Browsing by Subject "Depth"

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    ESTIMATES OF FACTORS DIRECTLY RELATED TO FINE ROOT LONGEVITY USING A HIERARCHICAL BAYESIAN MODEL
    (2008-08-29T18:30:31Z) Zhang, SiYao
    Fine root longevity, measured using minirhizotrons, range from days to years (Hendrick & Pregitzer, 1992; Eissenstat et al., 2000). Although there are several hypotheses that relate to root tissue lifespan (Ryser, 1996), very few long-term studies have examined the factors that may be directly related to survivorship of individual roots. It is known that atmospheric CO2, which is the major greenhouse gas, directly affects plant photosynthesis and water use. As an important plant tissue that acquires water and nutrients, fine roots may limit the forest productivity by limiting plant absorptive capacity under the enriched atmospheric CO2 concentration. Moreover, the turnover time of fine roots, which are the major component of carbon input to the soil carbon pool, may respond to this enriched CO2 effect and thus have impact on belowground carbon balance. Free air CO2 enrichment (FACE) facilities enable research on the effects of elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations over extended periods of time at ecosystem scale. By using a hierarchical Bayesian model with covariance variable estimates, we were able to identify this CO2 effect as well as several other covariates that correlate with fine root persistence. According to our result, enriched CO2 did not have an immediate effect on fine-root longevity; rather, it increased longevity with time over the 8.2-year study period. Furthermore, fine root longevity increased with soil depth, yet the effects of CO2-enrichment on longevity decreased with increasing depth. Coarser roots and roots grown in plots with higher N-mineralization rate had longer life spans. Nitrogen fertilization enhanced fine-root lifespan only in CO2-enriched plots.
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    ItemOpen Access
    Materializing Depths: The Potential of Contemporary Art and Media
    (2016) Choi, Jung Eun

    This dissertation argues that critical practices in the expanded field of art, technology, and space illustrate the potential of twenty-first century media by materializing depths of our experiential dimensions. Scholarship on digital embodiment and materialism in art, media studies, and aesthetics has paid much attention to the central role played by the human body in contemporary media environments. Grounded in these studies, however, this study moves forward to understand the more fundamental quality that grounds and conditions the experience of the human body—namely depth.

    Drawing on diverse disciplines, such as art history, visual studies, media studies, critical theory, phenomenology, and aesthetics, this study provides a reconstruction of the notion of depth to unpack the complex dimensionality of human experiences that are solicited by different critical spatial practices. As a spatial medium that produces the body subject and the world through the process of intertwining, depth points to an environmental affordance that prepares or conditions the ways in which the body processes the information in the world. The dimension of depth is not available to natural human perception. However, incorporating twenty-first century media that are seamlessly embedded in physical environments, critical spatial practices sensibly materialize the virtual dimensions of depth by animating space in a way that is different from the past.

    This dissertation provides comprehensive analyses of these critical spatial practices by artists who create constructed situations that bring the experiential dimensions of depth to the fore. The acknowledgement of depth allows us to understand the spatialities of bodies and their implication in the vaster worldly spatiality. In doing so, this study attends to major contemporary philosophical and aesthetic challenges by reframing the body as the locus of subjectivity that is always interdependent upon broader sociocultural and technological environments.