The relationship amongst climate, root zone storage capacity, and plant physiology has long been a foundational question of hydrology, and later eco-hydrology. Plants access to water affects their ability to photosynthesize, accumulate biomass, access resources, and survive periods of drought. However, determining the amount of precipitation plants receive is challenging because a) the amount of water that can be stored in the rooting zone, termed plant accessible water storage capacity (PAWSC), is exceedingly difficult to observe, and b) the relationship between precipitation, PAWSC, and evapotranspiration, a direct corollary for photosynthesis, is highly non-linear. While the estimation of PAWSC, or a similar storage capacity parameter, is integral to most hydrological and climatological modeling, we still lack a general conceptual model to describe how does uncertainty and variability in PAWSC affect evapotranspiration. Our current conceptual model, which is as PAWSC increases—evapotranspiration increases, has little description as to how much does evapotranspiration increase when PAWSC increases, what is the range of PAWSC that affect evapotranspiration, and how does this relationship between PAWSC and evapotranspiration vary for different climates? In this thesis, we develop a novel and efficient method that allows us to update our current conceptual model on relationship amongst climate, PAWSC, and evapotranspiration, in a way that can efficiently describe the effect of variability and uncertainty in PAWSC across a range of climates. We apply this model across 9 Critical Zone Observatories to develop the conceptual theory, we then describe the effects of PAWSC across elevational gradients in climate, and finally we show how PAWSC affects the change in evapotranspiration under a warmer climate.

Many of today’s film composers are either oblivious or indifferent to the styles and techniques of concert music throughout much of the twentieth century. Composers throughout the Romantic era aspired to express feelings and emotions in music, giving rise to program music and storytelling through music, all of which translated directly into the early film scores of the 1930s. Throughout the twentieth century, music in the concert world was moving in a vastly different direction, away from the expression of emotion or storytelling. But those film composers who came from the concert world recognized that all music, even the most experimental and dissonant, can have emotional effect, particularly when paired with visual imagery. Don Davis’ score for The Matrix is, to date, the ultimate example of this - a mixture of multiple twentieth-century styles and techniques used for emotional intent and storytelling.

The purpose of Volume I is to thoroughly catalogue and analyze every compositional element that Davis uses in his score, and to briefly describe the origins of these elements including how Davis utilizes them to accompany the film. This analysis will present an in-depth explanation of Davis’ use of leitmotifs, harmony, tonal sets, bitonality, rhythm, orchestration, unusual percussion, extended techniques for piano, electronic instrumentation including synthesizers and samplers, musique concr�te, “fantasy” exoticism, and textures that utilize minimalism, aleatory, and twelve-tone technique. I hope that film composers who read this dissertation monograph will be inspired by Davis’ example to investigate concert music of the twentieth century and beyond, so that they too may find creative ways to utilize new styles and techniques to convey feelings and tell stories in their own film scores, further bridging the gap between film music and concert music.

Volume II features an original ballet score somewhat in the spirit of Davis’ ideas in The Matrix, often using techniques from twentieth-century concert music. Supplementary materials include a video performance of the ballet, performed by the Winston Salem Festival Ballet in Winston Salem, North Carolina.