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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Accelerometer-Determined Physical Behavior Metrics And Their Associations With Sarcopenia Among Oldest-Old Adults, Eric M. Eberl Oct 2021

Accelerometer-Determined Physical Behavior Metrics And Their Associations With Sarcopenia Among Oldest-Old Adults, Eric M. Eberl

Masters Theses

INTRODUCTION: Sarcopenia is a loss of muscle function and muscle mass which frequently occurs among the oldest-old adult population (aged 85+ years). The analysis of accelerometer-determined physical behavior volumes and patterns of oldest-old adults might provide novel insights into the associations with sarcopenia and its components. METHODS: A total of 145 participants in the primary sample and 87 participants in the subsample with a mean age of 88.2 (2.5) years from the Health, Aging, and Body Composition study cohort provided cross-sectional data of handgrip strength, appendicular lean mass, gait speed, and accelerometry. Probable, confirmed, and severe sarcopenia were assessed based …


The Efficacy Of Habitat Conservation Assistance Programs For Family Forest Owners In Vermont, Margaret E. Harrington Oct 2021

The Efficacy Of Habitat Conservation Assistance Programs For Family Forest Owners In Vermont, Margaret E. Harrington

Masters Theses

The future of Vermont’s 1.8 million hectares (4.5 million acres) of forest habitat will be largely determined by the decisions of family forest owners, who collectively own 60% of the state’s forested land. To promote management for wildlife habitat, government agencies and non-governmental partnerships provide technical and financial support to family forest owners in the form of conservation assistance programs. In Chapter 1, I qualitatively compared the efficacy of two types of conservation assistance programs available in Vermont: traditional programs offered through the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and a simplified, accelerated program offered through a non-governmental partnership called Woods, Wildlife, …


Monitoring Mammals At Multiple Scales: Case Studies From Carnivore Communities, Kadambari Devarajan Oct 2021

Monitoring Mammals At Multiple Scales: Case Studies From Carnivore Communities, Kadambari Devarajan

Doctoral Dissertations

Carnivores are distributed widely and threatened by habitat loss, poaching, climate change, and disease. They are considered integral to ecosystem function through their direct and indirect interactions with species at different trophic levels. Given the importance of carnivores, it is of high conservation priority to understand the processes driving carnivore assemblages in different systems. It is thus essential to determine the abiotic and biotic drivers of carnivore community composition at different spatial scales and address the following questions: (i) What factors influence carnivore community composition and diversity? (ii) How do the factors influencing carnivore communities vary across spatial and temporal …


Diversity And Evolution Of Human Eccrine Sweat Gland Density, Andrew W. Best Oct 2021

Diversity And Evolution Of Human Eccrine Sweat Gland Density, Andrew W. Best

Doctoral Dissertations

Human eccrine density is highly derived. However, little is known about contemporary variation in this trait, what shapes it, and how it influences heat dissipation. This project explores 3 questions: 1) Is variation in functional eccrine density (FED) explained by childhood climate? 2) Is this variation patterned by geographic ancestry? 3) Is variation in FED associated with differences in heat dissipation capacity? We measured FED and sweat production in 6 body areas via pharmacological stimulation and impressions of sweating skin in 72 participants. Childhood climate variables were taken from the WorldClim database and geographic ancestry was estimated with 23andMe tests. …


Factors Influencing Primate Hair Microbiome Diversity, Catherine Kitrinos Sep 2021

Factors Influencing Primate Hair Microbiome Diversity, Catherine Kitrinos

Masters Theses

Primate hair is both a substrate upon which essential social interactions occur and an important host-pathogen interface. As commensal microbes provide important immune functions for their hosts, understanding the microbial diversity in primate hair could provide insight into primate immunity and disease transmission. While studies of human hair and skin microbiomes show differences in microbial communities across body regions, little is known about the nonhuman primate hair microbiome. In this study, we collected hair samples (n=159) from 8 body regions across 12 nonhuman primate species housed at 3 US institutions to examine 1) the diversity and composition of the primate …


Dissonant Forms: Landscape, Nature-Love, And Art, Taylor F. Benoit Jul 2021

Dissonant Forms: Landscape, Nature-Love, And Art, Taylor F. Benoit

Masters Theses

As artists continue the long and storied lineage of Landscape, are there aesthetic responsibilities that come with representing the forces that afford you the capacity to do so? As we delineate spaces into places, endless interconnectivity into knowable “systems”, and living matter into thing based taxonomies, who do these delineations serve and with what intentions do we proceed? My studio art practice explores what it means to give form to our Former—the Former being that from which we came, the here and now, our explicit ecological reality, the stuff of what we call nature. …


Mental Fatigue: Examining Cognitive Performance And Driving Behavior In Young Adults, Abigail F. Helm Apr 2021

Mental Fatigue: Examining Cognitive Performance And Driving Behavior In Young Adults, Abigail F. Helm

Doctoral Dissertations

Mental fatigue causes an increase in task-based EEG theta and alpha power and a decrease in performance (for a review, see Tran et al., 2020). However, little is known about the emergence of mental fatigue in resting state EEG recordings and whether the progression of mental fatigue over time is influenced by individual differences. The current dissertation examined the utility of resting state EEG as a measure of mental fatigue by testing whether EEG power changed in young adults over the course of a cognitively demanding battery of tasks. The current dissertation also tested how this measure of mental fatigue …


Studies On High-Throughput Single-Neuron Rna Sequencing And Circadian Rhythms In The Nudibranch, Berghia Stephanieae, Thi Bui Feb 2021

Studies On High-Throughput Single-Neuron Rna Sequencing And Circadian Rhythms In The Nudibranch, Berghia Stephanieae, Thi Bui

Masters Theses

One of the goals of neuroscience is to classify all of the neurons in the brain. Neuronal types can be defined using a combination of morphology, electrophysiology, and gene expression profiles. Gene expression profiles allow differentiation between cells that share similar characteristics. Leveraging the advantage of Berghia stephanieae (Gastropoda; Nudibranchia), which has around 28,000 neurons, I constructed high-throughput single-neuron transcriptomes for its whole brain. I produced a single-cell dissociation protocol and a custom data analysis pipeline for data of this nature. Around 129,000 cells were collected from 18 rhinophore ganglia and 20 circumesophageal ring ganglia (brain), consisting of the cerebropleural, …


Understanding Food And Climate Change: A Systems Perspective, Megan Brockelbank Jan 2021

Understanding Food And Climate Change: A Systems Perspective, Megan Brockelbank

Sustainability Education Resources

Climate change will profoundly affect our lives in many ways, even down to the very food we eat. Food is essential for survival and our complex food system, and all that depends on it, face a big threat with climate change. Throughout the semester we will explore the links between the food system and our changing climate with an emphasis on systems thinking. In science we tend to segregate, looking at just one part of a system, while systems thinking looks at the whole picture. Using this approach, we will think critically about how to build a more resilient food …