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From Genes To Streams: Mitochondrial Approaches To Population Monitoring Of The Santa Ana Sucker Catostomus Santaanae, Mariana Antonio Aug 2026

From Genes To Streams: Mitochondrial Approaches To Population Monitoring Of The Santa Ana Sucker Catostomus Santaanae, Mariana Antonio

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This study was developed to use aquatic environmental DNA (eDNA) as a tool to detect the presence of the Santa Ana sucker (Catostomus santaanae), a federally threatened fish species, across the Santa Ana River in Southern California. Environmental DNA is any genetic material that an organism sheds into the environment. We can get an idea of what aquatic species are present when sampling water at a given site. We sequenced the complete mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) of the Santa Ana sucker and designed custom DNA primers to improve eDNA detection accuracy. These primers were selected based on high genetic …


Non-Destructive Automated Classification Of Human And Large Mammal Long Bone Fragments: A Deep Learning Approach Using Micro-Ct Histomorphology And Grad-Cam Interpretation, Kathleen Marie Kelley May 2026

Non-Destructive Automated Classification Of Human And Large Mammal Long Bone Fragments: A Deep Learning Approach Using Micro-Ct Histomorphology And Grad-Cam Interpretation, Kathleen Marie Kelley

Department of Anthropology: Theses and Student Research

This study explores the development and validation of an automated, deep learning system designed to differentiate human from large mammal long bone fragments using micro-CT imagery. A comprehensive dataset of cross-sectional µCT images was assembled from human and animal skeletal material processed at the DPAA, Nebraska. A convolutional neural network (CNN) based on a ResNet-18 architecture, utilizing transfer learning from ImageNet weights, was trained to classify µCT images as human or animal. The model achieved a mean classification accuracy of 89.85% (± 8.27%) across five sample-level cross-validation folds, with a sensitivity of 96.21% and a 95% bootstrap confidence interval of …