The field of vector-borne disease research uses multidisciplinary approaches to help understand complicated interactions. This dissertation, covers three different aspects of tick-borne disease research which all focus on exploring tick-borne diseases in the non-endemic areas of Denton, County Texas and the state of Texas with a focus on Rickettsia spp. These aspects include tick sampling, testing ticks for the presence of Rickettsia spp., and creating species distribution maps of the Rickettsia spp. Rickettsia amblyommatis and tick species Amblyomma americanum.

The Science Teaching and Research (STAR) Leadership Program at Austin College was designed to intentionally include leadership development into the science curriculum and provides an opportunity to determine the effects of student leadership development on the retention of students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This dissertation used a quasi-experimental design to determine: 1) if STEM retention can be explained though the inclusion of leadership development into the curriculum; 2) if there is a difference between Austin College students who choose a STEM major compared to students who do not; and 3) if there is a difference between Austin College students who complete a STEM degree compared to students who do not. Census data were collected on 2,137 students who enrolled in STEM courses beginning in the fall of 2008 through the spring of 2017, and factors affecting retention were compared across three 3-year time periods that spanned before the program was initiated through wider implementation. A logistic regression showed that there was no significant positive association between leadership development and STEM retention when taking into account other pre-college and demographic factors that have been linked to retention in the literature. However, a one-way ANOVA showed that the academic …

Ecosystem services are the varied goods and benefits provided by ecosystems that make human life possible. This concept has fostered scientific explorations of the services that nature provides to people with the goal of sustaining those services for future generations. As the world becomes increasingly urban, ecosystems are reshaped, and services are degraded. Provisioning and regulating ecosystem services, landscape planning, decision making, and agricultural systems and technologies play a distinctive role in feeding and sustaining the expanding urban population. Hence, the integrated assessment of these coupled components is necessary to understand food security and sustainable development. Nevertheless, frameworks that incorporate ecosystem services, urbanization, and human wellbeing are still scarce due to several conceptual and methodological gaps that challenge this assessment. As a consequence, these frameworks are not operationalized, and ecosystem services rarely receive proper attention in decision making. This dissertation seeks to improve our understanding of the role of ecosystem services at the landscape level and provides an approach for operationalizing decisions that affect sustainable practices and human wellbeing.