Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Preliminary Perspectives On The Health Needs Of Pastoral Women On The Borana Plateau Using Participatory Approaches, D. Layne Coppock, Seyoum Tezera, Solomon Desta

Environment and Society Faculty Publications

Since 2000, the PARIMA project has conducted participatory research and outreach among pastoralists in southern Ethiopia. This has led to notable achievements in terms of forming collective-action groups dominated by women, stimulation of sustainable micro-finance and micro-enterprise activities, and improving linkages of pastoral producers to livestock markets. Despite such gains, there are many other challenges to be addressed. One is poor human health. PARIMA researchers used participatory and qualitative methods to conduct a preliminary assessment of women’s health problems among members of six, well-established collective-action groups from the Borana and Gugi zones in the Oromia Regional State during 2008. Conventional …

What Are Consumers In Moyale, Kenya Willing To Pay For Improved Milk Quality?, D. Layne Coppock, Francis O. Wayua, Mohamed G. Shibia, Moses S. Mamo

Environment and Society Faculty Publications

Pastoralists in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia may be able to diversify income by selling milk to urban residents. However, milk sold in open-air markets is often low in quality because it has been transported long distances without refrigeration and is subject to spoilage, or because milk is adulterated prior to sale to boost volume or enhance appearance. Open-air markets are characterized by low-income consumers who must make choices about milk quality with virtually no information other than their own sensory perceptions. PARIMA researchers used an experimental-auction approach to determine what residents in Moyale, Kenya, are willing to pay (WTP) …

Successful Implementation Of Collective Action And Human-Capacity Building Among Pastoralists In Southern Ethiopia: Lessons Learned, 2001-2008, D. Layne Coppock, Seyoum Tezera, Solomon Desta, Getachew Gebru

Environment and Society Faculty Publications

Since 2000 the PARIMA project has implemented pilot risk-management activities among poverty-stricken, semi-settled pastoralists in southern Ethiopia. The goal has been to improve human welfare via collective action and capacity building. Outcomes include progress in income generation, asset conservation, and livelihood diversification. The approach has been unique to southern Ethiopia in that a bottom-up, participatory perspective has dominated. It has focused on the priorities and felt needs of local people rather than top-down development of livestock or agricultural technology. Fifty-nine collective-action groups were created. Dominated by women, they have included over 2,300 members and most groups have been recently merged …

Are Cattle Die-Offs Predictable On The Borana Plateau, D. Layne Coppock, Getachew Gebru, Solomon Desta, Sintayehu Mesele, Seyoum Tezerra

Environment and Society Faculty Publications

Drought regularly affects rangelands and contributes to high death rates for livestock and poverty for pastoralists. But do livestock losses occur randomly simply when rainfall is low, or are they cyclical and predictable? Previously, PARIMA researchers proposed that high stocking rates—combined with low rainfall—trigger livestock die-offs on the Borana Plateau. It takes about six years for animal numbers to recover, setting the stage for another die-off when a dry year occurs. This “boom-and-bust” cycle is based on observed herd crashes in 1983-5, 1991-3, and 1998-9. Researchers predicted in 2002 that the next major die-off would occur during 2004-06, and one …

Sustainable Soils: Reducing, Mitigating And Adapting To Climate Change With Organic Agriculture, Meredith T. Niles

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Improved Uses And Values For The Byproducts Of The Developing Biofuels Industry, Kurt A. Rosentrater

Kurt A. Rosentrater

No abstract provided.

Sspnd –Support System For Phosphorus And Nitrogen Decisions – Modeling Of Management Practices Can Guide The Way Ahead, Simon Neville, David Weaver, Rebecca Ovens, Nardia Keipert, Robert Summers, Martin Clarke

Conference papers and presentations

Algal blooms in rivers and estuarine waters in south west Western Australia are a symptomatic response to excess nutrient input. Whilst a range of Best Management Practices (BMPs) are available to reduce the causes of phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N) pollution, most investment has been directed towards symptoms. In order to treat nutrient pollution causes effectively, possible nutrient reductions and the likely adoption costs of a range of BMPs require evaluation. Catchment-scale evaluation of implementation scenarios offers insights not possible through long term on-ground implementation and performance monitoring, and assists community groups and government to respond to pollution issues through …

Farm Gate Nutrient Balances In South West Western Australia – An Overview, Rebecca Ovens, David Weaver, Nardia Keipert, Simon Neville, Robert Summers, Martin Clarke

Conference papers and presentations

Farm-gate nutrient budgets can be used to identify the efficiency of nutrient use within and between individual enterprises and catchments, and may be used to represent a component of the risk that particular landuses represent to water quality. Over the past 5 years, more than 400 farm-gate nutrient balance audits have been conducted across a range of catchments and landuses in southwest Western Australia (WA). Values for nutrient use efficiency and surpluses across landuses and catchments are reported. Patterns of nitrogen and phosphorus signatures closely reflect one another across landuses, though nitrogen input, output and surplus values are consistently higher …

Sheep Updates 2008 - Part 3, L. J. E. Karlsson, J. C. Greeff, L. Slocombe, K. Jones, N. Underwood, Fred Wilkinson, W. D. Hoffman, W. A. Mckiernan, V. H. Oddy, M. J. Mcphee, B. L. Mcintyre, P. F. Parnell, R. A. Clark, J. Timms, G. Griffith, C. Mulholland, P. Hyland, Danielle England, Fiona Jones, John Lucey, Martin Staines, Richard Morris, Megan Abrahams, Caroline Peek, Dennis Van Gool, Daniel Gardiner, Kari-Lee Falconer, Sandra Prosser, Mario D'Antuono, John Young, Andrew Thompson, Chris Oldham, Brown Besier, Angus Campbell, Ralph Behrendt

Sheep Updates

This session covers fiveteen papers from different authors:

CONTROLLING FLY STRIKE

1. Breeding for Blowfly Resistance - Indicatoe Traits, LJE Karlsson, JC Greeff, L Slocombe, Department of Agriculture & Food, Western Australia

2.A practical method to select for breech strike resistance in non-pedigreed Merino flocks, LJE Karlsson, JC Greeff, L Slocombe, K. Jones, N. Underwood, Department of Agriculture & Food, Western Australia

3. Twice a year shearing - no mulesing, Fred Wilkinson, Producer, Brookton WA

BEEF

4. Commercial testing of a new tool for prediction of fatness in beef cattle, WD Hoffman^A, WA McKiernan^A, VH Oddy …

Interview With Michael Menzies, Braeside Farms, 2008 (Audio), Michael Menzies

All Sustainability History Project Oral Histories

Interview of Michael Menzies by Joel DaMetz at Braeside Farms in Estacada, Oregon on June 6th, 2008.

The interview index is available for download.

Interview With David Shonk, Bumblebee Farm, 2008 (Audio), David Shonk

All Sustainability History Project Oral Histories

Interview of David Shonk by Brian Francetich at Troutdale, Oregon on June 4th, 2008.

The interview index is available for download.

Interview With Shari Sirkin, Dancing Roots Farm, 2008 (Audio), Shari Sirkin

All Sustainability History Project Oral Histories

Interview of Shari Sirkin by Brian Francetich at Troutdale, Oregon on May 28th, 2008.

The interview index is available for download.

Interview With Jill And Michael J. Paine, Gaining Ground Farm, 2008 (Audio), Jill Paine, Michael J. Paine

All Sustainability History Project Oral Histories

Interview of Jill and Michael J. Pain by James Pritchett in Yamhill, Oregon on May 28th, 2008.

The interview index is available for download.

Interview With Melanie Plies, Backyard Bounty, 2008 (Audio), Melanie Plies

All Sustainability History Project Oral Histories

Interview of Melanie Plies by Stephenie Bitz on May 21st, 2008.

The interview index is available for download.

Interview With Louisa Depaiva, Purple Rain Vineyard, 2008 (Audio), Louisa Depaiva

All Sustainability History Project Oral Histories

Interview of Louisa DePaiva by Stephenie Bitz at Brush Prairie, Washington on May 10th, 2008.

The interview index is available for download.

Interview With John Martinson Jr., Birds & Bees Community Farm, 2008 (Audio), John Martinson Jr.

All Sustainability History Project Oral Histories

Interview of John Martinson Jr. by Clint Anderson in Oregon City, Oregon on May 8th, 2008.

The interview index is available for download.

Traditional Natural Resource Use And Development In Northeast Thailand, Christie Moulton

Senior Honors Projects

This paper explores the effects of development projects on traditional natural resource use in three communities in Northeast Thailand, a region known as Isan. I interviewed villagers in each community and asked them to describe their environmental perceptions, management practices and livelihood strategies. Participants described several subsistence livelihoods that have traditionally been present in Isan. These include rice farming, fishing, community forestry, and wetland use. Residents from the three communities all described various cultural activities, knowledge systems, and religious ceremonies that are closely tied to their local resources. Raising silk worms, making clay pots, and performing rituals for a spirit …

Developing Accurate Spatial Maps Of Cotton Fiber Quality Parameters, Gretchen F. Sassenrath

Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture

Awareness of the importance of cotton fiber quality (Gossypium, L. sps.) has increased as advances in spinning technology require better quality cotton fiber. Recent advances in geospatial information sciences allow an improved ability to study the extent and causes of spatial variability in fiber parameters. However, these studies are often harvested by hand and ginned on small research gins. Fiber quality from cotton lint harvested and ginned in this manner is different from that machine-harvested and ginned on production-scale equipment. The objective of this study was to develop a method of correcting for error introduced into cotton fiber quality parameters …

Nonlinear Mixed Models To Evaluate Effects Of Environment Conditions, Hair Coat, And Anchor Length On Body Temperature During Afternoon Milking Of Holstein Cows In Hawaii, N Aitha, A. M. Parkhurst, C. N. Lee, P. E. Hillman

Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture

A hot thermal environment is one factor that causes loss of activity, productivity and even death in cows. One reason may be the effect of hair coat (black or white) on body temperature during different activities and environment conditions. In this study, we attempt to characterize the relationship between body temperature over time using activity, physiological and environmental effects with a nonlinear regression model. The fixed and mixed versions of models are examined. We also examine the effect of the measuring device, anchor length (long or short). Environmental effects, such as, air temperature, thermal heat index (THI), relative humidity, solar …

A Two-Stage Approach For Estimating The Effect Of Dna Methylation On Differential Expression Using Tiling Array Technology, Suk-Young Yoo, R. W. Doerge

Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture

Epigenetics is the study of heritable alterations in gene function without changing the DNA sequence itself. It is known that epigenetic modifications such as DNA methylation and histone modifications are highly correlated with the regulation of gene expression. A twostage analysis is proposed that employs a hidden Markov model and a linear model to evaluate differential expression as related to DNA methylation for the purpose of examining the effects of DNA methylation on gene regulation using tiling array technology. In the first stage, a hidden Markov model (HMM) is employed to estimate the methylation status per tile by utilizing information …

Spatial Clustering Using The Likelihood Function, April Kerby, David Marx, Ashok Samal, Viacheslav Adamchuk

Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture

Clustering has been widely used as a tool to group multivariate observations that have similar characteristics. However, most attempts at formulating a method to group similar multivariate observations while taking into account their spatial location are relatively ad hoc and do not account for the underlying spatial structure of the variables measured [12, 13, 14]. This paper proposes a method to spatially cluster similar observations based on the likelihood function. The geographic or spatial location of the observations can be incorporated into the likelihood of the multivariate normal distribution through the variance-covariance matrix. The variance-covariance matrix can be computed using …

Statistical Issues In Efficacy Evaluation For Companion Animal Drug Development, Zhanglin Lin Cui, Wherly Hoffman

Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture

Companion animals, commonly called pets, are animals such as dogs, cats, and horses. The companion animal drug market has expanded rapidly in recent years. Two major points of focus in companion animal drug development are therapeutics and parasiticides. From a statistics point of view, experimental design, experimental unit determination, sample size estimation and reestimation, treatment design, data transformation, multiple testing, and proper modeling are major statistical issues when efficacy evaluation in a companion animal study is conducted. These major statistical issues are addressed using two clinical studies as examples: Reconcile® (Fluoxetine) for the treatment of separation anxiety in dogs and …

Modeling Seasonal Wine Grape Development Using A Mixture Technique, William J. Price, Bahman Shafii, Paul E. Blom, Julie M. Tarara, Nick Dokoozlian, Luis J. Sanchez

Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture

Biological growth data typically display an increasing sigmoidal pattern over time. Grape development is no exception and shows a similar general trend. A detailed examination of the growth process in grapes, however, reveals a few systematic deviations from this pattern. Specifically, grape development is often characterized by localized areas of growth plateaus leading to an overall growth pattern referred to as a double sigmoidal curve. Capturing and characterizing these local changes in growth is important as they represent important phases in grape development such as veraison. This paper utilizes a model adapted from the technique of mixture models to estimate …

Comparisons Of Two Symmetric Density Function Solutions Of Aphid Population Growth Models, J. H. Matis, T. R. Kiffey, W. Van Der Werf, A. C. Costamagna, T. I. Matis, G. J. Michels Jr

Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture

Aphids are among the world's most devastating crop pests, and their population trajectories in field crops are characterized by rapid boom and bust, under the influence of bottom up (host plant) and top down (natural enemy) forces. Theoretical development in aphid growth trajectory modeling has recently advanced quite significantly, and the logistic and normal probability density functions have been found to provide analytical solutions to mechanistic models of the aphid population growth dynamics. The logistic or hyperbolic secant squared model captures a growth trajectory shaped by negative feedback of the aphid population on itself, due to the accumulation of adverse …

Statistical Issues In The Normalizationof Multi-Species Microarray Data, John R. Stevens, Balasubramanian Ganesan, Prerak Desai, Sweta Rajan, Bart C. Weimer

Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture

Several species of bacteria are involved in the production of cheese, including Lactobacillus brevis and Lactococcus lactis. A custom-designed Affymetrix microarray was recently developed to study gene expression in three organisms on a single chip. This array contains only perfect match features for the coding and non-coding regions in the genomes of all three sequences. The multi-species nature of this array version raises interesting questions regarding the preprocessing or normalization strategies for the analysis of gene expression data. We present and evaluate several possible strategies using both cDNA dilution data and experimental expression data from a repeated measures design. The …

Multi-Trait Qtl Mapping Using A Structural Equation Model, Xiaojuan Mi, Kent M. Eskridge, Dong Wang

Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture

Research on mapping quantitative trait loci (QTL) often results in data on a number of traits that have well established causal relationships. Many multi-trait QTL mapping methods, taking into account the correlation among the multiple traits, have been developed to improve the statistical power of the test for QTL and the precision of parameter estimation. However none of these methods are capable of incorporating the causal structure among the traits with the consequence that genetic functions of the QTL may not be fully understood. Structural equation modeling (SEM) allows researchers to explicitly characterize the causal structure among the variables and …

Dynamic Clustering Of Cell-Cycle Microarray Data, Lingling An, R. W. Doerge

Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture

The cell cycle is a crucial series of events that are repeated over time, allowing the cell to grow, duplicate, and split. Cell-cycle systems play an important role in cancer and other biological processes. Using gene expression data gained from microarray technology it is possible to group or cluster genes that are involved in the cell-cycle for the purpose of exploring their functional co-regulation. Typically, the goal of clustering methods as applied to gene expression data is to place genes with similar expression patterns or profiles into the same group or cluster for the purpose of inferring the function of …

Testing Variance Components By Two Jackknife Methods, Jixiang Wu, Johnie N. Jenkins, Jack C. Mccarty

Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture

The jackknife method, a resampling technique, has been widely used for statistical tests for years. The pseudo value based jackknife method (defined as pseudo jackknife method) is commonly used to reduce the bias for an estimate; however, sometimes it could result in large variation for an estimate and thus reduce the power for parameters of interest. In this study, a non-pseudo value based jackknife method (defined as non-pseudo jackknife method) was used for testing variance components under mixed linear models. We compared this non-pseudo value based jackknife method and the pseudo value based method by simulation regarding their biases, Type …

Editor's Preface And Table Of Contents, Gary L. Gadbury

Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture

These proceedings contain papers presented in the twentieth annual Kansas State University Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture, held in Manhattan, Kansas, April 27- April 29, 2008.

A Comparison Of Agricultural And Urban Influences On Water Quality In South West Wa, Nardia Keipert, David Weaver, Robert Summers, Christian Zammit, Artemis Kitsios, Simon Neville, Martin Clarke

Conference papers and presentations

In Western Australia, a number of coastal rivers and estuaries have suffered from eutrophication since the 1960’s. Often the focus of the threat to water quality in these areas has been agriculture because of its extensive nature and widespread use of highly soluble fertilisers. Over recent years a focus on nutrient inputs, outputs and nutrient balance in a number of projects provides an opportunity to compare the relative nutrient threats from the agricultural and urban sectors, placed in the context of increasing urbanisation and development. These disparate data sets also allow a comparison of nutrient inputs in each sector in …