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- Creators: Barnaby, Hugh
Description
Urbanization rapidly alters the environment, leading to a decrease in biodiversity in urban areas. A challenge associated with urbanized areas is the increased heat caused by the urban heat island effect. Heat may have an important impact on arthropods particularly due to their status as ectotherms. Animal behavior reveals how individuals interact with their environment. A behavioral syndrome describes consistent individual differences in behaviors that are correlated across different behavioral contexts or situations. Understanding the Western Black Widow's behavioral responses to the urban heat island effect has important implications for the control of a pest species. In this study, the relationship between rising urban temperatures and voracity, web-building, and cannibalism behaviors of juvenile Western Black Widows was examined. Spiders raised in the urban temperature treatment were predicted to have more aggressive behavioral syndromes, characterized by shorter latencies to forage, greater web-building activity, and shorter latencies to cannibalize as compared to spiders raised in rural or intermediate temperature treatments. A correlation between the latency to attack the first fly and second fly was found, however there were no other correlations evidencing a behavioral syndrome. Temperature was found to affect foraging, web-building, and cannibalism behaviors where spiders in urban areas demonstrated increased activity in all behavioral contexts. The possession of behavioral plasticity rather than a behavioral syndrome is likely what allows Black Widows to be successful urban pests.
ContributorsGarver, Emily Elizabeth (Author) / Johnson, James Chadwick (Thesis director) / Foltz-Sweat, Jennifer (Committee member) / Kitchen, Kathryn (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Analog to Digital Converters (ADCs) are a critical component in modern circuit applications. ADCs are used in virtually every application in which a digital circuit is interacting with data from the real world, ranging from commercial applications to crucial military and aerospace applications, and are especially important when interacting with sensors that observe environmental factors. Due to the critical nature of these converters, as well as the vast range of environments in which they are used, it is important that they accurately sample data regardless of environmental factors. These environmental factors range from input noise and power supply variations to temperature and radiation, and it is important to know how each may affect the accuracy of the resulting data when designing circuits that depend upon the data from these ADCs. These environmental factors are considered hostile environments, as they each generally have a negative effect on the operation of an ADC. This thesis seeks to investigate the effects of several of these hostile environmental variables on the performance of analog to digital converters. Three different analog to digital converters with similar specifications were selected and analyzed under common hostile environments. Data was collected on multiple copies of an ADC and averaged together to analyze the results using multiple characteristics of converter performance. Performance metrics were obtained across a range of frequencies, input noise, input signal offsets, power supply voltages, and temperatures. The obtained results showed a clear decrease in performance farther from a room temperature environment, but the results for several other environmental variables showed either no significant correlation or resulted in inconclusive data.
ContributorsSwanson, Taylor Catherine (Co-author) / Millman, Hershel (Co-author) / Barnaby, Hugh (Thesis director) / Garrity, Douglas (Committee member) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05