Pollinators are essential to food production globally. Without them, the production of food becomes increasingly difficult, time consuming, and costly. Unfortunately, due to the rapid changes to our earth's physical and climatic structure millions of species are becoming classified as threatened, endangered or extinct. Among these declining species are pollinating insects such as Aphis mellifera (honeybee) and other native species. This is due to a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder (CCD) and other native bees. The decline indicates that the future habitability of earth may be in jeopardy. The solution to this crisis is to expand the habitat of native bees into our existing infrastructure, connecting the pollinator dependent crops with a network of biodiverse habitat. This will greatly improve the existing agricultural industries resiliency towards change. Thus, ensuring that California can be economically prosperous while continuing to feed the globe. The Sacramento Valley is one location which is ideal to develop such a network of native pollinator habitat due to its reliance on the agriculture industry and favorable environmental conditions.

The premise of this study is that an understanding of catalysts and impacts of social and economic change in the Los Angeles Metro Green Line study corridor and an analysis of current planning policies can help identify how future planning policies may generate more ideal and positive outcomes for the study corridor. This study evaluated the conditions within the transit corridor with four selected station areas defined by a one-mile radius from each station. The stations that make up the transit corridor are along the Los Angeles Metro Green Line that runs east west between Redondo Beach and Norwalk. A mile radius buffer was chosen to fully capture the spacing between the stations linearly and use that to define the corridor’s primary area of influence. This study evaluated the changes in demographic composition, housing affordability, transportation affordability and job accessibility within the Metro Green Line corridor between the year 2000 and 2010. Trends in the corridor revealed that over a ten-year span, the corridor saw shifts in demographic composition, growth in job and housing densities and increases in the cost of housing. Over the ten years, the corridor has not yet developed to the standards of a location efficient environment. This study recommends that protection of vulnerable populations such as the high proportion of renter-occupied housing units is important because they are more likely to make up core transit riders that need public transportation. Preserving and building affordable housing near transit would enable households to save money on both transportation and housing expenditures and can work towards making the corridor more affordable. By understanding the three main variables in the context of social equity, a decision-maker can avoid the potential of negative gentrification, displacement, and promote economic viability in the corridor.

<p>The Middle Jurassic Tecocoyunca Group of northeastern Guerrero, Mexico is situated on the allochthonous Mixteca tectostratiqraphic terrane. This group represents an overall transgressive trend with a few minor fluctuations of base level. Foreshore, shoreface, barrier island, washover, and laqoonal facies are identified within five coarsening-upward sequence. Abundant hummocky cross stratification, low-angle inclined stratification, and swash cross stratification indicate dominance of wave processes. These nearshore sequences are overlain by offshore marine shales, which are thought to represent a major global eustatic sea-level rise in the latest Bathonian, continuing into the Early Callovian. During the transgression, deep portions of the basin developed anoxic bottom conditions, resulting in the deposition of bituminous black shales. The combined effects of basinal subsidence and eustatic sea-level rise resulted in a rapid rate of transgression which exceeded that of sedimentation; ca. 110 cm/Ka. </p> <p> Five ammonite associations date the Tecocoyunca Group as Upper Bathonian (Retrocostatum Zone) to Lower Callovian (Calloviense Zone). Biogeoqraphic affinity of the ammonite fauna is mostly Andean with signicant west-Tethyan/mediterranean elements and a few endemic species. The ammonite faunas show: 1) a rapid faunal replacement, 2) shell morphology trends, and 3 ) varying degrees of endemism/cosmopolitanism, all in relation to sea level variation. </p> <p>Biostratiqraphy and lithostratigraphy of the Tecocoyunca Group suggest that: 1) the Mixteca terrane had a paleoposition, during the Middle Jurassic, near the Pacific opening of the Hispanic Corridor (proto-AtlanticJ, 2) the Hispanic corridor provided marine connections between the eastern Pacific Ocean and the western Tethys Sea, and 3) preponderance near shore sediments suggests close proximity to the Andes of South America. </p> / Thesis / Master of Science (MS)

This dissertation proposes a Dynamic Message Signs (DMS) diversion control system based on principles of existing Advanced Traveler Information Systems and Advanced Traffic Management Systems (ATMS). The objective of the proposed system is to alleviate total corridor traffic delay by choosing optimized diversion rate and alternative road signal-timing plan. The DMS displays adaptive messages at predefined time interval for guiding certain number of drivers to alternative roads. Messages to be displayed on the DMS are chosen by an on-line optimization model that minimizes corridor traffic delay. The expected diversion rate is assumed following a distribution. An optimization model that considers three traffic delay components: mainline travel delay, alternative road signal control delay, and the travel time difference between the mainline and alternative roads is constructed. Signal timing parameters of alternative road intersections and DMS message level are the decision variables; speeds, flow rates, and other corridor traffic data from detectors serve as inputs of the model. Traffic simulation software, CORSIM, served as a developmental environment and test bed for evaluating the proposed system. MATLAB optimization toolboxes have been applied to solve the proposed model. A CORSIM Run-Time-Extension (RTE) has been developed to exchange data between CORSIM and the adopted MATLAB optimization algorithms (Genetic Algorithm, Pattern Search in direct search toolbox, and Sequential Quadratic Programming). Among the three candidate algorithms, the Sequential Quadratic Programming showed the fastest execution speed and yielded the smallest total delays for numerical examples. TRANSYT-7F, the most credible traffic signal optimization software has been used as a benchmark to verify the proposed model. The total corridor delays obtained from CORSIM with the SQP solutions show average reductions of 8.97%, 14.09%, and 13.09% for heavy, moderate and light traffic congestion levels respectively when compared with TRANSYT-7F optimization results. The maximum model execution time at each MATLAB call is fewer than two minutes, which implies that the system is capable of real world implementation with a DMS message and signal update interval of two minutes.

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