In the summer of 2002, the 200,000-ha Biscuit Wildfire consumed a portion of the 150-ha Long-Term Ecosystem Productivity (LTEP) experiment in the Siskiyou National Forest, Oregon. The wildfire burned previously established 100-year-old conifer control and thinned experimental units, which allows comparison with prescribed burn and unburned units. This research evaluates the O horizon and mineral soil charcoal, a key fire-related soil component that affects physical and chemical properties. Charcoal C was quantified by a peroxide-acid...

Anadromous salmon populations of the Pacific Northwest have been decreasing for decades in response to a variety of factors, such as habitat destruction, overharvesting, and declining water quality. In Washington State's Water Resource Inventory Area (WRIA) 1, the State Conservation Commission listed the habitat limiting factors for salmon and steelhead as: sedimentation problems associated with landslides, overharvesting, lack of large woody debris, warmer stream temperatures, and impacts to riparian, floodplain, water quality, and flow conditions....

The purpose of the current study was to examine the effects a goal setting program had on exercise commitment and aerobic fitness among university students. Obesity and a lack of sufficient physical activity continue to be a problematic and increasing epidemic in the United States. Some theorists have utilized goal setting as an intervention to increase commitment effectiveness of exercise participants. In the current study, a two-way between-within experimental design was utilized involving two separate...

Training the core has become a topic of interest to athletes, health professionals, coaches and researchers. Core training may be an important supplementation to exercise programs. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of an eight week core exercise program on core function and half marathon run time in long distance runners. METHODS: Twenty-four well-trained distance runners were recruited from local running clubs to participate in this training study. Participants ran...

The intertidal sea anemone Anthopleura xanthogrammica is distributed widely along the Pacific coast, from Baja California Mexico (~30ºN) to southern Alaska (57ºN). In much of its range, A. xanthogrammica has the ability to co-host algal symbionts from two distinct taxa known as zoochlorellae (the chlorophyte Elliptochloris marina) and zooxanthellae (brown dinophytes in the genus Symbiodinium). Laboratory studies and field distributions have demonstrated that zoochlorellae and zooxanthellae represent "cool" and "warm" symbionts respectively, based on their...

The Research Process: Strategies for Undergraduate Students is an open access textbook written by library, archives, and Learning Commons professionals at Western Libraries, and is intended for undergraduate students. In Getting Started, you will discover the stages inherent in the research process, and be introduced to the available resources at Western Libraries. In Explore, you will explore different information sources, and will learn how to develop robust search strategies for each information source. In Focus...

High performance female athletes can jeopardize their health if their energy requirements during preparations for competitions are excessive. The problems that result are called the Female Athlete Triad characterized by low energy availability with or without disordered eating, menstrual dysfunction/ amenorrhea, and osteoporosis and either alone or in combination can lead to more serious pathologies. The goal here is to determine whether intercollegiate female athletes exhibit elements of the triad at Western Washington University. Sixteen...

Sexual dimorphism is the result of a cascade of genes that triggers sex-specific development. The cascade begins with a primary signal that affects a hierarchy of genes and, through their selective activation and repression, results in the development of an individual of a particular sex. The genes in this regulatory hierarchy are very divergent, with little conservation across taxa. However, homologs of doublesex, a master regulator in the sexdetermining cascade of Drosophila melanogaster, have been...

The California Gold Rush had a profound effect on the emerging city of San Francisco. Extreme highs and lows in the economic environment created an atmosphere in which the city's citizens were used to hardship and adversity. These conditions, combined with the importance of the newspaper industry explain the emergence of an eccentric individual such as Emperor Norton. Although he began his career in San Francisco as a prominent businessman, it is his later life...

For over 40 years now, a remote piece of land in the northeast corner of Alaska has been the focus of a highly publicized and extremely controversial debate. This contested landscape, known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), is valued for its striking vistas and unique wildlife as well as for its substantial petroleum reserves. As a result, environmentalists and oil industries have long been engaged in heated debate over its land use and...

Because garnet strongly fractionates Mn, spessartine (XSps) content can be treated as a rock-wide proxy for time. By using Sm-Nd isotopic dating to discretely date cores and rims of garnet crystals, I associated an age with a XSps content, and used this association to indirectly date a set of garnets in a subvolume from the specimen, a Grt-Chl-Pg-Bt-Ms schist from the Pinney Hollow Formation collected at Townshend Dam, VT. Using high-resolution X-ray computed tomographic data,...

The theory of resource use pre-emption suggests that diverse communities may be more resistant to invasion than simple communities due to lack of niche space for invaders. Studies examining the relationship of native species richness to exotic success have provided mixed support for this idea. To test this theory, I measured plant diversity and cover across topographic gradients differing in resource availability in a California serpentine grassland, and measured exotic success as either species richness,...

The success of diatoms in a wide range of global habitats, together with common observations of the post-bloom sinking of diatom biomass, indicates that this taxon has evolved a mechanism to reduce the largest loss process for phytoplankton in the ocean, microzooplankton grazing. Recent research has shown that polyunsaturated aldehydes (PUAs), lipid oxidation products generated by various species of diatoms, can reduce copepod fecundity and egg hatching success. This leads to the question of whether...

The Helena salient is an arcuate curve in the southwest Montana fold and thrust belt, characterized by thin-skinned folding and thrusting. Ages from volcanic sills imply that deformation in the region began 77 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous (Harlan et al., 2008). This study investigates the nature of curvature associated with this salient using paleomagnetic techniques. Carbonate rocks of the Mississippian Madison Group were sampled from 24 sites across three folds: the Devil's...

Historically, Marie Corelli's popular 1890s fiction has been considered lowbrow. Contemporary scholarship has attempted to recuperate her work by aligning her texts with high art movements of the nineteenth-century. The two Corelli novels that this thesis examines, The Sorrows of Satan (1895) and Wormwood (1890), construct idealized gender representations through a combination of low and high art stylistics and subject matter. These novels critique modes of consumption that cause characters to deviate from the ideal...

Timber management, especially clear-cut logging, dramatically alters forest ecosystems. In temperate conifer forests of the Pacific Northwest, succession following deforestation is a slow process, lasting several decades for early and mid-successional stages and several hundred years for late maturity and old growth stages. Despite the history of logging in the region and the importance of these forests to wildlife, it is not well understood how animal communities respond to forest disturbance, particularly over successional gradients....

Drawing on research into digital technologies and their effects on society and archives, as well as research on the public image of archives, this thesis examines whether technological changes, specifically the Internet, have had any effects on public perceptions of archives and if so to determine the nature of those effects. It relies on a survey to measure possible effects of Internet technology on perceptions of archives. Findings suggest that there are a number of...

On October 9th, 2007, a seismic swarm, known as the Nechako swarm, began in south-central British Columbia, approximately 20 kilometers west of the Nazko polygenetic cinder cone. After lasting for well over a month, seismic activity tapered off by November 21st, 2007. This study analyzes data from several temporary broadband seismometers deployed by the Geological Survey of Canada near the epicentral locations of initial events from the swarm. Over 4400 events were observed during this...

Silencing the self theory predicts that women in oppressive relationships tend to experience loss of self through self-silencing, and are therefore more prone to depression. Past studies have found that both abuse and immigration are associated with higher levels of self-silencing and depression. The current study investigated the psychometric properties of the Silencing the Self Scale (STSS) and the Beck Depression Inventory II (BDIII), as well as the validity of the STSS subscales for a...

Normal blood clotting is regulated by blood plasma protein factors in a blood coagulation cascade. Deficiency in one of these proteins, Factor VIII (FVIII), causes the disease hemophilia A, in which the patient is unable to form blood clots. Treatment of hemophilia A involves the infusion of FVIII, and the most common complication in this treatment is the development of antibodies against the therapeutic infusions. Two mouse monoclonal anti-human antibodies, 3E6 and G99, were used...

The current study examined the persuasiveness (based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model) of user comments on the evaluation of an Internet news article. Participants reviewed a news article concerning the implementation of a new comprehensive exam for all senior-level undergraduates, which was manipulated such that the news article information was either self-relevant (evoking central route processing) or self-irrelevant (evoking peripheral route processing). In addition, comments that followed the news article were also manipulated by both...

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of body tilt on shoulder muscle activity and repositioning accuracy during humeral elevation to three positions in the sagittal plane (70, 90 and 110 degrees). Thirty eight subjects underwent testing in an unconstrained joint position sense task. Kinematics were measured with a magnetic tracking device while muscle activation was measured with surface electromyography. The joint position sense task consisted of subjects moving their arms to...

This is a collection of creative nonfiction essays which address memory, memory loss, and the interruption of brain function and the difficulty in retrieval of memory due to traumatic brain injury, and other post traumatic injuries and diseases. These creative nonfiction works also investigate identity (in my case, my identity in my family and my race, which is Mètis), memoir, truth, and fact, and the many facets and elements that affect and define these. I...

Convergence is a collection of linked short stories focusing on the 2007-2008 post-election violence in Kenya. The narratives explore themes of identity and family, both in Kenya and in the United States, and how these concepts adapt or remain unchanged during times of crisis. Through the narrative of Joseph, a boy living in Kibera during the post-election violence, the collection provides a reader with an understanding of the events that occurred during the crisis and...

Utilizing documents from student organizations including strike committees, the National Center For Democratic Students, and the writings of young activists, official commentary, and press releases, this study provides a detailed examination of the student movement in Mexico during the 1960s. Within the historiography of the student youth movement studies tend to focus exclusively on 1968 and the movement's position within the global counterculture. The product of this history is the proliferation of a homogenous understanding...