During 1973 data was collected to analyze the seasonal variations of the tidal dynamics, water quality and sediments of the Alsea Estuary. A summary of historical information with a list of all known alterations to the estuary was made. A complete physical description, including the geographical setting and mixing classification of the estuary, was done. Times of high and low water and tidal ranges at three locations were measured. Tide measurements made at Waldport indicated that the published tide predictions for that location were reliable. At a location upstream of the estuary embayment noticeable damping of the tidal wave amplitude was detected during periods of high river flow and high tidal range. High water lag times were found to decrease during periods of high river flow, but low water lag times were unaffected by river flow. The tide motion was found to be a damped, partially standing wave, which altered its behavior according to the volume of water in the estuary. The high and low tide water quality parameters of salinity, temperature, dissolved oxygen, turbidity and pH were measured at 10 to 18 locations during each season to determine any seasonal changes in them. The parameters at a given location were found to be a function of river flow and tidal range. Winter and summer sediment samples were analyzed for grain size distribution, volatile solids and porosity. The sediments from the main channel exhibited characteristics of a high velocity regime and those of the north channel, a low velocity regime. / Graduation date: 1975

This thesis is a report of an empirical investigation into the twin processes of adoption and rejection as they operate in the diffusion of a specific controversial technological innovation. The innovation, the aerial application of phenoxy herbicides, and its pattern of diffusion throughout the Alsea, Oregon area are examined. The processes involved are analyzed utilizing as a theoretical framework the Classical Diffusion of Innovation Model. This model is discussed in detail with particular attention being called to the social, economic, and political factors that contributed to its development and popularity. This specific model was utilized in this study for two purposes: (1) to systematically guide the attempt to understand and interpret important aspects of the controversy in the Alsea area, and (2) to ascertain the utility and flexibility of this perspective through hypothesis testing.

This paper aims to spell out the post-syntactic operations involved in the placement of second-position subject clitics in Alsea, an extinct language of the central Oregon coast. It assumes that the subject clitic is a syntactic head that is moved to a complementizer position in syntax, but is linearized in a post-syntactic morphological component in PF; operations in morphology account for the deviation of the subject clitic from its syntactic output position. Based on Buckley (1994), this paper proposes a two-stage post-syntactic derivation to account for the subject clitic distribution in Alsea: (i) concatenation, in which the subject clitic adjoins to an adjacent head of the same type to satisfy its suffixal requirement, (ii) prosodic readjustment, whereby a clitic whose morphological host is non-overt, leans rightward to procliticize to the first prosodic constituent.

This dissertation integrates a process-based hydrological investigation with an ongoing paired-catchment study to better understand how forest harvest impacts catchment function at multiple scales. We do this by addressing fundamental questions related to the stocks, flows and transit times of water. Isotope tracers are used within a top-down catchment intercomparison framework to investigate the role of geology in controlling streamwater mean transit time and their scaling relationships with the surrounding landscape. We found that streams draining catchments with permeable bedrock geology at the Drift Creek watershed in the Oregon Coast Range had longer mean transit times than catchments with poorly permeable bedrock at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest in the Oregon Cascades. We also found that differences in permeability contrasts within the subsurface controlled whether mean transit time scaled with indices of catchment topography (for the poorly permeable bedrock) or with catchment area (for the permeable bedrock). We then investigated the process-reasons for the observed differences in mean transit time ranges and scaling behavior using a detailed, bottom-up approach to characterize subsurface water stores and fluxes. We found that the mean transit times in catchments underlain by permeable bedrock were influenced by multiple subsurface storage pools with different groundwater ages, whereas storage in the poorly permeable catchments was limited to the soil profile and that resulted in quick routing of excess water to the stream at the soil bedrock interface, leading to mean transit times that were closely related to flowpath lengths and gradients. Finally, we examined how and where forest trees interacted with subsurface storage during the growing season using a forest manipulation experiment, where we tested the null hypothesis that near-stream trees alone influenced daily fluctuations in streamflow. We felled trees within this zone for two 2.5 ha basins and combined this with isotopic tracing of tree xylem water to test if water sources utilized by trees actively contributed to summer streamflow. We rejected our null hypotheses and found that diel fluctuations in streamflow were not generated exclusively in the near-stream zone. We were unable to link, isotopically, the water sources trees were utilizing to water that was contributing to streamflow. Our results provide new process-insights to how water is stored, extracted, and discharged from our forested catchments in Western Oregon that will help better explain how forest removal influences streamflow across multiple scales and geological conditions. / Graduation date: 2012