The first observations of Florida burrowing owls (Athene cunicularia floridana) occurred in the 19th century on historical dry prairie habitat in south central Florida. These early observations documented the ecology of burrowing owls in rural environments. Since then the vast majority of research on this subspecies has been undertaken in suburban and urban environments during the breeding period. The research undertaken on burrowing owls in suburban and urban environments includes determining natal dispersal distance, assessing female fecundity, mate fidelity, territory fidelity, date of juvenile and adult dispersal from breeding habitat, date of clutch initiation, nesting success, density of breeding pairs, causes of mortality, prey preference, and minimum annual survival of fledglings, juveniles, and adults. Very little research has been undertaken on burrowing owls in rural environments. The purpose of this thesis was to elucidate the behavior and ecology of burrowing owls in a rural environment. The topics researched in this thesis include home range in breeding habitat, dispersal distance to post-breeding habitat, location of post-breeding habitat, behavior during the breeding period, diet of rural versus urban owls, and the evaluation of three methods to trap burrowing owls. The results of this thesis indicate that, during the daytime, juvenile burrowing owls utilized habitat very close to the main and satellite burrows during the breeding period. At night juvenile owls foraged in an extensive saw palmetto patch surrounding the breeding habitat. The predominant prey of both rural and urban burrowing owls during the breeding period was insects. Dispersal of juvenile burrowing owls from breeding habitat coincided with the flooding of the breeding habitat during the rainy season.

Detailed mapping and granulometric analyses of the 1992 Cerro Negro tephra blanket reveal remarkable departures from the expected distribution of tephra. Isomass maps show that the major axis of dispersion for the eruption was to the SW of the cone and that the coarser-grained particles, ranging from -4.0 -- 1.0 f, were deposited primarily along the major axis of dispersion with deposits thinning off of the axis. Comparable isomass maps for finer-grained particles, 1.5 - 3.5 f, show that these particles were primarily deposited along the edges of the deposit, off of the major axis of dispersion. Advection-diffusion models for tephra fallout currently widely used in volcanology do not account for this deposition pattern. Rather, it appears that interaction between the wind field, which developed a strong cross flow during the eruption, and the ascending tephra plume resulted in the formation of turbulent structure in the plume. Particles with a settling velocity greater than ~1-2m/s (diameter >0.5 mm) were able to overcome the turbulent structure and settled in a manner predicted by the advection-diffusion equation. Those with lower settling velocities were caught up in turbulent structure and deposited off of the major axis of dispersion, near the edges of the overall tephra blanket. Thus, this data set provides the first estimate of the strength of such turbulent structures in advecting plumes, and illustrates the limitations of the typical advection-diffusion models in describing some transport processes.

The rise of organometal halide perovskite materials with extremely intriguing properties have opened a new horizon in the design of high speed and low price optoelectronic devices. The bandgap in the crystalline structure of these materials can be easily tuned for various applications and their dominant non-excitonic dynamics eliminate the requirement of a bulk or heterostructure for charge carrier separation. These unique properties increase the photo-sensitivity of perovskite-based optoelectronics and provide them with a low time constant, resulting in high precision fast devices. Realization of perovskite-based devices translates directly to inexpensive and simplified architectures of optoelectronic systems. In perovskite-based devices, costly silicon or wide bandgap semiconductor fabrication technology is largely replaced by solution processable methods. Their bandgap tunability allows the reduction of the required optical accessories and interconnects in optoelectronic components. For instance, a tuned perovskite-based detector can substitute a narrowband detecting system consisting of a conventional detector and its required optical accessories such as lenses and color filters. These properties of perovskite-based devices lead to the realization of inexpensive, low power and high-performance optoelectronic systems. In this work, the design of a narrowband, low noise, high performance and stable photodetector based on organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite structure is proposed. The full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the device would be in the nanometer range. The response of the device can be tuned using either different ratios of the lead salts or synthetic dyes (macromolecules) in the crystalline structure for color discrimination in machine vision and imaging applications. Non-excitonic photocarrier generation, tunability of the optical bandgap and low voltage requirements for charge carrier generation are the keys to the utility of this optoelectronic device. The goals of this project were to identify the required functional materials (lead salts and synthetic dyes based on their molecular structures) and optimize their performance; the study of their effect on the charge collection narrowing mechanism and bandwidth specifications defined for detectivity, linear dynamic range (LDR) and photoresponse speed. To achieve these goals, it was proposed to study the light detection properties as well as spectroscopic and semiconductor parameter characteristics of fabricated devices. The design considerations of such devices are versatile and may be modulated for different applications.

Quantifying human posture and range of motion remains challenging due to the need for specific technologies, time for data collection and analysis, and space requirements. The demand for affordable and accessible human body position measurement requires alternative methods that cost less, are portable, and provide similar accuracy to expensive multi-camera systems. This thesis developed and evaluated a novel augmented reality mobile app for human posture measurement to bring marker-based body segment measurement to the point of patient contact. The augmented reality app provides live video of the person being measured, AprilTag2 fiducial markers locations in the video, processes marker data, and calculates angles and distances between markers. Results demonstrated that the mobile app can identify, track, and measure angles and distances between AprilTag2 markers attached to a human body in real-time with millimetre accuracy, thereby allowing researchers and clinicians to quantify posture measurements anywhere, at anytime.

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The intent of this study was to describe the effects of long term paraplegia and wheelchair use on upper limb function. Bilateral upper extremity isokinetic and grip strength, pain, and active range of motion were compared in 52 men with paraplegia (mean age 44 years: mean duration of spinal cord injury (SCI) 17 years) and 52 age and activity-level matched able-bodied men. The impact of upper limb pain on activities of daily living (ADL) performance was examined in the paraplegic sample. Strength was not significantly different between the two samples except for bilateral shoulder flexion (able-bodied stronger) and bilateral elbow extension (paraplegia stronger). Strength changed similarly with age in the two groups. The effect of duration of SCI on strength, excluding age, was significant for grip strength only. Duration of paraplegia and activity-level were better predictors of strength than age in 9 of 14 muscle groups, whereas in the able-bodied, age was the best strength predictor. Limited bilateral shoulder internal rotation and non-dominant external rotation were associated with paraplegia. Upper limb pain in the past week was associated with paraplegia (shoulder p<.001; elbow p<.00l; wrist/hand p<.00l). Reported pain prevalences for the paraplegic sample were: shoulder 39%, elbow 31%, wrist/hand 40%. The paraplegic subjects' pain intensity ratings revealed them to be experiencing mild to moderate levels of upper limb pain. Shoulder pain was associated with duration of injury, exclusive of age (p<.05). Measurement of the impact of upper limb pain On 18 activities of daily living (ADL) tasks revealed pain to be experienced by the majority of subjects with paraplegia (mobility tasks 60%; self-care tasks 5 8 % ; general activities tasks 60%). However, only 23-35% had made changes in their routines, and 6-16% had sought assistance with ADL due to upper limb pain. ++ / When age was excluded, it appeared that duration of SCI was more associated with pain during ADL, but this was significant only for pain during self-care tasks. The tasks most reported to cause upper limb pain were work/school, sleep, wheelchair transfers, outdoor wheeling, and driving. These results suggest that preventative and management steps are required to ensure continued independence and quality of life in this group over time. The effect of duration of SCI suggests that limitations in upper limb function may be seen in this population at relatively young ages.

Laser scanners provide a three-dimensional sampled representation of the surfaces of objects. The spatial resolution of the data is much higher than that of conventional surveying methods. The data collected from different locations of a laser scanner must be transformed into a common coordinate system. If good a priori alignment is provided and the point clouds share a large overlapping region, existing registration methods, such as the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) or Chen and Medioni’s method, work well. In practical applications of laser scanners, partially overlapping and unorganised point clouds are provided without good initial alignment. In these cases, the existing registration methods are not appropriate since it becomes very difficult to find the correspondence of the point clouds. A registration method, the Geometric Primitive ICP with the RANSAC (GPICPR), using geometric primitives, neighbourhood search, the positional uncertainty of laser scanners, and an outlier removal procedure is proposed in this thesis. The change of geometric curvature and approximate normal vector of the surface formed by a point and its neighbourhood are used for selecting the possible correspondences of point clouds. In addition, an explicit expression of the position uncertainty of measurement by laser scanners is presented in this dissertation and this position uncertainty is utilised to estimate the precision and accuracy of the estimated relative transformation parameters between point clouds. The GP-ICPR was tested with both simulated data and datasets from close range and terrestrial laser scanners in terms of its precision, accuracy, and convergence region. It was shown that the GP-ICPR improved the precision of the estimated relative transformation parameters as much as a factor of 5. / In addition, the rotational convergence region of the GP-ICPR on the order of 10°, which is much larger than the ICP or its variants, provides a window of opportunity to utilise this automated registration method in practical applications such as terrestrial surveying and deformation monitoring.

Axial rotation is regarded as an essential movement of the trunk that allows many individuals to participate in vocations, sports and activities of daily living. Unfortunately when the destabilising nature of rotation is combined with that of spinal flexion, the risk of injuring the spine can increase significantly. Few studies have investigated the potential benefits that maximizing trunk rotation has in certain vocation and sport-related arenas and none have looked at whether adopting certain spinal postures in the sagittal plane can maximise trunk rotation more than others. The aim of the study was to determine the effects of alterations of trunk inclination, spinal posture, pelvic fixation and turning direction on the active range of motion (ROM) of trunk rotation. Twenty healthy individuals participated in the main study. Retro-reflective markers were placed on key anatomical locations and used to track the movement of the thorax and pelvis during a series of repeated maximal trunk rotations in ten different spinal positions within the sagittal plane. Trunk kinematics and kinetics were recorded simultaneously using an optoelectronic motion analysis and force platform measuring system. A repeated-measures multiple analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used to test for the main effects of trunk inclination, spinal posture, fixation of pelvis and direction of turn on maximum active ROM of trunk rotation, maximum pelvic rotation and the anterior-posterior and lateral displacement of the centre of pressure (COP). To investigate test-retest reliability, ten participants were tested on two separate days. Repeatability for each outcome measure was investigated using interclass correlation coefficients (ICC) and Bland Altman graphs. The majority of subjects showed reasonable test-retest reliability for trunk rotation measures in each of the test positions, with ICC’s ranging between 0.562 – 0.731. Overall, trunk inclination (0°, 22.5°, 45°) forward in the sagittal plane had a significant effect on trunk and pelvic rotation (p<0.001) and lateral displacement of the COP (p<0.005) during trunk rotation. As trunk inclination increased from 0° to 45° there was an average increase in trunk rotation ROM of approximately 10 % (approximately 3.4°). Furthermore, increasing trunk inclination led to an increase in lateral displacement of the COP and a decrease in pelvic rotation. Spinal posture (neutral, flexed, extended) at a forward inclination of 45° had a significant effect on trunk rotation (p<0.01) and pelvic rotation (p<0.05), with a neutral spine averaging approximately 3 % (approximately 1.1°) more trunk rotation than a flexed or extended posture. The position and posture of the spine in the sagittal plane appears to have a significant influence on ranges of trunk rotation. The study suggests that rotating the trunk when adopting a neutral spine inclined to 45° will maximise range of trunk rotation and encourage a natural stabilisation of the lower body. This posture meets the unique set of biomechanical requirements for the sport of golf and may help to reduce the risk of injury in manual material handling tasks. Conversely, rotating the trunk whilst the thoracolumbar spine is flexed leads to a reduction in trunk rotation ROM, encourages greater pelvic and lower body rotation, reduces torque production of the trunk and may increase the risk of lower back injury. These findings have important implications in relation to the teaching of spinal position during vocations, sports and activities of daily living that seek to maximise trunk rotation.

Stretching is a widely prescribed technique that has been demonstrated to increase range of motion. Consequently it may enhance performance and aid in the prevention and treatment of injury. Few studies have investigated the frequency of stretching on a daily basis. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of stretching frequency on range of motion at the ankle joint. The detraining effect was also investigated after a period without stretching. Thirty-one female subjects participated in this study. They were randomly assigned to a control group who did not stretch a group who stretched two times per week (Stretch-2) or a group who stretched four times per week (Stretch-4). The stretching intervention was undertaken over four weeks and targeted the gastrocnemius and soleus muscles. Each stretch was held for duration of 30 seconds and repeated five times. Prior to the intervention (PRE), dorsiflexion was measured using a weights and pulley system that passively moved the ankle joint from a neutral position into dorsiflexion. After the four week stretching period (POST), dorsiflexion was measured once again to determine the change following the stretching programme. Following a further four week period where no stretching took place (FINAL), dorsiflexion was measured to determine the detraining effect. Electromyography was used to monitor the activity of the plantarflexors and dorsiflexors during the measuring procedure. The results of the study showed a significant increase in ankle joint range of motion for the Stretch-4 group (p<0.05) when comparing PRE and POST measurements. The Stretch-2 and control groups did not show significant differences (p>0.05) between PRE and POST measurements. When comparing the PRE and FINAL measurements of the Stretch-4 group, no significant differences were recorded (p>0.05). The POST and FINAL measurements were significantly different (p<0.05). After the detraining period the Stretch-4 group lost 99.8% of their range of motion gains. The present data provide some evidence that the viscoelastic properties of the muscle stretched were unchanged by the four week static stretching programme. The mechanism involved in the observed increase in range of motion for the Stretch-4 group is possibly that of enhanced stretch tolerance of the subject. Further research is required to support this conjecture.

Understanding the relationship between organisms and their environment is particularly important for the conservation and management of endangered species. The kakapo (Strigops habroptilus, Gray 1845) is a critically endangered, lek breeding, flightless nocturnal parrot endemic to New Zealand. In April 1998, a total population of fifty-six kakapo was known to survive on offshore islands. Twenty-six kakapo, thirteen males and thirteen females, were temporarily transferred to Pearl Island (518 ha), southern Stewart Island, from April 1998 to April 1999. The translocation of kakapo to Pearl Island, and subsequent breeding season, provided an ideal experimental framework to study kakapo dispersal, movement patterns, home range development, habitat selection, and lek development during the non-breeding and breeding seasons. A total of 4425 radio locations were analysed for all twenty-six birds, with a mean error polygon of 0.03 ha and an estimated average radio telemetry error of 21.6 m. Various home range analysis techniques were used to estimate kakapo home range size and overlap including: minimum convex polygons (MCP), modified minimum convex polygons (MMCP), harmonic mean analysis, adaptive kernel methods and cluster analysis. Estimates of kakapo home range size differed significantly depending on the method used (ANOVA, general linear model: F₁₃, ₁₀₇₆ = 63.99, p < 0.0001) and the season (F₂, ₁₀₇₆ = 160.75, p < 0.0001). Breeding home range size was significantly larger than non-breeding range size (mean difference = 67.6 ha, t₂₅ = 15.27, p < 0.0001). Calculations from 100% MCP and 95% harmonic mean analysis resulted in larger estimates of home range size and overlap compared to other methods. Cluster and kernel analyses appeared to give the most accurate home range representation for kakapo. Core home range areas showed a greater degree of similarity between methods. Male and female mean annual home range size did not differ significantly, whereas males had significantly (p < 0.05) larger home ranges than females during the nonbreeding season. Minimum convex polygons and harmonic mean analysis suggested that there was no significant difference in the way in which males and females interacted with each other. Kernel and cluster analyses indicated that females would overlap a greater proportion of another bird�s home range than males would. Cluster analysis also indicated that a female would have more of her home range occupied by another bird than a male would. The fact that different methods produced different quantitative results is an important consideration when using home range analysis to make conservation management decisions. Researchers must determine which method is the most appropriate for a particular research objective, species, or study area. The application of geographical information systems, ERDAS image classification techniques and global positioning systems was an integral part of this study. A large-scale vegetation classification map of Pearl Island was produced in order to quantify habitat selection by kakapo. The unsupervised classification technique produced the least accurate vegetation map, with an accuracy measure of 17-23%, compared to 52% for the supervised classification. The highest accuracy was obtained using an integrated approach involving inductive classification and deductive mapping, resulting in a vegetation classification map which correctly classified 95% of vegetation samples. Thirty-seven ecotone classes were identified and a total ecotone length of approximately 124 km was detected. Resource selection ratios and resource selection functions were estimated using a combination of discrete, continuous and area-based habitat variables. Circular buffers around used and available point locations were generated to determine whether kakapo selectively use vegetation mosaics. The probability of selection increased with increasing species diversity in each 75-metre radius buffer. Kakapo selected habitat mosaics and vegetation types with higher species diversity and moderate to high abundance of mature rimu and yellow silver pine trees.