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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Role Of Machine Learning And Network Analyses In Understanding Microbial Composition In An Experimental Prairie, Ali Eastman Oku
The Role Of Machine Learning And Network Analyses In Understanding Microbial Composition In An Experimental Prairie, Ali Eastman Oku
Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations
Machine learning and network analyses are powerful modern tools can process and map out connections between large amount of ecological data from complex environmental communities. Random forests, an ensemble machine learning algorithm, are particularly powerful as they can capture complex patterns in data while remaining easily interpretable. These tools are specifically useful in experimental settings where different types of data are collected. The aim of this study was to demonstrate the utility of machine learning models and network analyses at analyzing diverse ecological data from dynamic plant-soil microbial communities in a prairie ecosystem. Our experimental system is an experimental prairie …
Machine Learning For Species Habitat Analysis, Abigail Lavallin
Machine Learning For Species Habitat Analysis, Abigail Lavallin
USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Management and conservation initiatives will always be controlled by finite resources, whether financialor temporal. Understanding a species’ spatial ecology, and how its requirements vary across habitats and locations is key to a successful species management plan. During recent decades, it has been noted how many species populations have declined, despite conservation practices working to increase their numbers. The most prevalent impacts affecting fauna populations have come from anthropogenic change in the form of habitat loss and destruction, along with fragmentation, and global climate change. There is a clear need for management practices to now operate on an entire landscape instead …
Incorporating Demographic Structure And Variable Interaction Types Into Community Assembly Models, Akhil Reddy Alasandagutti, Nayan Chawla
Incorporating Demographic Structure And Variable Interaction Types Into Community Assembly Models, Akhil Reddy Alasandagutti, Nayan Chawla
Honors Theses
Theoretical studies of ecological food webs have allowed ecologists to remove the constraints of specific location and timescales from their study of ecological communities; food webs are generally complex and thus empirical study is difficult. Further, this theoretical approach allows ecologists to compare ecological processes and outcomes across any possible food web structures. However, these simulated communities are only as useful as the model from which they were constructed. Modifying existing considerations in these models, and generating new ones, are the jobs of theoretical ecologists that seek to achieve the shared goal of a majority of simulations: representation of real …
A Memento Of Complexity: The Rhetorics Of Memory, Ambience, And Emergence, Glen Southergill
A Memento Of Complexity: The Rhetorics Of Memory, Ambience, And Emergence, Glen Southergill
All Dissertations
Drawing from complexity theory, this dissertation develops a schema of rhetorical memory that exhibits extended characteristics. Scholars traditionally conceptualize memory, the fourth canon in classical rhetoric, as place (loci) or image (phantasm). However, memory rhetoric resists the traditional loci-phantasm framework and instead emerges from enmeshments of interiority, collectivity, and technology. Emergence considers the dynamics of fundamental parts that generate complex systems and offers a methodological lens to theorizing memory. The resulting construct informs everyday life, which includes interfacing with pervasive computing or sensing familiarity. Further, congruently with a neurological turn that contradicts simplification, this dissertation resituates rhetorical memory as generative …
Development And Testing Of An Unmanned Aircraft System For Environmental Science, Jerald James Brady
Development And Testing Of An Unmanned Aircraft System For Environmental Science, Jerald James Brady
Open Access Theses & Dissertations
For some environmental science applications, Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) are increasingly recognized for their capacity to collect remotely sensed data in a safer, more efficient and effective manner than is permitted with manned aircraft and satellite remote sensing platforms. To date, however, technological, human, and other challenges have constrained adoption of UASs in the environmental sciences. This study developed and tested a new UAS for an archetypical environmental science research group (stakeholder) composed of non-UAS experts. Specifically, this thesis: 1) Assessed the research and operational needs of the stakeholder to determine the optimum UAS platform; 2) Developed an Unmanned Aerial …