The overall objective of this thesis was to determine selenium (Se) levels in the major compartments of aquatic ecosystems and correlate these data with potential Se effects on early life stages of two native fish species. This work was conducted at two uranium (U) mines located in northern Saskatchewan, Key Lake mine and McClean Lake mine. In addition, a site fidelity study was conducted at Key Lake mine to evaluate movement patterns of northern pike inhabiting lakes receiving effluent discharges.<p> At Key Lake mine, Se was accumulated and biomagnified several orders of magnitude higher than its concentration in water (0.7-2.7 µg/L) in lakes receiving discharges, with Se in prey organisms reaching levels above the proposed 3-11 µg/g dry weight (DW) dietary toxicity threshold for fish. Increased concentrations of Se in aquatic biota led to an increase in the Se concentrations in eggs and tissues of northern pike that rely on these organisms as food sources. Furthermore, increases in the incidence of Se-induced deformities above 30% were recorded in fry originating from adults exposed to high levels of dietary Se (> 3µg/g, DW). The increased frequency of deformities found in northern pike fry was associated with a significant increase in the level of Se in northern pike eggs from exposure sites (31.28 - 48.23 µg/g DW) compared to reference (3.19 ± 0.29 µg/g DW).<p> At McClean Lake mine, Se was accumulated and biomagnified through the aquatic food chain with concentrations in some biota groups (e.g., forage fish) exceeding the lower limit (> 3µg/g DW) of the 3-11µg/g (DW) threshold for dietary Se toxicity in fish. Although both northern pike and white sucker females collected from the exposure site showed greater levels of Se in egg and tissues compared to fish collected from a reference site (likely caused by exposure to elevated levels of Se in prey organisms), no increases in Se-induced deformities were found in the developing fish larvae. The lack of a toxic response in fish larvae is in agreement with Se thresholds for early life stage deformities, with egg Se concentrations in northern pike and white sucker collected at the exposure site below the proposed 10 µg/g (DW) threshold associated with the presence of developmental abnormalities. The applicability of the proposed 7.91 µg/g (whole body, DW) Se toxicity threshold to cold water fish is controversial given that most of the research has focused on warm water fish. Therefore, there is an urgent need to conduct studies that allow us to better understand the environmental fate and effects of Se in north temperate (cold water) aquatic systems. The results of my research will contribute valuable information for the establishment of a realistic and environmentally relevant Se threshold for the protection of fish populations in Canadian waters. During the site fidelity study, fish locations were seasonally and daily recorded using a Lotek SRX_400 receiver with handheld Yagi antenna. The results suggest that tagged pike did not migrate out of the study area throughout the study period, with the mean distance traveled ranging from 50 to 400 m. Differences in movement (distance traveled) and home range were found between reference and exposure sites. Overall data suggest that radio-telemetry is a useful tool in environmental studies. This information on northern pike behavior will be valuable towards developing non-lethal sampling methods that could be applied for assessing the effects of industrial discharges in north temperate aquatic ecosystems.

In an attempt to manage values other than timber production, forestry companies have sought a new paradigm to manage forest resources. Based on the hypothesis that wildlife in the boreal forest has adapted to habitat structures created by natural disturbances, some forest harvests have been modified to approximate patterns left after natural disturbance. Attempts at approximating natural disturbance have included retention of patches of live trees within cutblock boundaries, cutting to natural stand boundaries and application of harvest plans with spatio-temporally aggregated cutblocks (single-pass harvests). Single-pass harvesting is a recent attempt to better approximate natural disturbance in the boreal and has not been evaluated for its potential to sustain wildlife. I therefore contrasted residual patch pattern and composition, as well as landscape-scale avian abundance and composition in 1) single-pass; 2) multi-pass; and 3) salvage logged post-fire harvests, and contrasted these with unsalvaged post-fire sites. Post-fire sites were used to define the Natural Range of Variation (NRV). Seventy-two plots (12 post-fire, 15 post-salvage harvest, 16 single-pass harvest, and 29 multi-pass harvest) were surveyed for avian community composition and abundance one to five years post disturbance. <p>I contrasted the composition of remaining live forest stands at the landscape-scale and in residual patches by pairwise comparison of pre- and post-disturbance composition. At the landscape-scale, non-metric mutlidimensional scaling suggested post-disturbance landscape composition of post-fire and salvage-logged plots was similar to pre-disturbance landscape composition, with a tendency toward greater survival of hardwoods and lower survival of jack pine (Pinus banksiana) or black spruce (Picea mariana). However, harvesting of hardwoods and mixedwood stand types in single and multi-pass harvests led to landscapes with more bog and swamp habitats. <p>Comparison of residual patch composition with pre-disturbance composition was made using blocked multi-response permutation procedures. Post-fire plots (i.e. NRV) had residual patches that were representative of pre-disturbance composition, but with slightly more hardwoods and less black spruce/jack pine than expected by chance. All harvested treatments had similar biases among residuals to those left by fire, except that multi-pass harvests tended to leave less mixedwood habitat than expected. Multi-pass harvests also had less area in residual patches, and patches were smaller, more isolated and less complex in shape. Single-pass harvests had residual patches that were more representative of the size, shape, complexity, and change in composition seen post-fire. Multi-pass harvests only had 14% of the residual patch area in patches at least 5 ha in size, whereas this proportion was higher in fire (83%), salvage-logged areas (42%), and single-pass harvests (57%). Old-growth associated species might only persist in patches 5 ha or larger, and so multi-pass harvesting may have negative consequences for these forest birds.<p>Redundancy analysis indicated that bird communities differed from the NRV in all harvest treatments. However, single-pass harvests provided a slightly better fit to NRV than did multi-pass harvesting. Community similarity was influenced by non-linear responses to area harvested, residual retention, residual composition and pre-disturbance forest composition. An optimization routine was used to select harvest characteristics that would maximize community similarity to NRV. Optimization suggested that community similarity to NRV can be maximized by using single-pass harvests over multi-pass harvests, harvesting 66-88% of of a planning unit, and retaining 5-19% of the harvest area as live residual patches.<p>My results suggest that single-pass harvesting may be ecologically more sustainable than multi-pass harvests. Future studies are required to determine whether both harvesting treatments converge with NRV through time. Greater overlap of salvage-logged avian communities with NRV suggests that experimentation with prescribed fire as a post-harvest treatment may be the best method to bring harvests ecologically closer to NRV, and highlights the need to conserve early post-fire habitats.

The basic principle in SAS is to use an array which is small in length to create a long synthetic array thus the better resolution is achieved through the use of signal processing. Additionally, the resolution that is independent of range and signal frequency, makes SAS a advantageous tool for applications. Although the origin of SAS comes from SAR, SAS still needs to overcome all constraints for real-world application. In a previous study by Sung and prof. Liu, published results of the along track resolution experiments which were well done however there was still much room in range resolution, the purpose of this research is to achieve high range resolution at any ranges. Indeed there are many existing factors affecting the capability of resolution which including characteristic of the target, certain arrangements of targets, bandwidth, waveforms and pulse duration and etc. High range resolution is obtained using pulse compression techniques. The experiments were carried out using the transducers of AST MK VI 192 kHz which were employed to transmit and receive signals, scanned various copper balls at anechoic water tank(4 m ¡Ñ 3.5 m ¡Ñ 2 m) in NSYSU. From the equipment we have now results were evaluated based on both simulated and real data: for the range resolution the pulse length is very important the shortest pulse length on an object would be 2L/c theoretically, the measured range resolution is about 7.5 cm for the 20-kHz bandwidth signals and 5 cm for along track resolution. As all the experiments have been successful in the Water Tank, we intent to launch further investigation of this research to the real world application of SAS i.e. in Sizihwan Bay Marine Test Field.

With the growing demand of embedded graphics applications, how to provide an efficient graphics hardware acceleration solution has drawn much attention. It is well known that computer graphics contains two major domains: two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) graphics. Each domain owns large amounts of applications, such that general embedded platforms will require both graphics acceleration supports. This thesis proposes an advanced texture unit architecture which can provide various 3D texture filtering functions including trilinear, anistrophics filtering etc , and 2D coloring, painting, and texturing functions. Our proposed design consists of a core computation unit, and a set of data registers. The equations for those supported functions are decomposed into a series of basic arithmetic operations such as multiply-add-accumulation, multiply, etc executed by the core computation unit. To evaluate those equations for each pixel may require some pre-computed parameters which will be computed outside our unit in advance by the system¡¦s micro-controller. The equations can be computed by our texture unit based on the selected finite-state machine sequences which is stored in the on-chip control table. By updating those sequences can change the functionality provided by our chip. The overall cost of the proposed unit is about 28.36k gates. In addition to various texturing functions, this thesis also proposes an implementation of texture function for high-dynamic range (HDR) textures. HDR textures can provide various color details according to the frame¡¦s global illumination environment. Therefore, the 3D rendering system has to incorporate a tone-mapping mechanism to map the HDR image into normal color range of output display system. To reduce the overall tone-mapping implementation cost, this thesis uses an extra accumulator between the standard per-fragment rendering pipeline stages to accumulate the global illumination intensity based on the depth comparison result of the incoming pixel. After all of the pixels have passed through the pipeline stages, every pixel of the stored rendering result will be fetched into a mapping unit which will generate its mapping color in the normal dynamic range. The overall cost of the additional hardware for the realization of HDR textures is about 6.98k gates.

Most bridges in Taiwan are simple beam bridge , and most of them have been used more than twenty years , even some of them are used fifty years.In recent years , there are many floods in Taiwan rivers . There are often high-velocity,flow,and entrainment of a large number of sediment from happening.This situation for the bridge itself and the safety of people cause a great threat , bridge health examination become an important issue after Typhoon Morakot. In this study , we explored modern measurement technique for bridge deformation monitoring , and it can also used bridge health examination. The cross bridge measurement and modeling is focused on the vicinity area around Da-Jia Bridge of Highway 1 based on Angle-Distance monitoring survey, Leveling, close-range photogrammetry, and 3D laser scanning technologies. The 3D point cloud model of bridge is constructed for the purpose of comparing the accuracy between four technologies. Moreover, the discussion and investigation is also conducted for at least three bridges span and two-side of the bridge deformation monitoring. P29 to P25 bridge pier deflection measurements of the monitoring points for each completed total of five point and the deformation monitoring accuracy is analyzed base on four technologies. Finally, development of the technical specification draft for bridge deformation monitoring is to aim the goal of technologically advanced, economical, and safe application in the technology of deformation monitoring of bridges. At present, the draft of technical specification applies only to the measurements of structure, settlement, displacement, and tilt for simple beam-type bridge. The bridge deformation monitoring after the flood season can reflect the degree of deformation or the deformation trend.

Woody encroachment upon grasslands is a global trend that is cause for concern. In the Lampasas Cut Plain of Texas, Ashe juniper is the dominant woody invasive species. Grassland restoration is dependent upon proper seedbed preparation and seedling establishment. Shearing and bulldozing are common methods of juniper removal. Three hypotheses were tested in this experiment. The first was that bulldozing and shearing results in similar seedbed preparations. The second was that electrical conductivity (ECa) models soil moisture storage heterogeneity across a landscape. The third hypothesis tested was that bulldozing and shearing result in similar seedling establishment. Eighteen plots were selected and three treatments were applied: 1) shearing, 2) dozing, and 3) control. After clearing with both juniper removal methods, the levels of soil disturbance and vegetation regrowth were measured. Point measures were used to describe soil surface disturbance, and at each point, presence and size of ground cover and surface depressions were recorded. After germination, when the plants were large enough to identify, vegetation was sampled at 20-24 locations in each plot. At each sample location a quadrat was placed on the transect, and total herbaceous, grass, forb, rock, litter, and bare soil cover were recorded in cover classes. All species were identified, seeded species were enumerated, and in the second vegetation sample, dominant species were assigned a cover class. There was considerable variation between plots for all parameters measured. Bulldozing created a greater number of depressions in the soil than shearing. It also had a higher percent of large depressions. There was no difference in ground cover change between treatments except in the case of the largest litter category. ECa was effective in modeling soil moisture storage patterns and had a lower coefficient of variation than manual soil depth measurements. There was no difference between sheared and dozed plots for any of the vegetation establishment parameters, but control plots had lower establishment in most categories. Overall, there was little difference between the two treatments in seedbed preparation and seedling establishment. The cost of shearing was 80% of the cost of dozing, which made it more desirable in this scenario.

Thermoacoustic tomography (TAT) is a newly emerging modality in biomedical imaging. It combines the good contrast of electromagnetic and good resolution of ultrasound imaging. The mathematical model of TAT is the observability problem for the wave equation: one observes the data on a hyper-surface and reconstructs the initial perturbation. In this dissertation, we consider several mathematical problems of TAT. The first problem is the inversion formulas. We provide a family of closed form inversion formulas to reconstruct the initial perturbation from the observed data. The second problem is the range description. We present the range description of the spherical mean Radon transform, which is an important transform in TAT. The next problem is the stability analysis for TAT. We prove that the reconstruction of the initial perturbation from observed data is not H¨older stable if some observability condition is violated. The last problem is the speed determination. The question is whether the observed data uniquely determines the ultrasound speed and initial perturbation. We provide some initial results on this issue. They include the unique determination of the unknown constant speed, a weak local uniqueness, a characterization of the non-uniqueness, and a characterization of the kernel of the linearized operator.

A fundamental problem in spacecraft proximity operations is the determination of the 6 degree of freedom relative navigation solution between the observer reference frame and a reference frame tied to a proximal body. For the most unconstrained case, the proximal body may be uncontrolled, and the observer spacecraft has no a priori information on the body. A spacecraft in this scenario must simultaneously map the generally poorly known body being observed, and safely navigate relative to it. Simultaneous localization and mapping(SLAM)is a difficult problem which has been the focus of research in recent years. The most promising approaches extract local features in 2D or 3D measurements and track them in subsequent observations by means of matching a descriptor. These methods exist for both active sensors such as Light Detection and Ranging(LIDAR) or laser RADAR(LADAR), and passive sensors such as CCD and CMOS camera systems. This dissertation presents a method for fusing time of flight(ToF) range data inherent to scanning LIDAR systems with the passive light field measurements of optical systems, extracting features which exploit information from each sensor, and solving the unique SLAM problem inherent to spacecraft proximity operations. Scale Space analysis is extended to unstructured 3D point clouds by means of an approximation to the Laplace Beltrami operator which computes the scale space on a manifold embedded in 3D object space using Gaussian convolutions based on a geodesic distance weighting. The construction of the scale space is shown to be equivalent to both the application of the diffusion equation to the surface data, as well as the surface evolution process which results from mean curvature flow. Geometric features are localized in regions of high spatial curvature or large diffusion displacements at multiple scales. The extracted interest points are associated with a local multi-field descriptor constructed from measured data in the object space. Defining features in object space instead of image space is shown to bean important step making the simultaneous consideration of co-registered texture and the associated geometry possible. These descriptors known as Multi-Field Diffusion Flow Signatures encode the shape, and multi-texture information of local neighborhoods in textured range data. Multi-Field Diffusion Flow Signatures display utility in difficult space scenarios including high contrast and saturating lighting conditions, bland and repeating textures, as well as non-Lambertian surfaces. The effectiveness and utility of Multi-Field Multi-Scale(MFMS) Features described by Multi-Field Diffusion Flow Signatures is evaluated using real data from proximity operation experiments performed at the Land Air and Space Robotics(LASR) Laboratory at Texas A&M University.

The standard IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol assumes that each mobile host uses maximum transmission power for the transmission of each packet. However, energy is very valuable resources for mobile host in ad hoc wireless network. In the past, several researches about power control were proposed. These power control schemes use different power levels and one more separate power control channel in order to save energy, avoid occurrence of collision, and increase network channel utilization. But various power levels lead to each mobile host having different transmission power ranges, and cause the additional hidden terminal problem, namely heterogeneous power terminal problem. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a simple and efficient power control protocol that used dynamic adjustment transmission power ranges to reduce power consumption, avoid collision, increase the network channel utilization, and ease heterogeneous power terminal problem as well.

A low voltage low power sigma¡Vdelta modulator for voice applications is presented. The implementation of proposed sigma-delta modulator is based on switched-capacitor circuit. Bootstrapped switches were used to replace CMOS transmission gates for increasing the insufficient driving of switched-capacitor circuit under the low voltage operation. To reduce the power dissipation, an improved current mirror OTA were designed with rail-to-rail output swing, which can also make the voltage gain enhance 10~20 dB and overcome the poor voltage gain shortage of traditional current mirror OTA. The post-simulation result shows that the modulator achieves a dynamic range of 77 dB, a peak signal-to-noise ratio of 82 dB, and the sigma-delta modulator dissipates 25£gW under 1.1-V voltage supply, using TSMC 0.18£gm 1P6M CMOS technology.