Master of Science (MS), Bowling Green State University, 2020, Biological Sciences

The distribution, abundance, and movement of mammals can be heavily influenced by the configuration of the landscape, including boundary effects. Management practices are commonly used by park managers to restore and conserve certain natural habitats (e.g., prairies, savannas), and may produce distinct edges. The challenge is that there can be unintended detrimental consequences to the organisms that depend on these managed habitats and the adjacent areas. Research on the effects of management usually focuses on vegetation or a specific focal species of management, but this research focused on the effects of management on native terrestrial mammals that are not usually the target species for early successional habitat management. My research focused on surveying nonvolant small mammals and bats at the managed and unmanaged level, site level, and landscape level and evaluating the effects of these managed edges on native mammals. I used tracking tubes to survey small mammals and stationary acoustic monitors to survey bats. I focused on prescribed burning as the main form of management for this project since prescribed burns produced the most distinct boundaries compared to herbicide and mechanical vegetation removal. My study took place in the Oak Openings Preserve in northwestern Ohio. My goal was to investigate how prescribed burning impacted wildlife, what structures and characteristics were the most important for organisms, and which could be maintained or created by burning. The results provide guidelines to help managers reach their goals of creating and maintaining viable natural remnants for native biodiversity. My results suggested that both groups of mammals value open areas and certain vegetation characteristics such as sapling and crypto-biotic crust that result from the prescribed burns. My study emphasizes the importance of having an unburned area adjacent to a burned area to allow for dispersal and resource availability, and the importance of studying (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Karen Root Ph. D. (Advisor); Helen Michaels Ph. D. (Committee Member); Shannon Pelini Ph. D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Biology

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2020, Arts and Sciences: Geography

Previous research has recognized the importance of edges to crime. Various scholars have explored how one specific type of edges such as physical edges or social edges affect crime, but rarely investigated the importance of the composite edge effect. To address this gap, this study introduces nightlight data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite sensor on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership Satellite (NPP-VIIRS) to measure composite edges. This study defines edges as nightlight gradients—the maximum change of nightlight from a pixel to its neighbors. Using nightlight gradients and other control variables at the tract level, this study applies negative binomial regression models to investigate the effects of edges on the street robbery rate and the burglary rate in Cincinnati. The Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) of models show that nightlight gradients improve the fitness of models of street robbery and burglary. Also, nightlight gradients make a positive impact on the street robbery rate whilst a negative impact on the burglary rate, both of which are statistically significant under the alpha level of 0.05. The different impacts on these two types of crimes may be explained by the nature of crimes and the in-situ characteristics, including nightlight.

Committee: Lin Liu Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Richard Beck Ph.D. (Committee Member); John Eck Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Geography

Master of Science (MS), Bowling Green State University, 2017, Biological Sciences

Bat species face multiple threats. One such threat, white-nose syndrome (WNS) has drastically reduced many bat populations. Also, habitat loss and fragmentation often forces bats to concentrate in remnant natural areas, or utilize habitats that are not as suitable. Both of these threats, while threaten bats in a general sense, also affect species differentially. The Oak Openings Region of Northwest Ohio is a biodiversity hotspot with a landscape composed of remnant natural areas within a matrix of agriculture and urban areas. This area, which provides crucial summer foraging habitat, has experienced declines in bat activity, shifts in bat assemblages, and some in diversity, in recent years, especially since WNS introduction. To study bats in this diverse landscape, we sampled bats acoustically from May – August 2016. We sampled mobile transects along roads along with stationary sites within the Oak Openings Preserve within the region. We identified calls to species and ran analyses investigating total bat activity, species-specific activity and presence, and bat diversity compared to. We compared bats to environmental, vegetation, road, and landcover parameters. Our results show that certain parameters influence bats as a whole, while others only affect one or a few species. We found that savanna stationary sites had more species-specific activity and bat diversity than forested sites (Rank Sums, p<0.05). Parameters that affected most bat species most prevalently were temperature and forest cover, both reflecting positive relationships with total bat activity and diversity (Chi-square; Rank Sums, p<0.05). When looking at species specific relationships, we focused on the least active species, as they may be more in need of management than more active species. Parameters that most influenced our least active species were humidity and open/savanna vs. forested sampling areas. Humidity had positive relationships with the likelihood of presence of our rarer species, whil (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Karen Root PhD (Advisor); Kevin McCluney PhD (Committee Member); Verner Bingman PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Animal Sciences; Animals; Biology; Conservation; Ecology; Environmental Management; Natural Resource Management; Organismal Biology; Wildlife Conservation; Wildlife Management; Zoology

MA, Kent State University, 2017, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Anthropology

In the 1930s, archaeologist Dr. F. H. H. Roberts proposed that proximal-lateral edge grinding was executed on Paleoindian projectile points to limit damage to the lashings that attached them to their shafts. This assumption is logical and widely accepted, but remains empirically untested. Here, we present an experiment that examines the role of proximal-lateral edge grinding in replica Clovis projectile points made of Texas chert. We compare via controlled ballistics experiments large samples of points with lateral edge grinding versus those with sharp lateral edges, but otherwise similar in every other morphometric aspect. By analyzing and comparing the hafting performance of the ground-edged specimens and the sharp-edged specimens, we hope to better understand the function of lateral basal grinding from technological and ecological perspectives.

Committee: Metin I. Eren (Advisor); Linda B. Spurlock (Committee Member); Mark Seeman (Committee Member); Richard Meindl (Committee Member) Subjects: Archaeology; Experiments