abstract: Land use change driven by human population expansion continues to influence the integrity and configuration of riparian corridors worldwide. Wildlife viability in semi-arid regions depend heavily on the connectivity of riparian corridors, since water is the primary limiting resource. The Madrean Archipelago in northern Mexico and southwestern United States (US) is a biodiversity hotspot that supports imperiled wildlife like jaguar (Panthera onca) and ocelot (Leopardus pardalis). Recent and ongoing infrastructure developments in the historically understudied US-México borderlands region, such as the border wall and expansion of Federal Highway 2, are altering wildlife movement and disconnecting essential habitat. I used wildlife cameras to assess species occupancy, abundance, and related habitat variables affecting the use of washes as corridors for mammals in semi-arid Los Ojos (LO), a private ranch within a 530 km2 priority conservation area in Sonora, México located south of the border and Federal Highway 2. From October 2018 to April 2019, I deployed 21 wildlife cameras in five different riparian corridors within LO. I used single- season occupancy models and Royal Nichols abundance models to explore the relationship between habitat variables and use of riparian corridors by mammal communities of conservation concern within this region. Twenty-one mammal species were recorded in the study area, including American black bear (Ursus americanus), white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and the first sighting of jaguar (Panthera onca) in this region in 25 years. For the 11 medium- and large-bodied mammals recorded, habitat variables related to perennial river characteristics (distance to river, weekly water, and site width) and remoteness (distance from highway, elevation, and NDVI) were important for occupancy, but the direction of the relationship varied by species. For commonly observed species such as mountain lion (Puma concolor) and white-nosed coati (Nasua narica), topographic variety was highly informative for species abundance. These results highlight the importance of habitat diversity when identifying corridors for future protection to conserve wildlife communities in semi-arid regions. Additionally, this study provides robust evidence in support of mitigation measures (e.g. funnel fencing, over- or under- passes) along Federal Highway 2, and other barriers such as the border wall, to facilitate wildlife connectivity. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Biology 2020

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems (HVAC) are the single largest consumer of energy in commercial and residential sectors. Minimizing its energy consumption without compromising indoor air quality (IAQ) and thermal comfort would result in environmental and financial benefits. Currently, most buildings still utilize constant air volume (CAV) systems with on/off control to meet the thermal loads. Such systems, without any consideration of occupancy, may ventilate a zone excessively and result in energy waste. Previous studies showed that CO2-based demand-controlled ventilation (DCV) methods are the most widely used strategies to determine the optimal level of supply air volume. However, conventional CO2 mass balanced models do not yield an optimal estimation accuracy. In this study, feed-forward neural network algorithm (FFNN) was proposed to estimate the zone occupancy using CO2 concentrations, observed occupancy data and the zone schedule. The occupancy prediction result was then utilized to optimize supply fan operation of the air handling unit (AHU) associated with the zone. IAQ and thermal comfort standards were also taken into consideration as the active constraints of this optimization. As for the validation, the experiment was carried out in an auditorium located on a university campus. The results revealed that utilizing neural network occupancy estimation model can reduce the daily ventilation energy by 74.2% when compared to the current on/off control.

Indices of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) abundance in the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan suggested the population declined 40% from the previous 5 year mean following 2 consecutive severe winters in the mid-1990s and has not since increased in population size. I collected estimates and assessed biological and environmental covariates of survival and recruitment of fawns (< 1 year old) and age-specific reproductive and survival rates of adult females (> 1.6 years old) in the southwestern Upper Peninsula of Michigan from 2009–2011. Reproduction did not appear to regulate population growth, as 92 percent of females were pregnant. Annual survival of adult females was 70 percent across years, but poorer annual survival of fawns across years (44 percent) resulted in recruitment being the most influential vital rate to population growth, which increased10 percent from 2009 to 2010, but decreased 13 percent from 2010 to 2011. Variation in population growth emphasized that annual variation in fawn recruitment may have nullified increased growth over time. Most fawn mortalities occurred within 12 weeks of age, emphasizing this period greatly influenced annual survival rates of fawns, and especially population growth. Therefore, I suggest fawns should be considered the priority cohort for deer population management, including mitigation of factors which limit fawn recruitment. Winter severity effects on nutritional condition of adult females primarily influenced survival of adult females and fawns. However, adult female avoidance of interior lowland forests which had greater wolf (Canis lupus) use and commonly aging and over-browsed vegetation ostensibly reduced fawn recruitment through a lack of hiding vegetation and poorer forage. Also, by adult females raising fawns in habitats near roads, the predatory efficacy of coyotes (C. latrans) on adult females and fawns increased. Although predation was the leading cause of deer mortality, bottom-up effects of winter severity on nutritional condition and resource use appeared to be most influential to sustaining a lack of population increase. Hence, I suggest population growth could be improved through habitat management that increases landscape heterogeneity of early successional forests to enhance year-round browse to increase nutritional condition of adult females and hiding cover for fawns.

The real-estate sector has traditionally been thinking in terms of “bricks and mortar” focusing more on the buildings than on the tenants. A change of approach has, however, been detected since the mid 1990s. The tenant is now more in focus. This new situation puts higher requirements on both the individual real-estate manager’s and organization’s ability to determine the needs of the tenants. Evaluations and knowledge management can be a help in this process Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) is one tool where the tenant’s perspective is in focus. The purpose of this thesis is to study the Swedish real-estate sector’s attitudes and experience of POE. Furthermore the purpose is to investigate how POE can be implemented in the organization and what barriers there are to implementation. This thesis presents three empirical studies of the real-estate sector and their use of POE. The first study is a survey sent to Swedish real-estate managers to determine their attitudes and experience of POE. This study was followed up by a more in-depth interview study to determine the attitudes regarding POE among the real-estate managers. The third study was also an interview study and it was carried out with individuals in leading positions in organizations in the real-estate sector. The aim of this study was to get a clearer view of possibilities for change and barriers to change within the real-estate sector The results show that there is an interest from the real-estate managers towards evaluations but that they rarely carry out evaluations. The main barrier detected is the lack of support from top management and this has resulted in a lack of incentives for realestate managers to work with POE. The reason for this lack of interest from the top management can be the culture of the real-estate sector, a culture which has sprung from the building sector. The conclusion is that problems will not be solved solely by implementing POE. The organisation must take care of the information, share it, learn from it and use it in the best way in current and future projects. This can only be done by implanting a knowledge management system. To enable this kind of change within the organisation the top management must underline the importance of this and at the same time give the organisation both the right tools to enable implementation and incentives to carry this out and follow it through. One way to show the importance of knowledge management, and at the same time create incentives and methods to follow up the development of the organisation is to integrate POE in the Balanced Scorecard. The conclusion is that if the top management doesn’t want the organisation to fall behind its competitors it must put knowledge management on the agenda. Sooner or later the competitors will implement evaluations and knowledge management in their organisations, and then it is only a question of time before they have built a better and stronger organisation, with better-qualified employees, that generates more efficient services and more satisfied customers. / <p>ISBN (invalid): 9197598484</p>

This thesis deals with the development of an Airspace Sector Occupancy Model (ASOM). The model determines the occupancy of Air Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) sectors for a given geometry of sectors and flight schedules, and can be used to study the impact of alternative flight schedules on the workload imposed on the sectors. Along with complimentary airspace analysis models, this can serve as an advisory tool to approve flight plans in the Free Flight Scenario, or to reschedule flights around a Special Use Airspace (SUA). ASOM is developed using Matlab 5.2, and can be run on an IBM compatible PC, Macintosh, or Unix Workstation. The computerized model incorporates the powerful features of graphics and hierarchical modeling inherent in Matlab, to design an effective tool for analyzing air traffic scenarios and their respective sector occupancies. / Master of Science

<p> This paper is a further investigation of Gilchrist and Hall's work on the three-dimensional relationships in traffic flow theory variables (Gilchrist and Hall, 1989). The investigation examines the three variables of traffic flow (speed, volume, and occupancy). Gilchrist and Hall's data is then compared with data used in this analysis. The traffic variables are first examined by the traditional two-dimensional model and then they are examined obliquely in three-dimensional space. The resulting oblique views of the data are reviewed for points of agreement with conclusions made by Gilchrist and Hall. Resultant views of the data suggest that there is a plane along which all of the uncongested data fall. However, this phenomena only occurs when there is a wide range of speed values in the data set. The results also suggest that low-speed congested data do not lie on the same plane as do the uncongested data. It is concluded that low-speed congested data do not lie on a plane at all.</p> / Thesis / Candidate in Philosophy

Chapter 1. Species’ occurrences are dependent on a variety of habitat characteristics, including physical landscape factors and anthropogenic land use and change. Understanding the influence of habitat attributes on species occurrence is essential to successful wildlife and habitat management, specifically in areas with active human use. We tested the influence of vegetation alliance, fragmentation, and human recreation in the form of off-highway vehicles (OHV) in an area of active land management in coastal California, with a focus on the occurrences of six small mammal species. The area is composed of sand dunes subject to natural habitat fragmentation. OHV recreation occurs around a portion of the habitat fragments, but not within the fragments. We used model selection and model averaging on single season occupancy models in program R to compare probability of occupancy across three habitat attributes: vegetation alliance (two states), fragmentation (present – absent), and recreation (present – absent). Vegetation alliance was the best predicter of occupancy for Dipodomys heermanni, Peromyscus maniculatus, Peromyscuscalifornicus, and Neotoma macrotis. Fragmentation influenced occupancy for three species, conferring a positive effect for N. macrotis and Microtus californicus, and a negative effect for Chaetodipus californicus. Only two species showed a response in occupancy to recreation, N. macrotis and M. californicus, but the responses showed an increase in occupancy in habitat surrounded by OHV use. Occupancy for the three remaining species (D. heermanni, P. maniculatus, P. californicus,) was not impacted by fragmentation or recreation. The response to fragmentation is larger than the response to OHV recreation. Taken together, these results indicate that direct management of dominant vegetation and habitat fragmentation will have more of an impact on occupancy than the direct management of OHV recreation, except where recreation contributes indirectly to fragmentation. Chapter 2. Determining best methods to detect individuals and monitor populations that balance effort and efficiency can assist conservation and land management. This may be especially true for small, non-charismatic species, such as rodents (Rodentia), which comprise >40% of all mammal species. Given the importance of rodents to ecosystems, and the number of listed species, we tested two commonly used detection and monitoring methods, live traps and camera traps, to determine their efficiency in rodents. An artificial-intelligence machine-learning model was developed to process the camera trap images and identify the species within them which reduced camera trapping effort. We used occupancy models to compare probability of detection and occupancy estimates for six rodent species across the two methods. Camera traps yielded greater detection probability and occupancy estimates for all six species. Live trapping yielded biasedly low estimates of occupancy, required greater effort, and had a lower probability of detection. Camera traps, aimed at the ground to capture the dorsal view of an individual, combined with machine learning provided a practical, non-invasive, and low effort solution to detecting and monitoring rodents. Thus, camera trapping with A.I. is a more sustainable and practical solution for the conservation and land management of rodents. Chapter 3. One third of missing mammal species thought to be extinct have been rediscovered as extant. Therefore, determining extinction correctly, without misinterpreting negative evidence, is difficult and takes a large amount of effort, especially for small, cryptic species. The Morro Bay kangaroo rat (MBKR), Dipodomys heermanni morroensis, is a small nocturnal rodent that has not been detected since 1986 and is suspected of being extinct. While numerous surveys have been done, additional work is still needed to determine if the subspecies is truly extinct. This work summarizes a survey of the Morro Bay sandspit, an area not previously considered part of its range but that has the potential to be occupied by the subspecies, given habitat characteristics of its closest subspecies. Inferences from the closest relative, Dipodomys heermanni arenae, were used to inform surveys and detection probability for D. h. morroensis. Visual surveys in areas with greatest probability of detecting sign (burrows, bipedal prints, tail drags, etc.) were carried out and yielded only a few occurrences of possible sign. Camera traps, which provide an efficient, accurate, and precise detection method, were deployed both in winter and summer at locations with possible sign but yielded no detection of MBKR. Combining our survey results with inference from Dipodomys heermanni arenae, the possibility that individuals are present on the sandspit but were undetected by cameras is extremely low. We conclude that the MBKR is not present on the Morro Bay sandspit, at least not in the habitat where its presence was most likely to be detected.

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This work focuses on the development and implementation of an autonomous path planning and obstacle avoidance algorithm for an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) in a riverine environment. The algorithm effectively handles trap situations, which occur when the river bends away from the destination. In addition, the algorithm uses real-time sensor feedback to avoid obstacles. A general global route is proposed based on an a priori shoreline map. Then, local paths are calculated considering both the a priori data and measurements received from an obstacle sensor. These paths roughly follow the global path. The algorithm was tested on an ASV equipped with basic navigational sensors and an omnidirectional camera for obstacle detection, and experimentation verified its effectiveness. / Master of Science

Chan Chung Yee Albert. / "Architecture Department, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Master of Architecture Programme 1997-98, design report." / Includes bibliographical references. / Chapter 1.0 --- Introduction / Chapter 2.0 --- Project Brief / Chapter 3.0 --- Client Profile / Chapter 4.0 --- Site Particulars / Chapter 5.0 --- Design Process / Chapter 6.0 --- Characters in Proposed Street / Chapter 7.0 --- Characters in Proposed Building / Chapter 8.0 --- Final Design / Chapter 9.0 --- Bibliography / Chapter 10.0 --- Appendix A Programming Report / Chapter 11.0 --- Appendix B Cost Estimation