Matching Items (57)
Description
Beta-Amyloid(Aβ) plaques and tau protein tangles in the brain are now widely recognized as the defining hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), followed by structural atrophy detectable on brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. However, current methods to detect Aβ/tau pathology are either invasive (lumbar puncture) or quite costly and not widely available (positron emission tomography (PET)). And one of the particular neurodegenerative regions is the hippocampus to which the influence of Aβ/tau on has been one of the research projects focuses in the AD pathophysiological progress.
In this dissertation, I proposed three novel machine learning and statistical models to examine subtle aspects of the hippocampal morphometry from MRI that are associated with Aβ /tau burden in the brain, measured using PET images. The first model is a novel unsupervised feature reduction model to generate a low-dimensional representation of hippocampal morphometry for each individual subject, which has superior performance in predicting Aβ/tau burden in the brain. The second one is an efficient federated group lasso model to identify the hippocampal subregions where atrophy is strongly associated with abnormal Aβ/Tau. The last one is a federated model for imaging genetics, which can identify genetic and transcriptomic influences on hippocampal morphometry. Finally, I stated the results of these three models that have been published or submitted to peer-reviewed conferences and journals.
ContributorsWu, Jianfeng (Author) / Wang, Yalin (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Liang, Jianming (Committee member) / Wang, Junwen (Committee member) / Wu, Teresa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Communications around sustainability have been found to be incongruent with eliciting the transformative change required to address global climate change and its' repercussions. Recent research has been exploring storytelling in sustainability, specifically with an emphasis on reflexive and emancipatory methods. These methods encourage embracing and contextualizing complexity and intend to target entire cognitive hierarchies. This study explores the possibility of using emancipatory and reflexive storytelling as a tool to change attitudes pertaining to the Valley Metro Light Rail, an example of a complex sustainability mitigation effort. I explore this in four steps: 1) Conducted a pre-survey to gauge preexisting attitudes and predispositions; 2) Provided a narrative that uses storytelling methodologies of reflexivity and emancipation through a story about the light rail; 3) Conducted a post-survey to gauge attitude shift resulting from the narrative intervention; 4) Facilitated a focus group discussion to examine impact qualitatively. These steps intended to provide an answer to the question: How does emancipatory and reflexive storytelling impact affective, cognitive and conative attitudes regarding local alternative transportation? By using tripartite attitude model, qualitative and quantitative analysis this paper determines that reflexive and emancipatory storytelling impacts attitudinal structures. The impact is marginal in the survey response, though the shift indicated a narrowing of participant responses towards one another, indicative of participants subscribing to emancipation and reflexivity of their held attitudes. From the group discussion, it was evident from qualitative responses that participants engaged in emancipating themselves from their held attitudes and reflected upon them. In doing so they engaged in collaboration to make suggestions and suggest actions to help those with experiences that differed from their own. Though this research doesn’t provide conclusive evidence, it opens the door for future research to assess these methodologies as a tool to elicit shared values, beliefs and norms, which are necessary for collective action leading to transformative change in response to global climate change.
ContributorsSwanson, Jake Ryan (Author) / Roseland, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Larson, Kelli (Committee member) / Calhoun, Craig (Committee member) / Schoon, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Understanding the dynamic interactions between humans and wildlife is essential to establishing sustainable wildlife-based ecotourism (WBE). Animal behavior exists within a complex feedback loop that affects overall ecosystem function, tourist satisfaction, and socioeconomics of local communities. However, the specific value that animal behavior plays in provisioning ecosystem services has not been thoroughly evaluated. People enjoy activities that facilitate intimate contact with animals, and there are many perceived benefits associated with these experiences, such as encouraging pro-environmental attitudes that can lead to greater motivation for conservation. There is extensive research on the effects that unregulated tourism activity can have on wildlife behavior, which include implications for population health and survival. Prior to COVID-19, WBE was developing rapidly on a global scale, and the pause in activity caused by the pandemic gave natural systems the chance to recover from environmental damage from over-tourism and provided insights into how tourism could be less impactful in the future. Until now it has been undetermined how changes in animal behavior can alter the relationships and socioeconomics of this multidimensional system. This dissertation provides a thorough exploration of the behavioral, ecological, and economic parameters required to model biosocial interactions and feedbacks within the whale watching system in Las Perlas Archipelago, Panama. Through observational data collected in the field, this project assessed how unmanaged whale watching activity is affecting the behavior of Humpback whales in the area as well as the socioeconomic and conservation contributions of the industry. Additionally, it is necessary to consider what a sustainable form of wildlife tourism might be, and whether the incorporation of technology will help enhance visitor experience while reducing negative impacts on wildlife. To better ascertain whether this concept of this integration would be favorably viewed, a sample of individuals was surveyed about their experiences about using technology to enhance their interactions with nature. This research highlights the need for more deliberate identification and incorporation of the perceptions of all stakeholders (wildlife included) to develop a less-impactful WBE industry that provides people with opportunities to establish meaningful relationships with nature that motivate them to help meet the conservation challenges of today.
ContributorsSurrey, Katie (Author) / Gerber, Leah (Thesis advisor) / Guzman, Hector (Committee member) / Minteer, Ben (Committee member) / Schoon, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
University-level sustainability education in Western academia attempts to focus on eliminating future harm to people and the planet. However, Western academia as an institution upholds systems of oppression and reproduces settler colonialism. This reproduction is antithetical to sustainability goals as it continues patterns of Indigenous erasure and extractive relationships to the Land that perpetuate violence towards people and the planet. Sustainability programs, however, offer several frameworks, including resilience, that facilitate critical interrogations of social-ecological systems. In this thesis, I apply the notion of resilience to the perpetuation of settler colonialism within university-level sustainability education. Specifically, I ask: How is settler colonialism resilient in university-level sustainability education? How are, or could, sustainability programs in Western academic settings address settler colonialism? Through a series of conversational interviews with faculty and leadership from Arizona State University School of Sustainability, I analyzed how university-level sustainability education is both challenging and shaped by settler colonialism. These interviews focused on faculty perspectives on the topic and related issues; the interviews were analyzed using thematic coding in NVivo software. The results of this project highlight that many faculty members are already concerned with and focused on challenging settler colonialism, but that settler colonialism remains resilient in this system due to feedback loops at the personal level and reinforcing mechanisms at the institutional level. This research analyzes these feedback loops and reinforcing mechanisms, among others, and supports the call for anti-colonial and decolonial reconstruction of curriculum, as well as a focus on relationship building, shifting of mindset, and school-wide education on topics of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and systems of oppression in general.
ContributorsBills, Haven (Author) / Klinsky, Sonja (Thesis advisor) / Goebel, Janna (Committee member) / Schoon, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
In 1996, a floral and faunal inventory of the southeastern slopes of the Marojejy Massif, which falls in a protected area known as the Parc national de Marojejy, was conducted in an ascending series of altitudinal transect zones. The 1996 research team worked in five altitudinal zones (referred to as transect zones). Between 3 October and 15 November 2021, a floral and faunal inventory was completed, replicating the locations surveyed in 1996 and closely the dates. Detected bird species were analyzed for changes in elevational distribution between 1996 and 2021. Birds were divided into three feeding behavior groups and tolerance to forest habitat degradation was considered.
ContributorsLangrand, Tahiry (Author) / Schoon, Michael (Thesis director) / Goodman, Steve (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Complex Adaptive Systems (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor)
Created2022-05
Description
Political boundaries often divide ecosystems and create the challenge of conserving the ecosystem across borders. Through transboundary ecosystem management multiple groups can come together and manage the ecosystem that spans their borders collaboratively. In the United States there are several examples of ecosystems that span borders, such as the Sonoran Desert along the US-Mexico frontier and the Rocky Mountains running through the US and Canada. To gain insight into what leads to effective transboundary resource management I compared two case studies that manage resources over borders with multiple collaborators: Glacier National Park and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. These two cases offer contrasting ecosystems and backgrounds in transboundary resource management in the United States. To compare the cases I coded them using a collaborative governance codebook (Schoon et al. 2020). The codebook uses a Context-Mechanisms-Outcomes framework to identify aspects of collaborative governance and contextual factors present in each park (Pawson & Tilley 1997; Salter & Kothari, 2014). Once coded, the cases were compared to identify what aspects were similar and different in the parks to help potentially explain what features did or did not lead to effective transboundary resource management.
ContributorsTaetle, Noah (Author) / Schoon, Michael (Thesis director) / Carr Kelman, Candice (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor)
Created2022-05
Description
Heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants contribute to human health risks worldwide. Among the most common routes of exposure to pollutants for humans are through the consumption of contaminated water and food, with fish being among the greatest vectors for ingestion of heavy metals in humans, particularly mercury.This dissertation consists of three chapters with a central theme of investigating heavy metal and persistent organic pollutant concentrations in fish and corned beef, which are two commonly consumed food items in American Samoa. A literature review illustrated that historically the primary pollutants of concern in fish muscle tissue from American Samoa have been mercury, arsenic, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon mixtures. To better understand the changes in heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants in fish, this study reports an updated data set, comparing concentrations in pollutants as they have changed over time. To further investigate pollutants in fish tissue, 77 locally caught and commonly consumed fish were analyzed for heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants, and baseline human health risk assessments were calculated for contaminants that had available oral reference doses. While in American Samoa collecting fish for contaminant analyses, it was realized that canned corned beef appeared to be more commonly consumed than fresh fish. An IRB approved consumption survey revealed that 89% of American Samoan adults regularly consume fish, which is the same percentage of people that reported eating canned corned beef, indicating a dramatic increase in this food item to their diet since its introduction in the 20th century.
Results of this study indicate that fish muscle tissue generally has higher heavy metal concentrations than canned corned beef, and that mercury continues to be a main contaminant of concern when consuming fresh and canned fish in American Samoa. While none of the heavy metal concentrations in corned beef exceeded calculated action levels, these foods might contribute to negative health outcomes in other ways. One of the main findings of this study is that either the presence or the ability to detect persistent organic pollutant concentrations are increasing in fish tissue and should be periodically monitored to adequately reflect current conditions.
ContributorsLewis, Tiffany Beth (Author) / Polidoro, Beth (Thesis advisor) / Neuer, Susanne (Thesis advisor) / Halden, Rolf (Committee member) / Schoon, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Effective collaboration and cooperation across difference are at the heart of present and future sustainability challenges and solutions. Collaboration among social groups (intragenerational), across time (intergenerational), and across species (interspecies) is each central to achieving sustainability transitions in the 21st century. In practice, there are three types of differences that limit collaboration and cooperation toward sustainability outcomes: differences among social groups, differences across time, and differences across species. Each of these differences have corresponding cognitive biases that challenge collaboration. Social cognitive biases challenge collaboration among social groups; temporal cognitive biases challenge collaboration across time; and anthropocentric cognitive biases challenge collaboration across species. In this work, I present three correctives to collaboration challenges spanning the social, temporal, and species cognitive biases through intervention-specific methods that build beyond traditional framings of empathy, toward social, futures, and ecological empathy. By re-theorizing empathy across these domains, I seek to construct a multidimensional theory of empathy for sustainability, and suggest methods to build it, to bridge differences among people, time horizons, and species for sustainability practice.
ContributorsLambert, Lauren Marie-Jasmine (Author) / Selin, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Schoon, Michael (Thesis advisor) / Tomblin, David (Committee member) / Berbés-Blázquez, Marta (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Wildlife rehabilitation as a practice in the United States exists in a complicated ethical landscape. The Wildlife Rehabilitator's Code of Ethics exists to guide the profession and states that rehabilitators must respect the wildness and maintain the dignity of an animal in their care. This thesis explores the question: How do the attitudes and actions of wildlife rehabilitators exemplify the ways in which they understand and enact respect for an animal’s dignity and wildness while in their care? Additionally, in what circumstances do rehabilitators align and diverge from each other in their interpretation and demonstration of this respect? These questions were answered through a literature review, interviews with rehabilitators, and site visits to wildlife rehabilitation centers in the Phoenix metropolitan area. My results suggest that rehabilitators are aligned in their understanding of respect for wildness and dignity as it applies to the animals in their care that are actively undergoing rehabilitation. Rehabilitators achieved consensus on the idea that they should interact with the animals as little as possible while providing their medically necessary care. Rehabilitators began to diverge when considering the animals in their sanctuary spaces. Specifically, they varied in their perception of wildness in sanctuary animals, which informed how some saw their responsibilities to the animals. Lesser perceived wildness correlated to increased acceptance of forming affectionate relationships with the sanctuary animals, and even feelings of obligation to form these relationships. Based on my research, I argue that the Wildlife Rehabilitator's Code of Ethics should be revised to reflect the specific boundary that wildlife rehabilitators identified in the rehabilitation space and provide substantive guidance as to what respecting wildness and dignity means in this field.
ContributorsBernat, Isabella Elyse (Author) / Minteer, Ben (Thesis advisor) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Schoon, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Though controversial in its utility to the scientific study of nonhuman animals, anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human characteristics to a nonhuman being, is omnipresent in our interactions with other animals. Anthropomorphism is undeniably a fixture of modern zoos, but how anthropomorphism relates to zoos’ contributions to conservation is unclear. In this dissertation, I investigate these potentially dueling, potentially overlapping, messages within great ape exhibits in accredited zoos. Given the complexity of both anthropomorphism and conservation, this dissertation reveals some nuances of how both play out in zoological spaces. Human psychology literature on anthropomorphism indicates that there are a variety of uses for this lens that benefit humans; from feeling we can understand a confusing animal action, to feeling social connection. Whereas the comparative psychology literature highlights a contested utility of anthropomorphism in studies of nonhuman animals. The main findings from this study are four-fold. Firstly, surveys conducted with zoo visitors show that many bring anthropomorphic beliefs with them on their trek through the zoo. Visitors are prone to viewing great apes as strikingly like humans in terms of emotions, emotional expression, and understanding of the world. Secondly, surveyed zoo visitors who agreed more with anthropomorphic statements also agreed more with statements about feeling interconnected with nature. Thirdly, there is no uniform understanding within the zoo community about how zoo exhibits do or should contribute to conservation efforts given that exhibits have multiple goals, one being the safety and wellness of their animal residents. Fourthly, interviews of zoo staff show that they mediate a variety of messages for zoo visitors and walk a sometimes-divisive line between when it’s acceptable to use anthropomorphic framing to discuss zoo animals and when it’s inaccurate. By leveraging a better understanding of these attitudes and relationships, zoos can further empower their staff to navigate these complex issues and improve their mission-based goal of promoting conservation outcomes by acknowledging the human practices embedded in our perceptions of and interactions with zoo animals. This work speaks to the importance of carefully considering the ways we understand animals in zoos, in the wild, and all the places in-between.
ContributorsLyon, Cassandra (Author) / Minteer, Ben A. (Thesis advisor) / Wynne, Clive D.L. (Committee member) / Maynard, Lily (Committee member) / Schoon, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024