Digital Commons Network^™

The Emotional Arcs Of Stories Are Dominated By Six Basic Shapes, Andrew J. Reagan, Lewis Mitchell, Dilan Kiley, Christopher M. Danforth, Peter Sheridan Dodds

College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences Faculty Publications

Advances in computing power, natural language processing, and digitization of text now make it possible to study a culture’s evolution through its texts using a ‘big data’ lens. Our ability to communicate relies in part upon a shared emotional experience, with stories often following distinct emotional trajectories and forming patterns that are meaningful to us. Here, by classifying the emotional arcs for a filtered subset of 1,327 stories from Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection, we find a set of six core emotional arcs which form the essential building blocks of complex emotional trajectories. We strengthen our findings by separately applying matrix …

Coupled Impacts Of Climate And Land Use Change Across A River-Lake Continuum: Insights From An Integrated Assessment Model Of Lake Champlain's Missisquoi Basin, 2000-2040, Asim Zia, Arne Bomblies, Andrew W. Schroth, Christopher Koliba, Peter D.F. Isles, Yushiou Tsai, Ibrahim N. Mohammed, Gabriela Bucini, Patrick J. Clemins, Scott Turnbull, Morgan Rodgers, Ahmed Hamed, Brian Beckage, Jonathan Winter

College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences Faculty Publications

Global climate change (GCC) is projected to bring higher-intensity precipitation and higher-variability temperature regimes to the Northeastern United States. The interactive effects of GCC with anthropogenic land use and land cover changes (LULCCs) are unknown for watershed level hydrological dynamics and nutrient fluxes to freshwater lakes. Increased nutrient fluxes can promote harmful algal blooms, also exacerbated by warmer water temperatures due to GCC. To address the complex interactions of climate, land and humans, we developed a cascading integrated assessment model to test the impacts of GCC and LULCC on the hydrological regime, water temperature, water quality, bloom duration and severity …

Estimating Economic Losses To Tourism In Africa From The Illegal Killing Of Elephants, Robin Naidoo, Brendan Fisher, Andrea Manica, Andrew Balmford

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Recent surveys suggest tens of thousands of elephants are being poached annually across Africa, putting the two species at risk across much of their range. Although the financial motivations for ivory poaching are clear, the economic benefits of elephant conservation are poorly understood. We use Bayesian statistical modelling of tourist visits to protected areas, to quantify the lost economic benefits that poached elephants would have delivered to African countries via tourism. Our results show these figures are substantial (∼USD $25 million annually), and that the lost benefits exceed the anti-poaching costs necessary to stop elephant declines across the continent's savannah …

Disaggregating The Evidence Linking Biodiversity And Ecosystem Services, Taylor H. Ricketts, Keri B. Watson, Insu Koh, Alicia M. Ellis, Charles C. Nicholson, Stephen Posner, Leif L. Richardson, Laura J. Sonter

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Ecosystem services (ES) are an increasingly popular policy framework for connecting biodiversity with human well-being. These efforts typically assume that biodiversity and ES covary, but the relationship between them remains remarkably unclear. Here we analyse >500 recent papers and show that reported relationships differ among ES, methods of measuring biodiversity and ES, and three different approaches to linking them (spatial correlations, management comparisons and functional experiments). For spatial correlations, biodiversity relates more strongly to measures of ES supply than to resulting human benefits. For management comparisons, biodiversity of â € service providers' predicts ES more often than biodiversity of functionally …

Opportunities For Biodiversity Gains Under The World's Largest Reforestation Programme, Fangyuan Hua, Xiaoyang Wang, Xinlei Zheng, Brendan Fisher, Lin Wang, Jianguo Zhu, Ya Tang, Douglas W. Yu, David S. Wilcove

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Reforestation is a critical means of addressing the environmental and social problems of deforestation. China's Grain-for-Green Program (GFGP) is the world's largest reforestation scheme. Here we provide the first nationwide assessment of the tree composition of GFGP forests and the first combined ecological and economic study aimed at understanding GFGP's biodiversity implications. Across China, GFGP forests are overwhelmingly monocultures or compositionally simple mixed forests. Focusing on birds and bees in Sichuan Province, we find that GFGP reforestation results in modest gains (via mixed forest) and losses (via monocultures) of bird diversity, along with major losses of bee diversity. Moreover, all …

Spatial And Temporal Dynamics And Value Of Nature-Based Recreation, Estimated Via Social Media, Laura J. Sonter, Keri B. Watson, Spencer A. Wood, Taylor H. Ricketts

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Conserved lands provide multiple ecosystem services, including opportunities for naturebased recreation. Managing this service requires understanding the landscape attributes underpinning its provision, and how changes in land management affect its contribution to human wellbeing over time. However, evidence from both spatially explicit and temporally dynamic analyses is scarce, often due to data limitations. In this study, we investigated nature-based recreation within conserved lands in Vermont, USA.We used geotagged photographs uploaded to the photo-sharingwebsite Flickr to quantify visits by in-state and outof- state visitors, and we multiplied visits by mean trip expenditures to show that conserved lands contributed US $1.8 billion …

Multiple Post-Domestication Origins Of Kabuli Chickpea Through Allelic Variation In A Diversification-Associated Transcription Factor, R. Varma Penmetsa, Noelia Carrasquilla-Garcia, Emily M. Bergmann, Lisa Vance, Brenna Castro, Mulualem T. Kassa, Birinchi K. Sarma, Subhojit Datta, Andrew D. Farmer, Jong Min Baek, Clarice J. Coyne, Rajeev K. Varshney, Eric J.B. Von Wettberg, Douglas R. Cook

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

Chickpea (Cicer arietinum) is among the founder crops domesticated in the Fertile Crescent. One of two major forms of chickpea, the so-called kabuli type, has white flowers and light-colored seed coats, properties not known to exist in the wild progenitor. The origin of the kabuli form has been enigmatic. We genotyped a collection of wild and cultivated chickpea genotypes with 538 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and examined patterns of molecular diversity relative to geographical sources and market types. In addition, we examined sequence and expression variation in candidate anthocyanin biosynthetic pathway genes. A reduction in genetic diversity and extensive genetic …

Pyrogenic Fuels Produced By Savanna Trees Can Engineer Humid Savannas, William J. Platt, Darin P. Ellair, Jean M. Huffman, Stephen E. Potts, Brian Beckage

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

Natural fires ignited by lightning strikes following droughts frequently are posited as the ecological mechanism maintaining discontinuous tree cover and grass-dominated ground layers in savannas. Such fires, however, may not reliably maintain humid savannas. We propose that savanna trees producing pyrogenic shed leaves might engineer fire characteristics, affecting ground-layer plants in ways that maintain humid savannas. We explored our hypothesis in a high-rainfall, frequently burned pine savanna in which the dominant tree, longleaf pine (Pinus palustris), produces resinous needles that become highly flammable when shed and dried. We postulated that pyrogenic needles should have much greater influence on fire characteristics …

Conjoint Analysis Of Farmers' Response To Conservation Incentives, David Conner, Jennifer Miller, Asim Zia, Qingbin Wang, Heather Darby

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

Environmental degradation threatens the long term resiliency of the US food and farming system. While USDA has provided conservation incentives for the adoption of best management practices (BMPs), only a small percentage of farms have participated in such conservation programs. This study uses conjoint analysis to examine Vermont farmers' underlying preferences and willingness-to-accept (WTA) incentives for three common BMPs. Based on the results of this survey, we hypothesize that federal cost share programs' payments are below preferred incentive levels and that less familiar and more complex BMPs require a higher payment. Our implications focus on strategies to test these hypotheses …

Vaporous Marketing: Uncovering Pervasive Electronic Cigarette Advertisements On Twitter, Eric M. Clark, Chris A. Jones, Jake Ryland Williams, Allison N. Kurti, Mitchell Craig Norotsky, Christopher M. Danforth, Peter Sheridan Dodds

College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences Faculty Publications

Background Twitter has become the "wild-west" of marketing and promotional strategies for advertisement agencies. Electronic cigarettes have been heavily marketed across Twitter feeds, offering discounts, "kid-friendly" flavors, algorithmically generated false testimonials, and free samples. Methods All electronic cigarette keyword related tweets from a 10% sample of Twitter spanning January 2012 through December 2014 (approximately 850,000 total tweets) were identified and categorized as Automated or Organic by combining a keyword classification and a machine trained Human Detection algorithm. A sentiment analysis using Hedonometrics was performed on Organic tweets to quantify the change in consumer sentiments over time. Commercialized tweets were topically …

Farmer Perceptions Of Climate Change: Associations With Observed Temperature And Precipitation Trends, Irrigation, And Climate Beliefs, Meredith T. Niles, Nathaniel D. Mueller

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

How individuals perceive climate change is linked to whether individuals support climate policies and whether they alter their own climate-related behaviors, yet climate perceptions may be influenced by many factors beyond local shifts in weather. Infrastructure designed to control or regulate natural resources may serve as an important lens through which people experience climate, and thus may influence perceptions. Likewise, perceptions may be influenced by personal beliefs about climate change and whether it is human-induced. Here we examine farmer perceptions of historical climate change, how perceptions are related to observed trends in regional climate, how perceptions are related to the …

Local Adaptation Or Foreign Advantage? Effective Use Of A Single-Test Site Common Garden To Evaluate Adaptation Across Ecological Scales, Eric J.B. Von Wettberg, Edward Marques, Courtney J. Murren

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Surface Permeability Of Natural And Engineered Porous Building Materials, David Grover, Cabot R. Savidge, Laura Townsend, Odanis Rosario, Liang Bo Hu, Donna M. Rizzo, Mandar M. Dewoolkar

College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences Faculty Publications

Characterization of surface gas permeability measurements on a variety of natural and engineered building materials using two relatively new, non-destructive surface permeameters is presented. Surface gas permeability measurements were consistent for both laboratory and field applications and correlated well with bulk gas permeability measurements. This research indicates that surface permeability measurements could provide reliable estimates of bulk gas permeability; and due to the non-destructive nature and relative sampling ease of both surface gas permeability tools, it is possible to quantify the range of the spatial autocorrelation, heterogeneity, and anisotropy in porous building materials and their degree of degradation from weathering.

Game Story Space Of Professional Sports: Australian Rules Football, Dilan Patrick Kiley, Andrew J. Reagan, Lewis Mitchell, Christopher M. Danforth, Peter Sheridan Dodds

College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences Faculty Publications

Sports are spontaneous generators of stories. Through skill and chance, the script of each game is dynamically written in real time by players acting out possible trajectories allowed by a sport's rules. By properly characterizing a given sport's ecology of "game stories," we are able to capture the sport's capacity for unfolding interesting narratives, in part by contrasting them with random walks. Here we explore the game story space afforded by a data set of 1310 Australian Football League (AFL) score lines. We find that AFL games exhibit a continuous spectrum of stories rather than distinct clusters. We show how …

Do Insect Outbreaks Reduce The Severity Of Subsequent Forest Fires?, Garrett W. Meigs, Harold S.J. Zald, John L. Campbell, William S. Keeton, Robert E. Kennedy

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Understanding the causes and consequences of rapid environmental change is an essential scientific frontier, particularly given the threat of climate- and land use-induced changes in disturbance regimes. In western North America, recent widespread insect outbreaks and wildfires have sparked acute concerns about potential insect-fire interactions. Although previous research shows that insect activity typically does not increase wildfire likelihood, key uncertainties remain regarding insect effects on wildfire severity (i.e., ecological impact). Recent assessments indicate that outbreak severity and burn severity are not strongly associated, but these studies have been limited to specific insect or fire events. Here, we present a regional …

A Regional Model For Malaria Vector Developmental Habitats Evaluated Using Explicit, Pond-Resolving Surface Hydrology Simulations, Ernest Ohene Asare, Adrian Mark Tompkins, Arne Bomblies

College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences Faculty Publications

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Dynamical malaria models can relate precipitation to the availability of vector breeding sites using simple models of surface hydrology. Here, a revised scheme is developed for the VECTRI malaria model, which is evaluated alongside the default scheme using a two year simulation by HYDREMATS, a 10 metre resolution, village-scale model that explicitly simulates individual ponds. Despite the simplicity of the two VECTRI surface hydrology parametrization schemes, …

The Geography Of Gender Inequality, Brendan Fisher, Robin Naidoo

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Reducing gender inequality is a major policy concern worldwide, and one of the Sustainable Development Goals. However, our understanding of the magnitude and spatial distribution of gender inequality results either from limited-scale case studies or from national-level statistics. Here, we produce the first high resolution map of gender inequality by analyzing over 689,000 households in 47 countries. Across these countries, we find that male-headed households have, on average, 13% more asset wealth and 303% more land for agriculture than do female-headed households. However, this aggregate global result masks a high degree of spatial heterogeneity, with bands of both high inequality …

The Moral Basis For Conservation - Reflections On Dickman Et Al., Douglas Sheil, Jane Cohen, Carol J.Pierce Colfer, David Price, Rajindra Puri, Manuel Ruiz-Perez, Yulia Sugandi, Paul Vedeld, Eva Wollenberg, Yurdi Yasmi

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Salinity Adaptation And The Contribution Of Parental Environmental Effects In Medicago Truncatula, Ken S. Moriuchi, Maren L. Friesen, Matilde A. Cordeiro, Mounawer Badri, Wendy T. Vu, Bradley J. Main, Mohamed Elarbi Aouani, Sergey V. Nuzhdin, Sharon Y. Strauss, Eric J.B. Von Wettberg

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. High soil salinity negatively influences plant growth and yield. Some taxa have evolved mechanisms for avoiding or tolerating elevated soil salinity, which can be modulated by the environment experienced by parents or offspring. We tested the contribution of the parental and offspring environments on salinity adaptation and their potential underlying mechanisms. In a two-generation greenhouse experiment, we factorially manipulated salinity concentrations for genotypes of Medicago truncatula …

Farmer Perceptions Of Climate Change Risk And Associated On-Farm Management Strategies In Vermont, Northeastern United States, Rachel E. Schattman, David Conner, V. Ernesto Méndez

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

Little research has been conducted on how agricultural producers in the northeastern United States conceptualize climate-related risk and how these farmers address risk through on-farm management strategies. Two years following Tropical Storm Irene, our team interviewed 15 farmers in order to investigate their perceptions of climate-related risk and how their decision-making was influenced by these perceptions. Our results show that Vermont farmers are concerned with both ecological and economic risk. Subthemes that emerged included geographic, topographic, and hydrological characteristics of farm sites; stability of land tenure; hydrological erosion; pest and disease pressure; market access; household financial stability; and floods. Farmers …

Placing Natural Resource Decisions In Social And Historical Contexts: Sociological Inquiries Into Agency Communications, Management Rationalities, And Community Change, Emilian Geczi

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

A sociological understanding of natural resource management decisions traces the links between historical change (How does this historical period differ from other periods?), society (What social relations exist at this time and how do they persist or change?), and individuals (What types of conduct and discourse prevail in this society and in this period?). The papers submitted for this dissertation examine the connections between identity, social milieu, and historical change relative to three resource management issues:

(1) The promotion of nature play areas as a novel landscape form. Analysis of agency materials suggests that these spaces are advertised as bucolic …

Influence Of Mission, Audience, And Policy Context On Issue Framing: A Case Study Of Mobilization Against Hydraulic Fracturing In The Marcellus Shale, Rezwana Zafar

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The case of mobilization against hydraulic fracturing by interest groups provided an opportunity to examine the influence of three factors (mission, audience, and policy context) on diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framing. A comparative analysis was conducted of the mobilization activities of five national environmental organizations with a local presence in the Pennsylvania and New York Marcellus Shale regions. The organizations varied with respect to organizational mission, the audiences they were targeting (urban and rural), and the policy context in which they worked (pro and anti-hydraulic fracturing). Data came from eleven semi-structured in-depth interviews with organization personnel, and from the organizations' …

An Analysis Of Agricultural Decision-Making For Phosphorus Runoff Reduction In The State Of Vermont, Bethany Brown

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Eutrophication, stimulated by phosphorous (P) runoff from landscapes, compromises water quality and can have long-term impacts on the aesthetics, recreation, property values, and drinkability of bodies of water around the world. In the State of Vermont, efforts are underway to control the amount of P entering Lake Champlain per standards set forth in the Federal Clean Water Act. Agriculture has been identified as a major contributor to excess P in the waterways and will be managed according to Act 64, the Vermont Water Quality Act. The studies presented in this paper will introduce two independent methodologies proposed to aid in …

Diversification Strategies And Contributions Of Coffee Income To Poverty Alleviation Among Smallholders In Northern Huehuetenango And Quiche Departments, Guatemala, Andrew Gerlicz

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

In the past two decades, Mesoamerican smallholder coffee farmers have had to confront several stressors and shocks, such as price crises and natural disasters, with debilitating impacts on the viability of their livelihoods. More recently, many farmers have suffered crop losses in the wake of the spread of coffee leaf rust disease, and researchers are predicting that some areas will become less suitable for coffee growing in the near future as a result of climate change. In response to these conditions and in the context of the withdrawal of the state from provision of agricultural services, development practitioners have mainly …

Civic Engagement And Peace Corps Recruitment Efforts In The State Of Vermont, Kelly Dolan

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The United States Peace Corps' recruitment offices actively seek a qualified volunteer base from its applicant pool for positions in over 60 countries. The state of Vermont, and colleges and universities within the state, have provided the agency with an unprecedented number of volunteers accounting for their consistently high ranking for the number of volunteers currently serving overseas.

This research considers the culture of civic engagement in Vermont and how this can, in part, explain the successful recruitment efforts within the state. Drawing on research done on the topic of civic engagement and how it is manifest in different states, …

Expanding Food Agency: Exploring The Theory And Its Scale In Philadelphia, Pa, Caitlin Bradley Morgan

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Our contemporary American food system has created complex environments for decisions and actions around food, and those decisions have implications for culture, health, natural resources, social relations, and the economy. And yet, as scholars, we do not understand the particulars of how people actually cook for themselves and their families. This study explores how race and socioeconomic class interact with individual experience of "food agency," or personal capacity to plan and prepare meals within one's food environment. It is one stage in a multiphase project developing a comprehensive theory of food agency, applicable in any context; a scale for measuring …

Psychotherapists Becoming Leadership Consultants: The Making Of An Institutional Entrepreneur, Mercy Burton Russell

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

ABSTRACT

Leadership consultants bring specialized knowledge into their clients'

organizations. Advisor leadership consultants (ALC) trained as psychotherapists

apply concepts from human behavior theories as advisors to business leaders. They

also bring service-oriented professional norms and values of objectivity, neutrality,

and lack of self-interest. Their business clients in the market sector operate

according to norms and values of pragmatism, financial self-interest, and advocacy.

In order to establish credibility in the organizational field of business clients,

leadership consultants must negotiate between these different value systems.

This study is a grounded theory inquiry using narrative analysis tools to

study how ALCs navigate across …

Creating A Welcoming Clinical Environment For Lgbt Patients, Samy S. Ramadan

Family Medicine Clerkship Student Projects

The aim of this project was to develop a welcoming clinical environment for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) patients at Northern Counties Health Care (NCHC) and to serve as a model for community health centers across the nation that want to provide their LGBT communities with patient centered care that is affordable, compassionate and accessible. This was achieved by revising non-discrimination policies and new patient forms to be more inclusive of sexual orientations and gender identities, incorporating LGBT health learning modules into yearly provider and staff mandatories, and adding LGBT inclusive material into all waiting and exam rooms. The …