River basin in Northern California. The Random Forest model uses publicly available USGS 3D Elevation Program Lidar (3DEP) and NAIP imagery as inputs and is likely to be easily adaptable to other landscapes. The model had a Receiver Operating Characteristic …
Coralai: Emergent Ecosystems Of Neural Cellular Automata, Aidan A. Barbieux, Aidan A. Barbieux
Coralai: Emergent Ecosystems Of Neural Cellular Automata, Aidan A. Barbieux, Aidan A. Barbieux
Master's Theses
Artificial intelligence has traditionally been approached through centralized architectures and optimization of specific metrics on large datasets. However, the frontiers of fields spanning cognitive science, biology, physics, and computer science suggest that intelligence is better understood as a multi-scale, decentralized, emergent phenomenon. As such, scaling up approaches that mirror the natural world may be one of the next big advances in AI. This thesis presents Coralai, a framework for efficiently simulating the emergence of diverse artificial life ecosystems integrated with modular physics. The key innovations of Coralai include: 1) Hosting diverse Neural Cellular Automata organisms in the same simulation that …