Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Comparison Of Five Statistical Methods For Predicting Stream Temperature Across Stream Networks, Maike F. Holthuijzen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The health of freshwater aquatic systems, particularly stream networks, is mainly influenced by water temperature, which controls biological processes and influences species distributions and aquatic biodiversity. Thermal regimes of rivers are likely to change in the future, due to climate change and other anthropogenic impacts, and our ability to predict stream temperatures will be critical in understanding distribution shifts of aquatic biota. Spatial statistical network models take into account spatial relationships but have drawbacks, including high computation times and data pre-processing requirements. Machine learning techniques and generalized additive models (GAM) are promising alternatives to the SSN model. Two machine learning …

Analysis Of The Hite Fault Group, Southeast Utah: Insights Into Fluid Flow Properties In A Reservoir Analog, Daniel J. Curtis

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the subsurface faults can act as both barriers and conduits for fluids or gases such as CO₂, hydrocarbons, or water. It is often thought that faults in porous rocks such as sandstone are barriers to fluid flow. In this study we show that this is not always the case. In sandstones like the Cedar Mesa Sandstone it is very important to understand the relationships between this history of fault slip and fluid flow. Better understanding of how fluids migrate through faults and the damaged areas surrounding these faults has strong significance to the oil and gas industry. …

Quantifying Riverbed Sediment Using Recreational-Grade Side Scan Sonar, Daniel Hamill

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Colorado River in Glen, Marble, and Grand Canyons is subject to a complex regulatory framework, including the Colorado River Compact, the Endangered Species Act, and the Grand Canyon Protection Act of 1992. Physical, biological, and cultural resources are extensively monitored by the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program (GCDAMP) to assess the effect of Glen Canyon Dam (GCD) operations on the downstream environment. The GCDAMP consists of a diverse group of stakeholders who identify priority resources and agree upon water releases at GCD. Large expenditures of money have been devoted to monitoring physical and biological resources in Grand Canyon. …

Estimating Accuracy Of Personal Identifiable Information In Integrated Data Systems, Amani "Mohammad Jum'h" Amin Shatnawi

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Both government agencies and private companies rely on the collection of personal data on an ever-increasing scale. Out of necessity, person data include Personal Identifiable Information (PII), which is information that could potentially identify a specific individual. Many of these data would be integrated, so data analyst, policy makers or corporate officers can use it to make decisions or get a conclusion. Integrating data in a heterogeneous database environment create a need to estimate the accuracy of that data; without a valid assessment of accuracy there is a risk of coming with incorrect conclusions or making bad decision based on …

Database Auto Awesome: Enhancing Database-Centric Web Applications Through Informed Code Generation, Jonathan Adams

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Database Auto Awesome is an approach to enhancing web applications comprised of forms used to interact with stored information. It was inspired by Google's Auto Awesome tool, which provides automatic enhancements for photos. Database Auto Awesome aims to automatically or semi-automatically provide improvements to an application by expanding the functionality of the application and improving the existing code.

This thesis describes a tool that gathers information from the application and provides details on how the parts of the application work together. This information provides the details necessary to generate new portions of an application.

These enhancements are directed by the …

Geometric Facility Location Problems On Uncertain Data, Jingru Zhang

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In this dissertation, we study several facility location problems on uncertain data. We mainly consider the k-center problem and many of its variations. These are classical problems in computer science and operations research. These problems on deterministic data have been studied extensively in the literature. We consider them on uncertain data because data in the real world is often associated with uncertainty due to measurement inaccuracy, sampling discrepancy, outdated data sources, resource limitation, etc. Although we focus on the theoretical study, the algorithms developed in this dissertation may find applications in other areas such as data clustering, wireless sensor …

Great Basin Bristlecone Pine Resistance To Mountain Pine Beetle: An Evaluation Of Dendroctonus Ponderosae Host Selection Behavior And Reproductive Success In Pinus Longaeva, Erika L. Eidson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) is a native bark beetle that attacks and kills most species of pines (Pinus) throughout its range in western North America. Due to the strong relationship between thermal conditions and mountain pine beetle population success, climate change-induced changes in mountain pine beetle outbreaks are a major concern for land managers. Over the past several decades, warmer than average temperatures allowed mountain pine beetle populations to reach epidemic levels across much of the western U.S. and Canada, including high elevations where outbreaks were previously limited by cool temperatures. Many high-elevation pine …

(Uranium-Thorium)/Helium Thermochronologic Constraints On Secondary Iron-Oxide Mineralization In Southwestern New Mexico, Michael Channer

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Southwestern New Mexico experienced protracted volcanism from ~60 Ma to 500 ka and associated epithermal mineralization. We apply hematite (U-Th)/He (hematite He) thermochronology to fracture-hosted hematite in the Lordsburg Mining District to resolve the timing of mineralization related to hydrothermal fluid circulation. We interpret hematite He dates with integrated field and structural observations, scanning electron microscopy to characterize hematite texture and grain size distribution, and zircon U-Pb and zircon (U-Th)/He (zircon He) chronology to constrain the timing of host rock formation and the ambient low-temperature thermal history, respectively. Undeformed hematite fills fractures cut a brecciated rhyolite and preserve open voids. …

An Exploratory Study Of Fifth-Grade Students’ Reasoning About The Relationship Between Fractions And Decimals When Using Number Line-Based Virtual Manipulatives, Scott Smith

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Understanding the relationship between fractions and decimals is an important step in developing an overall understanding of rational numbers. Research has demonstrated the feasibility of technology in the form of virtual manipulatives for facilitating students’ meaningful understanding of rational number concepts. This exploratory dissertation study was conducted for the two closely related purposes: first, to investigate a sample of fifth-grade students’ reasoning regarding the relationship between fractions and decimals for fractions with terminating decimal representations while using virtual manipulative incorporating parallel number lines; second, to investigate the affordances of the virtual manipulatives for supporting the students’ reasoning about the decimal-fraction …

Sclerocactus Wetlandicus: Habitat Characterization, Seed Germination And Mycorrhizal Analysis, Kourtney T. Harding

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Uinta Basin hookless cactus (Sclerocactus wetlandicus) is a threatened species native to Eastern Utah. The cactus is found in a landscape highly disturbed by non-renewable energy production. To understand the environmental conditions that support natural growth of this cactus, we asked what types of plants were present in the same areas as the cactus, and if the types of plants were different in environments that were disturbed. From our assessment, we determined that the types of plants present in disturbed areas were drastically different from those present in undisturbed locations. Areas previously used for energy production are …

Effect Of Foliage And Root Carbon Quantity, Quality, And Fluxes On Soil Organic Carbon Stabilization In Montane Aspen And Conifer Stands In Utah, Antra Boča

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Soil organic carbon (SOC) positively affects many soil properties (e.g., fertility and water holding capacity), and the amount of carbon (C) in soil exceeds the amount in the atmosphere by about three times. Forest soils store as much C as is found in trees. Tree species differ in their effect on SOC pools. Quaking aspen forests in the Western US often store more stable SOC in the mineral soil than nearby conifers. During the last decades a decline in aspen cover, often followed by conifer encroachment, has been documented. A shift from aspen to conifer overstories may negatively affect the …

Object Recognition In Videos Utilizing Hierarchical And Temporal Objectness With Deep Neural Networks, Liang Peng

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

As the growth of mobile devices and social networks has been faster than ever, online image and video content has become truly ubiquitous today. Understanding of these images and videos, called vision, is one of the most primary ways for human being to perceive the world. Computer vision, which refers to the study of enabling machines to see and understand the visual world, is fundamental in advancing Artificial Intelligence.

Object recognition, which is defined as the task of locating and recognizing object categories in images and videos, is a major research field in computer vision. Recent research in object recognition …

Wearable Computing: Accelerometer-Based Human Activity Classification Using Decision Tree, Chong Li

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In this study, we designed a system that recognizes a person’s physical activity by analyzing data read from a device that he or she wears. In order to reduce the system’s demands on the device’s computational capacity and memory space, we designed a series of strategies such as making accurate analysis based on only a small amount of data in the memory, extracting only the most useful features from the data, cutting unnecessary branches of the classification system, etc. We also implemented a strategy to correct certain types of misclassifications, in order to improve the performance of the system.

We …

Chemical Bonding In Novel 0-, 1-, 2-, And 3-Dimensional Chemical Species, Ivan A. Popov

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

While the trial and error approach is still being a dominant pathway for synthesis of various compounds in chemistry, computation-driven approaches have recently been shown to be a very efficient way towards the rational design of new materials with tailored properties. In principle, theoretical design of materials may not only significantly reduce the costs associated with the experiment, but may also result in the prediction of novel compounds possessing completely unexpected geometries. These compounds can serve as long-lived catalysts, powerful batteries, efficient solar cells, or reliable energy storage materials. Since geometric structure of any system is related to its electronic …

A Parallel Genetic Algorithm For Optimizing Multicellular Models Applied To Biofilm Wrinkling, Christopher Douglas Johnson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Multiscale computational models integrating sub-cellular, cellular, and multicellular levels can be powerful tools that help researchers replicate, understand, and predict multicellular biological phenomena. To leverage their potential, these models need correct parameter values, which specify cellular physiology and affect multicellular outcomes. This work presents a robust parameter optimization method, utilizing a parallel and distributed genetic-algorithm software package. A genetic algorithm was chosen because of its superiority in fitting complex functions for which mathematical techniques are less suited. Searching for optimal parameters proceeds by comparing the multicellular behavior of a simulated system to that of a real biological system on the …

The Influence Of Aspen Chemistry And The Nutritional Context On Aspen Herbivory, Kristen Y. Heroy

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Consumption of aspen by herbivores is one major force causing aspen decline in North America. In this Dissertation, I aimed to determine why herbivores prefer browsing on certain aspen stands over others, and why they prefer consuming aspen that contains chemical defenses over understory forages like grasses, forbs, and shrubs. I explored the influence of nutrients and chemical defenses within aspen on aspen intake and preference by lambs in pen experiments. I also explored drivers of aspen preference on the landscape by looking at relationships between aspen herbivory, indicators of aspen health, amount of nutrients available in the understory, and …

First-Row Transition Metal Sulfides And Phosphides As Competent Electrocatalysts For Water Splitting, Nan Jiang

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Solar energy is a carbon-neutral and renewable energy resource. Its nature of intermittence and unequal distribution requires efficient solar energy capture, conversion, and storage. Solar-driven water splitting to produce hydrogen and oxygen is widely considered as an appealing approach to meet this goal, in which hydrogen acts as a green energy carrier. Water splitting consists of two redox half reactions: hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Both reactions involve the transfer of multiple electrons and protons and possess high energy barriers to proceed at appreciable rates, hence catalysts are needed.

A large number of HER and OER …

Combinatorial Games On Graphs, Trevor K. Williams

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Combinatorial Games are intriguing and have a tendency to engross students and lead them into a serious study of mathematics. The engaging nature of games is the basis for this thesis. Two combinatorial games and some educational tools are presented which were developed by the author in the pursuit of the solution of these games.

To What Extent Might Beaver Dam Building Buffer Water Storage Losses Associated With A Declining Snowpack?, Konrad Hafen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Dams built by North American Beaver create natural water storage and slow water as it moves through streams. In portions of streams with beaver dams, these effects have been observed to decrease the peak magnitude of floods and increase base flow during annual summer droughts. In the western United States changes to streamflow patterns have been observed in recent decades with large spring floods coming earlier in the year, causing annual summer droughts to start earlier and last longer. These changes are linked to decreasing snowpack which acts as the most significant natural water storage reservoir by holding onto precipitation …

Detecting Malicious Campaigns In Crowdsourcing Platforms, Hongkyu Choi

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Crowdsourcing sites such as Mechanical Turk and Crowdflower provide a marketplace where requesters create tasks and recruit workers, who may perform certain tasks in order to get financial compensation. Anyone in the world can be a requester and/or a worker as long as he/she has the Internet connection. Crowdsourcing creates a new way to solve various tasks by using “human computation power”. However, crowdsourcing has been misused by malicious requesters and unethical workers for account generation, search engine optimization, content and link generation, ad posting and spam mailing, and social network linking. It creates new threats to the Web system. …

Power Analysis Of Continuous Data Capture In Beepi, A Solar- Powered Multi-Sensor Electronic Beehive Monitoring System For Langstroth Beehives, Keval Shah

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Honey bee (Apis mellifera) is one of the most important pollinating species in agriculture. The decline in the bee population worldwide is a sign of something going amiss in the environment. This decrease in the population is attributed to the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). In this thesis, a power analysis is presented of a solar-powered, multi-sensor electronic beehive monitoring (EBM) system. EBM may contribute to our understanding of the major factors affecting the health of honeybee colonies without disturbing the colonies' daily behavioral patterns or putting extra burdens on beekeepers. The EBM system analyzed in this thesis runs …

A Pattern Language For Designing Application-Level Communication Protocols And The Improvement Of Computer Science Education Through Cloud Computing, Jorge Edison Lascano

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Enterprises that develop software use current technology because of its proven advantages and to accelerate and improve the software development process. Nevertheless, it is difficult to be up-to-date for most professionals in the area. Although students from higher academic institutions need to learn these new tools, and their main purpose is to learn how learn; colleges still need to prepare students for modern enterprise requirements, so they teach new technologies to improve students’ skills. Ubiquitous computing is software and services available everywhere, for example in mobile devices, in different locations, in different networks. This computing requires good communication protocols so …

Changes In Floodplain Inundation Under Non-Stationary Hydrology For An Adjustable, Alluvial River Channel, Bruce C. Call

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Predicting the frequency and aerial extent of flooding in river valleys is essential for infrastructure design, environmental management, and risk assessment. Such flooding occurs when the discharge of water within a river channel exceeds its maximum capacity and the extra water submerges the adjoining floodplain surface. The maximum capacity of a channel is controlled by its geometry, gradient, and frictional resistance. Conventional flood prediction methods rely on assumptions of unchanging flood probabilities and channel capacities. However, changes in climate, land cover, and water management have been shown to systematically shift the magnitude and variability of flood flows in many systems. …

Modeling And Projection Of The North American Monsoon Using A High-Resolution Regional Climate Model, Jonathan D.D. Meyer

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The North American Monsoon (NAM) is a dominant climate feature across the southwestern United States and Mexico during the summertime. Rainfall from the NAM elicits a significant response from the regional ecology as well as supports the socioeconomic well-being of both rural and urban populations. Due to the large variability in the yearly intensity and location of where the NAM rainfall occurs, the region is highly susceptible to prolonged and exceptional periods of drought; compounded by significant population growth projections through the 21st century. Reliable prediction for the NAM is highly beneficial on timescales ranging from shortterm weather forecasting to …

Investigating Patterns Of Fluvial Form And Incision Near The Yellowstone Hotspot — Alpine Canyon Of The Snake River, Wyoming, Daphnee Tuzlak

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The shape of a landscape is created by rivers, which erode the underlying bedrock and carve through mountains. The Snake River flows across the uplifting hotspot plume of the Yellowstone region, cuts through the Snake River Range, and ultimately enters the low-lying eastern Snake River Plain. Although there is a good understanding of the track of the Yellowstone hotspot over geologic time and shorter timescales, measurements over Quaternary timescales and an understanding of how uplift influences the rivers and landscape in the Yellowstone region are absent. We study the Snake River and its past deposits where it cuts through Alpine …

Modeling De Novo Granulation Of Anaerobic Sludge, Honey Varghese

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The global market for biological waste water treatment is large and growing. Bioengineered reactor setups employ microorganisms to degrade waste and produce useful/less harmful components. Scientists are interested in studies that reveal the biological mechanisms involved in the process of these microbial actions in order to improve the reactor performance. The process of granulation in aerobic sludge is one such interesting process which is less explained.

The primary goal of the thesis is to design a computational model that simulates the process of granulation in anaerobic sludge and that addresses the role physiochemical and biological processes play in granule formation. …

Sequence Stratigraphy, Chemostratigraphy, And Biostratigraphy Of Lower Ordovician Units In Northeastern And Western Central Utah: Regional Implications, Colter R. Davis

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Lower to Middle Ordovician Garden City Formation and Pogonip Group are mixed carbonate and sandy marine rocks deposited on the western margin of ancestral North America. The Garden City Formation was deposited in the Northern Utah Basin and the Pogonip Group was deposited in the Ibex Basin. These two basins experienced different rates of subsidence that resulting in significant thickness differences between rock units and different rock types related to sea level change. This study provides a unique opportunity to examine changes in rock types, rock chemistry, and fossil types as sea level changed within two separate basins in …

Spatio-Temporal History Of Fluid-Rock Interaction In The Hurricane Fault Zone, Jace Michael Koger

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Hurricane Fault is a 250-km long, west dipping, active Basin and Range-bounding normal fault in southwest Utah and northwest Arizona. There are multiple known hot springs along its 250-km length and multiple late Tertiary-Quaternary basaltic centers that broadly parallel the fault. Possible sources of hot spring fluids include deeply circulated meteoric water that experienced water-rock exchange at high temperatures (>100 °C) and deep-seated crustal fluids. Abundant damage zone veins, cements, and host rock alteration are present along strike, indicative of past fluid flow. Carbonate veins and cements are key features of the Hurricane Fault zone, and the primary …

Magmatic Evolution Of Early Subduction Zones: Geochemical Modeling And Chemical Stratigraphy Of Boninite And Fore Arc Basalt From The Bonin Fore Arc, Emily A. Haugen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Izu-Bonin-Mariana arc stretches south from Japan to Guam in the Western Pacific. International Ocean Discovery Project Expedition 352 drilled four core in the fore arc of the Izu-Bonin arc east of the Bonin Islands: U1439C, U1440B, U1441A, and U1442A. From the four core, 124 samples were retrieved and analyzed for major and trace elements. Two main rock types were identified: FAB and boninite. FAB is a Mid-Ocean Ridge Basalt (MORB)-like tholeiite with variable fluid mobile element enrichment such as Rb, Ba, and Sr, and low Ti/V ratios more similar to an island arc volcanic than a mid-ocean ridge volcanic. …

A Stochastic Model For Water-Vegetation Systems And The Effect Of Decreasing Precipitation On Semi-Arid Environments, Shannon A. Dixon

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Current climate change trends are affecting the magnitude and recurrence of extreme weather events. In particular, several semi-arid regions around the planet are confronting more intense and prolonged lack of precipitation, slowly transforming these regions into deserts. Many mathematical models have been developed for purposes of analyzing vegetation-water interactions, particularly in semi-arid landscapes. Most models are based on the average behavior of the system as a whole, and how it is influenced by external changes. These models may be termed "macro-scale" models. Other models have concerned themselves with the interactions between individuals, in this case the interactions between individual plants …