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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Developing A Framework To Link Multi-Sector Drought Impacts To Drought Severity At The State Level, Mary Noel Aug 2019

Developing A Framework To Link Multi-Sector Drought Impacts To Drought Severity At The State Level, Mary Noel

School of Natural Resources: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The United States Drought Monitor, a weekly map depicting severity and spatial extent of drought, is a key indicator for federal and state policy decisions including the annual distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars for agricultural financial relief in the United States. However, the current table describing potential drought impacts for the map’s severity levels fails to adequately represent a state’s unique environmental, economic, and social values affected by drought. One approach to improve this broad, national-scale assessment is to transition from the former platform to a more detailed characterization of drought impacts at the state level. To accomplish …


Visual Head Counts: A Promising Method For Efficient Monitoring Of Diamondback Terrapins, Patricia Levasseur, Sean Sterrett, Chris Sutherland Jan 2019

Visual Head Counts: A Promising Method For Efficient Monitoring Of Diamondback Terrapins, Patricia Levasseur, Sean Sterrett, Chris Sutherland

Environmental Conservation Faculty Publication Series

Determining the population status of the diamondback terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin spp.) is challenging due to their ecology and limitations associated with traditional sampling methods. Visual counting of emergent heads offers a promising, efficient, and non-invasive method for generating abundance estimates of terrapin populations across broader spatial scales than has been achieved using capture–recapture, and can be used to quantify determinants of spatial variation in abundance. We conducted repeated visual head count surveys along the shoreline of Wellfleet Bay in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and analyzed the count data using a hierarchical modeling framework designed specifically for repeated count data: the N-mixture model. …