Matching Items (18)
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Description
Since its inception in 1973, the Endangered Species Act has been met with both praise and criticism. More than 40 years later, the Act is still polarizing, with proponents applauding its power to protect species and critics arguing against its perceived ineffectiveness and potential mismanagement. Recovery plans, which were required

Since its inception in 1973, the Endangered Species Act has been met with both praise and criticism. More than 40 years later, the Act is still polarizing, with proponents applauding its power to protect species and critics arguing against its perceived ineffectiveness and potential mismanagement. Recovery plans, which were required by the 1988 amendments to the Act, play an important role in organizing efforts to protect and recover species under the Act. In 1999, in an effort to evaluate the process, the Society for Conservation Biology commissioned an independent review of endangered species recovery planning. From these findings, the SCB made key recommendations for how management agencies could improve the recovery planning process, after which the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service redrafted their recovery planning guidelines. One important recommendation called for recovery plans to make threats a primary focus, including organizing and prioritizing recovery tasks for threat abatement. Here, I seek to determine the extent to which SCB recommendations were incorporated into these new guidelines, and if, in turn, the recommendations regarding threats manifested in recovery plans written under the new guidelines. I found that the guidelines successfully incorporated most SCB recommendations, except those that addressed monitoring. As a result, recent recovery plans have improved in their treatment of threats, but still fail to adequately incorporate threat monitoring. This failure suggests that developing clear guidelines for monitoring should be an important priority in future ESA recovery planning.
ContributorsTroyer, Caitlin (Author) / Gerber, Leah (Thesis advisor) / Minteer, Ben (Committee member) / Guston, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
There has been considerable advancement in the algae research field to move algae production for biofuels and bio-products forward to become commercially viable. However, there is one key element that humans cannot control, the natural externalities that impact production. An algae cultivation system is similar to agricultural crop farming practices.

There has been considerable advancement in the algae research field to move algae production for biofuels and bio-products forward to become commercially viable. However, there is one key element that humans cannot control, the natural externalities that impact production. An algae cultivation system is similar to agricultural crop farming practices. Algae are grown on an area of land for a certain time period with the aim of harvesting the biomass produced. One of the advantages of using algae biomass is that it can be used as a source of energy in the form of biofuels. Major advances in algae research and development practices have led to new knowledge about the remarkable potential of algae to serve as a sustainable source of biofuel. The challenge is to make the price of biofuels from algae cost-competitive with the price of petroleum-based fuels. The scope of this research was to design a concept for an automated system to control specific externalities and determine if integrating the system in an algae cultivation system could improve the algae biomass production process. This research required the installation and evaluation of an algae cultivation process, components selection and computer software programming for an automated system. The results from the automated system based on continuous real time monitored variables validated that the developed system contributes insights otherwise not detected from a manual measurement approach. The implications of this research may lead to technology that can be used as a base model to further improve algae cultivation systems.
ContributorsPuruhito, Emil (Author) / Sommerfeld, Milton (Thesis advisor) / Gintz, Jerry (Thesis advisor) / Alford, Eddie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Technological advances have enabled the generation and collection of various data from complex systems, thus, creating ample opportunity to integrate knowledge in many decision making applications. This dissertation introduces holistic learning as the integration of a comprehensive set of relationships that are used towards the learning objective. The holistic view

Technological advances have enabled the generation and collection of various data from complex systems, thus, creating ample opportunity to integrate knowledge in many decision making applications. This dissertation introduces holistic learning as the integration of a comprehensive set of relationships that are used towards the learning objective. The holistic view of the problem allows for richer learning from data and, thereby, improves decision making.

The first topic of this dissertation is the prediction of several target attributes using a common set of predictor attributes. In a holistic learning approach, the relationships between target attributes are embedded into the learning algorithm created in this dissertation. Specifically, a novel tree based ensemble that leverages the relationships between target attributes towards constructing a diverse, yet strong, model is proposed. The method is justified through its connection to existing methods and experimental evaluations on synthetic and real data.

The second topic pertains to monitoring complex systems that are modeled as networks. Such systems present a rich set of attributes and relationships for which holistic learning is important. In social networks, for example, in addition to friendship ties, various attributes concerning the users' gender, age, topic of messages, time of messages, etc. are collected. A restricted form of monitoring fails to take the relationships of multiple attributes into account, whereas the holistic view embeds such relationships in the monitoring methods. The focus is on the difficult task to detect a change that might only impact a small subset of the network and only occur in a sub-region of the high-dimensional space of the network attributes. One contribution is a monitoring algorithm based on a network statistical model. Another contribution is a transactional model that transforms the task into an expedient structure for machine learning, along with a generalizable algorithm to monitor the attributed network. A learning step in this algorithm adapts to changes that may only be local to sub-regions (with a broader potential for other learning tasks). Diagnostic tools to interpret the change are provided. This robust, generalizable, holistic monitoring method is elaborated on synthetic and real networks.
ContributorsAzarnoush, Bahareh (Author) / Runger, George C. (Thesis advisor) / Bekki, Jennifer (Thesis advisor) / Pan, Rong (Committee member) / Saghafian, Soroush (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
This paper examines how equity analysts' roles as information intermediaries and monitors affect corporate liquidity policy and its associated value of cash, providing new evidence that analysts have a direct impact on corporate liquidity policy. Greater analyst coverage (1) reduces information asymmetry between a firm and outside shareholders and (2)

This paper examines how equity analysts' roles as information intermediaries and monitors affect corporate liquidity policy and its associated value of cash, providing new evidence that analysts have a direct impact on corporate liquidity policy. Greater analyst coverage (1) reduces information asymmetry between a firm and outside shareholders and (2) enhances the monitoring process. Consistent with these arguments, analyst coverage increases the value of cash, thereby allowing firms to hold more cash. The cash-to-assets ratio increases by 5.2 percentage points when moving from the bottom analyst-coverage decile to the top decile. The marginal value of $1 of corporate cash holdings is $0.93 for the bottom analyst-coverage decile and $1.83 for the top decile. The positive effects remain robust after a battery of endogeneity checks. I also perform tests employing a unique dataset that consists of public and private firms, as well as a dataset that consists of public firms that have gone private. A public firm with analyst coverage can hold approximately 8% more cash than its private counterpart. These findings constitute new evidence on the real effect of analyst coverage.
ContributorsChang, Ching-Hung (Author) / Bates, Thomas (Thesis advisor) / Bharath, Sreedhar (Committee member) / Lindsey, Laura (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurological disorder with complicated and disabling motor and non-motor symptoms. The pathology for PD is difficult and expensive. Furthermore, it depends on patient diaries and the neurologist’s subjective assessment of clinical scales. Objective, accurate, and continuous patient monitoring have become possible with the

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurological disorder with complicated and disabling motor and non-motor symptoms. The pathology for PD is difficult and expensive. Furthermore, it depends on patient diaries and the neurologist’s subjective assessment of clinical scales. Objective, accurate, and continuous patient monitoring have become possible with the advancement in mobile and portable equipment. Consequently, a significant amount of work has been done to explore new cost-effective and subjective assessment methods or PD symptoms. For example, smart technologies, such as wearable sensors and optical motion capturing systems, have been used to analyze the symptoms of a PD patient to assess their disease progression and even to detect signs in their nascent stage for early diagnosis of PD.

This review focuses on the use of modern equipment for PD applications that were developed in the last decade. Four significant fields of research were identified: Assistance diagnosis, Prognosis or Monitoring of Symptoms and their Severity, Predicting Response to Treatment, and Assistance to Therapy or Rehabilitation. This study reviews the papers published between January 2008 and December 2018 in the following four databases: Pubmed Central, Science Direct, IEEE Xplore and MDPI. After removing unrelated articles, ones published in languages other than English, duplicate entries and other articles that did not fulfill the selection criteria, 778 papers were manually investigated and included in this review. A general overview of PD applications, devices used and aspects monitored for PD management is provided in this systematic review.
ContributorsDeb, Ranadeep (Author) / Ogras, Umit Y. (Thesis advisor) / Shill, Holly (Committee member) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Safe, readily available, and reliable sources of water are an essential component of any municipality’s infrastructure. Phoenix, Arizona, a southwestern city, has among the highest per capita water use in the United States, making it essential to carefully manage its reservoirs. Generally, municipal water bodies are monitored through field sampling.

Safe, readily available, and reliable sources of water are an essential component of any municipality’s infrastructure. Phoenix, Arizona, a southwestern city, has among the highest per capita water use in the United States, making it essential to carefully manage its reservoirs. Generally, municipal water bodies are monitored through field sampling. However, this approach is limited spatially and temporally in addition to being costly. In this study, the application of remotely sensed reflectance data from Landsat 7’s Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) and Landsat 8’s Operational Land Imager (OLI) along with data generated through field-sampling is used to gain a better understanding of the seasonal development of algal communities and levels of suspended particulates in the three main terminal reservoirs supplying water to the Phoenix metro area: Bartlett Lake, Lake Pleasant, and Saguaro Lake. Algal abundances, particularly the abundance of filamentous cyanobacteria, increased with warmer temperatures in all three reservoirs and reached the highest comparative abundance in Bartlett Lake. Prymnesiophytes (the class of algae to which the toxin-producing golden algae belong) tended to peak between June and August, with one notable peak occurring in Saguaro Lake in August 2017 during which time a fish-kill was observed. In the cooler months algal abundance was comparatively lower in all three lakes, with a more even distribution of abundance across algae classes. In-situ data from March 2017 to March 2018 were compared with algal communities sampled approximately ten years ago in each reservoir to understand any possible long-term changes. The findings show that the algal communities in the reservoirs are relatively stable, particularly those of the filamentous cyanobacteria, chlorophytes, and prymnesiophytes with some notable exceptions, such as the abundance of diatoms, which increased in Bartlett Lake and Lake Pleasant. When in-situ data were compared with Landsat-derived reflectance data, two-band combinations were found to be the best-estimators of chlorophyll-a concentration (as a proxy for algal biomass) and total suspended sediment concentration. The ratio of the reflectance value of the red band and the blue band produced reasonable estimates for the in-situ parameters in Bartlett Lake. The ratio of the reflectance value of the green band and the blue band produced reasonable estimates for the in-situ parameters in Saguaro Lake. However, even the best performing two-band algorithm did not produce any significant correlation between reflectance and in-situ data in Lake Pleasant. Overall, remotely-sensed observations can significantly improve our understanding of the water quality as measured by algae abundance and particulate loading in Arizona Reservoirs, especially when applied over long timescales.
ContributorsRussell, Jazmine Barkley (Author) / Neuer, Susanne (Thesis advisor) / Fox, Peter (Committee member) / Myint, Soe (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
The transition from high school to college is marked by many changes, one of the most significant being the increased accessibility of alcohol, putting college students at high risk for alcohol-related consequences. It is imperative to identify factors that can protect young adults against these risks during this critical period.

The transition from high school to college is marked by many changes, one of the most significant being the increased accessibility of alcohol, putting college students at high risk for alcohol-related consequences. It is imperative to identify factors that can protect young adults against these risks during this critical period. Although peers become increasingly influential in college, extant literature has shown that parents still have an impact on their children's behavior during this time. While parents spend less time with their children after college matriculation, they may indirectly protect against risky drinking behaviors by instilling certain values into their children before they make this transition. Using data from a large sample of students during their senior year of high school and their freshman year of college, the current study sought to examine interactive effects of parental communication and parental knowledge and caring on drinking behavior, and the extent to which internalization of personal drinking values mediate these effects. The primary study hypotheses were tested using path analysis conducted in Mplus 7.0. Full information maximum likelihood (FIML) estimation was utilized to estimate missing data and bootstrapping was used to address non-normality in the data. Results showed that, for those whose parents were high in knowledge and caring, higher levels of communication were associated with lower risk for alcohol use and problems at wave 3 through less permissive drinking values at wave 1. This finding has important implications for prevention approaches designed to reduce risk for heavy drinking and related problems during the transition to college.
ContributorsHartman, Jessica Danielle (Author) / Corbin, William (Thesis director) / Knight, George (Committee member) / Chassin, Laurie (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2015-05
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Description
High concentrations of carbon monoxide and particulate matter can cause respiratory disease, illness, and death in high doses. Air pollution is a concern in many urban areas of emerging markets that rely on outdated technologies for transportation and electricity generation; rural air quality is also a concern when noting the

High concentrations of carbon monoxide and particulate matter can cause respiratory disease, illness, and death in high doses. Air pollution is a concern in many urban areas of emerging markets that rely on outdated technologies for transportation and electricity generation; rural air quality is also a concern when noting the high prevalence of products of incomplete combustion resulting from open fires for cooking and heating. Monitoring air quality is an essential step to identifying these and other factors that affect air quality, and thereafter informing engineering and policy decisions to improve the quality of air. This study seeks to measure changes in air quality across spatial and temporal domains, with a specific focus on microclimates within an urban area. A prototype, low-cost air quality monitoring device has been developed to measure the concentrations of particulate matter, ozone, and carbon monoxide multiple times per minute. The device communicates data wirelessly via cell towers, and can run off-grid using a solar PV-battery system. The device can be replicated and deployed across urban regions for high-fidelity emissions monitoring to explore the effect of anthropogenic and environmental factors on intra-hour air quality. Hardware and software used in the device is described, and the wireless data communication protocols and capabilities are discussed.
ContributorsReilly, Kyle (Co-author) / Birner, Michael (Co-author) / Johnson, Nathan (Thesis director) / Gary, Kevin (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-05
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Description
Concussions and traumatic brain injuries are mechanical events which can derive from no specific activity or event. However, these injuries occur often during athletic and sporting events but many athletes experiencing these symptoms go undiagnosed and continue playing without proper medical attention. The current gold standard for diagnosing athletes with

Concussions and traumatic brain injuries are mechanical events which can derive from no specific activity or event. However, these injuries occur often during athletic and sporting events but many athletes experiencing these symptoms go undiagnosed and continue playing without proper medical attention. The current gold standard for diagnosing athletes with concussions is to have medical professionals on the sidelines of events to perform qualitative standardized assessments which may not be performed frequently enough and are not specialized for each athlete. The purpose of this report is to discuss a study sanctioned by Arizona State University's Project HoneyBee and additional affiliations to validate a third-party mouth guard device product to recognize and detect force impacts blown to an athlete's head during athletic activity. Current technology in health monitoring medical devices can allow users to apply this device as an additional safety mechanism for early concussion awareness and diagnosis. This report includes the materials and methods used for experimentation, the discussion of its results, and the complications which occurred and areas for improvement during the preliminary efforts of this project. Participants in the study were five non-varsity ASU Wrestling athletes who volunteered to wear a third-party mouth guard device during sparring contact at practice. Following a needed calibration period for the devices, results were recorded both through visual observation and with the mouth guard devices using an accelerometer and gyroscope. This study provided a sound understanding for the operation and functionality of the mouth guard devices. The mouth guard devices have the capability to provide fundamental avenues of research for future investigations.
ContributorsTielke, Austin Wyatt (Author) / Ross, Heather (Thesis director) / LaBelle, Jeffrey (Committee member) / Harrington Bioengineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
In rural and urban areas of Nigeria, dependence on groundwater is increasing since the population is growing and high quality, treated municipal water is scarce. Municipal drinking water is often compromised because of old and leaking distribution pipes. About 58% of the water consumed in Lagos State, Nigeria, comes from

In rural and urban areas of Nigeria, dependence on groundwater is increasing since the population is growing and high quality, treated municipal water is scarce. Municipal drinking water is often compromised because of old and leaking distribution pipes. About 58% of the water consumed in Lagos State, Nigeria, comes from residential wells. However, a majority of residential wells are shallow wells that are constructed relatively close to septic tanks or pit latrines and are therefore subject to contamination. In certain parts of Africa, there is high potential of severe epidemic if water quality is not improved. With increasing reliance on groundwater, a need exists to monitor the quality of groundwater. This thesis develops a plan for a monitoring program for residential wells in Lagos State, Nigeria. The program focuses on ways by which owners can maintain reasonably good water quality, and on the role of government in implementing water quality requirements. In addition, this thesis describes a survey conducted in various areas of Lagos State to assess community awareness of the importance of groundwater quality and its impact on individuals and the community at large. The survey shows that 30% to 40% of the households have located their wells and septic tanks in the same general area. Various templates have been created to help the staff of a future monitoring program team to effectively gather information during site characterization. A "Questions and Answers" leaflet has been developed to educate citizens about the need for monitoring residential wells. 
ContributorsTalabi, Omogbemiga Adepitan (Author) / Edwards, David (Thesis advisor) / Hild, Nicholas (Committee member) / Olson, Larry (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010