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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

The Human Natural Resource Endowment Of Limestone For Cement Manufacturing, Vanya Marie North Dec 2022

The Human Natural Resource Endowment Of Limestone For Cement Manufacturing, Vanya Marie North

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the total per-capita allocation of limestone globally. Termed the Human Natural Resource Endowment (HNRE), it is calculated by subtracting the cumulative annual production from the ultimately recoverable reserve (URR) of limestone and dividing the difference by global population. HNRE represents a unique way of visualizing resource depletion by asking how much of a given resource can be allocated to each person on earth, and how long that allocation can last given multiple population and usage scenarios. The average American, born in 2021, will use approximately 23,930 kgs of cement in their lifetime, with similar demands globally. Demand …


Multivariate Fairness For Paper Selection, Reem Alsaffar Dec 2022

Multivariate Fairness For Paper Selection, Reem Alsaffar

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Peer review is the process by which publishers select the best publications for inclusion in a journal or a conference. Bias in the peer review process can impact which papers are selected for inclusion in conferences and journals. Although often implicit, race, gender and other demographics can prevent members of underrepresented groups from presenting at major conferences. To try to avoid bias, many conferences use a double-blind review process to increase fairness during reviewing. However, recent studies argue that the bias has not been removed completely. Our research focuses on developing fair algorithms that correct for these biases and select …


Flood Hazard And Risk Analyses In The Republic Of Panama: A Case Study From The Juan Diaz River Watershed In Panama City, Virgilio De Jesus Quintero Dec 2022

Flood Hazard And Risk Analyses In The Republic Of Panama: A Case Study From The Juan Diaz River Watershed In Panama City, Virgilio De Jesus Quintero

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Flooding is the natural hazard with most occurrences in Panama. Its frequency and magnitude have increased over the years. This dissertation analyzes Panama’s flood activity in order to better understand flood hazards, the current evolution of Panamanian perceptions of flood risk, and the incorporation of indigenous knowledge used to mitigate flood hazards. The first chapter developed a baseline of past and current flood inventory in Panama, which required the use of flood historical data, thematic cartography, and Geographic Information Science (GIS). This chapter shows Panama has experienced floods in varying degrees. Through the spatial and temporal distribution of floods from …


Orbital Mapping Of Seasonal And Yearly Changes In Co2 And Water Ice On The Southern Polar Cap Of Mars, Victoria Michell Ann Karnes Dec 2022

Orbital Mapping Of Seasonal And Yearly Changes In Co2 And Water Ice On The Southern Polar Cap Of Mars, Victoria Michell Ann Karnes

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research exhibits a new foundation for the rates of change in CO2 and water ice on the southern polar cap of Mars, where the annual precipitation cycles are known to fluctuate seasonally between the north and south pole, based on observations from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer (CRISM). The conventional belief is that both CO2 ice and water ice on the southern polar cap condenses and evaporates over the course of a Martian year (MY), condensing during the Martian spring and summer and evaporating during the Martian fall and winter. With this theory in mind, CO2 and water ice …


Delineating Field Variation Using Apparent Electrical Conductivity In An Ozark Highlands Agroforestry System, Shane Reid Ylagan Dec 2022

Delineating Field Variation Using Apparent Electrical Conductivity In An Ozark Highlands Agroforestry System, Shane Reid Ylagan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Little to no work has been conducted assessing field variability using repeated electromagnetic induction (EMI) apparent electrical conductivity (ECa) surveys in agroforestry (AF) systems within regions similar to the Ozark Highlands. The objectives of this thesis were to identify i) spatiotemporal ECa variability; ii) ECa-derived soil management zones (SMZs); iii) correlations among EMI-ECa and in-situ, sentential-site soil properties; iv) whether fewer, EMI-ECa surveys could be conducted to capture similar ECa variance as mid-monthly EMI-ECa surveys; v) correlations between ECa and forage yield, tree growth, and terrain attributes based on plant (forage and tree) species, and fertility treatments, and ECa-derived SMZs, …


Movie Reviews Sentiment Analysis Using Bert, Gibson Nkhata Dec 2022

Movie Reviews Sentiment Analysis Using Bert, Gibson Nkhata

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sentiment analysis (SA) or opinion mining is analysis of emotions and opinions from texts. It is one of the active research areas in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Various approaches have been deployed in the literature to address the problem. These techniques devise complex and sophisticated frameworks in order to attain optimal accuracy with their focus on polarity classification or binary classification. In this paper, we aim to fine-tune BERT in a simple but robust approach for movie reviews sentiment analysis to provide better accuracy than state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. We start by conducting sentiment classification for every review, followed by computing …


Changes Of Winter Severity In Arkansas During 1901-2100, Christian Garcia Aug 2022

Changes Of Winter Severity In Arkansas During 1901-2100, Christian Garcia

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this study was to quantify the winter severity in a way that was reproduceable and easy to understand. The Accumulated Winter Severity Seasonal Index (AWSSI) was chosen for this reason and was used to quantify winter severity by season across the state of Arkansas. The variables that go into the AWSSI calculation are maximum daily temperature, minimum daily temperature, daily snowfall, and daily snow depth. When the snowfall and snow depth were missing, they can be estimated using daily temperature and precipitation. Then the estimated snowfall and snow depth can be subsequently used to quantify the winter …


Environmental Communication: Changing The Attitude-Behavioral Gap In Science Communication Utilizing Strategic Messaging, Carrie Helgeson Nelms Aug 2022

Environmental Communication: Changing The Attitude-Behavioral Gap In Science Communication Utilizing Strategic Messaging, Carrie Helgeson Nelms

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

National Polls in the United States consistently find the public’s beliefs and attitudes about climate change and other environmental issues significantly diverge from those held by the science community. A communication gap between the findings on the causes and effects of environmental issues and the public’s inability to interpret or refuse to accept these findings are possible causes of this divergence. This communication gap constitutes a threat to society because of inaction to environmental problems and points to needed changes in scientific messaging that better informs and motivates behavioral change. The present research employed a strategic message design to affect …


The Mangrove Walks: An Econometric Analysis Of Climate Migration Drivers From Coastal Bangladesh And Their Geopolitical Impacts, Kendall Scott Byers Aug 2022

The Mangrove Walks: An Econometric Analysis Of Climate Migration Drivers From Coastal Bangladesh And Their Geopolitical Impacts, Kendall Scott Byers

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Coastal Bangladesh is subject to extreme climate change forces upon poor, rural populations. The aim of this thesis is to determine the strength of environmental drivers of migration and discern whether planned or catastrophic migration predominates in the polder areas of Bangladesh. I use regression analysis on a 1,025 household, 2016 IRRI/IWMI analysis of Polder 28/1, 28/2, and 30 within Satkhira district to determine factor correlations with migration. Progressive salinization is the strongest environmental driver, while flooding decreases migration through trapping household capital investment. Religion has the greatest correlation with migration. Hindus migrate less frequently, but do so with more …


Conservation Of Open-Canopy-Associated Wildlife: Multi-Scale Management Impacts On Imperiled Herpetofauna, Ethan Joseph Royal Aug 2022

Conservation Of Open-Canopy-Associated Wildlife: Multi-Scale Management Impacts On Imperiled Herpetofauna, Ethan Joseph Royal

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The loss of open-canopy ecosystems throughout North America has precipitated declines in reptile and amphibian species associated with these habitat types. Current efforts to restore open-canopy ecosystems are underway in many areas, but the local distributions of, habitat characteristics required by and the effects of management actions on many herpetofauna species are poorly understood or entirely unknown. Research examining relationships among herpetofauna and their environments is often complicated by the extremely low detectability seen in many studies. We used landscape-scale, assemblage-level surveys to investigate the occupancy patterns and habitat associations of open-canopy-associated herpetofauna in two regions, as well as gain …


Deep Learning Applications In Industrial And Systems Engineering, Winthrop Harvey Aug 2022

Deep Learning Applications In Industrial And Systems Engineering, Winthrop Harvey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Deep learning - the use of large neural networks to perform machine learning - has transformed the world. As the capabilities of deep models continue to grow, deep learning is becoming an increasingly valuable and practical tool for industrial engineering. With its wide applicability, deep learning can be turned to many industrial engineering tasks, including optimization, heuristic search, and functional approximation. In this dissertation, the major concepts and paradigms of deep learning are reviewed, and three industrial engineering projects applying these methods are described. The first applies a deep convolutional network to the task of absolute aerial geolocalization - the …


Reconstructing Bison And Mammoth Migration During The Late Pleistocene And Early Holocene Of Central Texas Using Strontium Isotopes, Joshua John Porter May 2022

Reconstructing Bison And Mammoth Migration During The Late Pleistocene And Early Holocene Of Central Texas Using Strontium Isotopes, Joshua John Porter

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

During the Late Pleistocene (LP; past 130,000 years), over two-thirds of large mammal (>45kg) species went extinct globally. While the role of humans is hotly debated, the effect of these extinctions is growing clearer; the extinctions resulted in widespread and lasting faunal community reorganization. However, the impact of these extinctions on dietary and migratory behavior within faunal communities is unknown. Our study examines the impact of the megafaunal extinctions on the dietary and migratory behavior of surviving Bison individuals in Texas using carbon, oxygen, and strontium isotopes. Strontium isotopes are incorporated into mammalian enamel during their tooth development and …


Multi-Trophic Biodiversity Increases With Increasing Structural Complexity Of Forest Canopy, Ayanna St. Rose May 2022

Multi-Trophic Biodiversity Increases With Increasing Structural Complexity Of Forest Canopy, Ayanna St. Rose

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Understanding the effects of forest canopy structural complexity on multi-trophic diversity is critical for conserving biodiversity and managing land sustainably. But multi-trophic diversity is often ignored when making decisions about land management due to lack of cost- and time-effective methods to evaluate it. Here, we explored a new method based on widely available remote sensing data to quantify canopy structural complexity and its relationships with multi-trophic biodiversity at landscape scale using 32 forested sites of the National Ecological Observatory Network. We investigated the influence of vertical and horizontal structural complexity of forest canopy on multi-trophic (primary producers, herbivores (beetles), omnivores …