Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Four-Pronged Approach To Addressing A Wild Pig Invasion In A Bottomland And Upland Forested Landscape, Tyler Scott Evans

Theses and Dissertations

Among exotic species that are capable of invading, establishing, and reaching pest status, few pose the range of impacts to biotic (e.g., competition with native species, predation, herbivory, introduction of other exotics) and abiotic (e.g., soil, hydrology) ecosystem components that can be attributed to the wild pig (Sus scrofa). Despite the presence of wild pigs throughout the southeastern United States for centuries, new invasions continue to occur in previously uninhabited and often under-investigated landscapes, including bottomland and upland forests. The recent invasion of the Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge (hereafter, NNWR) in east-central Mississippi represents an …

Assessing Ecosystem Health Through Contaminants In The Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve, Nancy Torres

Theses

Although the Tijuana River Estuary (TRE) remains the largest, most-intact coastal wetland in Southern California, it has a history of major changes, much of this related to its location immediately north of the US / Mexico Border. One of the primary challenges is cross-border flows from the rapidly growing city of Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, and the delivery of wastewater, debris, and sediment to sensitive coastal wetland ecosystems. There is a need to more fully investigate these environmental changes to assess the ecosystem health of the Tijuana River Estuary over time, especially related to pollution impacts. This can inform an …

Monitoring Bull Kelp (Nereocystis Leutkeana) Remotely At High Resolutions, Hannah E. Joss

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Bull kelp (Nereocystis leutkeana) is a foundational seaweed in nearshore, marine systems, traditionally supporting economically important fisheries, extracting nutrients in its vicinity, and sequestering carbon and transporting it great distances to subsidize shallow and deep-sea environments. Bull kelp is also a culturally important species for some indigenous peoples along the northeastern Pacific coastline and provides a harvestable product with growing demand. Global trends in kelp distribution show patterns of decline, and the immense loss of northern California bull kelp forests in response to climatic changes have highlighted the need for alternative sources of kelp, both for the product …

Groundwater Monitoring Analysis And Management Recommendations In California: Cuyama And Santa Cruz Mid-County, Kayla M. Souza

Master's Projects and Capstones

Groundwater is an essential water resource, accounting for about 40 percent of supply in California and 80 percent in the Central Coast hydrologic region, but significant monitoring data gaps have limited sustainable management efforts. Twenty-four basins within the Central Coast hydrologic region were identified as critically overdrafted in 2014. For this study, two basins were chosen based on differing sustainability concerns so that a comparative analysis could be performed on the groundwater monitoring methods. I obtained original groundwater elevation data reported (2000-2020) from the various groundwater monitoring organization wells to the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) within the Cuyama …

Using Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles For Identifying The Extent Of Invasive Phragmites Australis In Treatment Areas Enrolled In An Adaptive Management Program, Colin Brooks, Charlotte Weinstein, Andrew Poley, Amanda Grimm, Nicholas Marion, Laura Bourgeau-Chavez, Dana Hansen, Kurt Kowalski

Michigan Tech Publications

Higher spatial and temporal resolutions of remote sensing data are likely to be useful for ecological monitoring efforts. There are many different treatment approaches for the introduced European genotype of Phragmites australis, and adaptive management principles are being integrated in at least some long-term monitoring efforts. In this paper, we investigated how natural color and a smaller set of near-infrared (NIR) images collected with low-cost uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) could help quantify the aboveground effects of management efforts at 20 sites enrolled in the Phragmites Adaptive Management Framework (PAMF) spanning the coastal Laurentian Great Lakes region. We used object-based image …

Toward Tweet-Mining Framework For Extracting Terrorist Attack-Related Information And Reporting, Farkhund Iqbal, Rabia Batool, Benjamin C. M. Fung, Saiqa Aleem, Ahmed Abbasi, Abdul Rehman Javed

All Works

The widespread popularity of social networking is leading to the adoption of Twitter as an information dissemination tool. Existing research has shown that information dissemination over Twitter has a much broader reach than traditional media and can be used for effective post-incident measures. People use informal language on Twitter, including acronyms, misspelled words, synonyms, transliteration, and ambiguous terms. This makes incident-related information extraction a non-trivial task. However, this information can be valuable for public safety organizations that need to respond in an emergency. This paper proposes an early event-related information extraction and reporting framework that monitors Twitter streams synthesizes event-specific …

Reimagining The Potential Of Earth Observations For Ecosystem Service Assessments, Carlos Ramirez-Reyes, Kate A. Brauman, Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer, Gillian L. Galford, Susana B. Adamo, Christopher B. Anderson, Clarissa Anderson, Ginger R.H. Allington, Kenneth J. Bagstad, Michael T. Coe, Anna F. Cord, Laura E. Dee, Rachelle K. Gould, Meha Jain, Virginia A. Kowal, Frank E. Muller-Karger, Jessica Norriss, Peter Potapov, Jiangxiao Qiu, Jesse T. Rieb, Brian E. Robinson, Leah H. Samberg, Nagendra Singh, Sabrina H. Szeto, Brian Voigt, Keri Watson, T. Maxwell Wright

Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

The benefits nature provides to people, called ecosystem services, are increasingly recognized and accounted for in assessments of infrastructure development, agricultural management, conservation prioritization, and sustainable sourcing. These assessments are often limited by data, however, a gap with tremendous potential to be filled through Earth observations (EO), which produce a variety of data across spatial and temporal extents and resolutions. Despite widespread recognition of this potential, in practice few ecosystem service studies use EO. Here, we identify challenges and opportunities to using EO in ecosystem service modeling and assessment. Some challenges are technical, related to data awareness, processing, and access. …

Oil Spills Detection By Means Of Uas And Low-Cost Airborne Thermal Sensors, A. Al-Shammari, Eugene Levin, R. Shults

School of Technology Publications

This paper provides an overview of oil spill scenarios and the remote sensing methods used for detection and mapping the spills. It also discusses the different kinds of thermal sensors used in oil spills detection. As UAS is becoming an important player in the oil and gas industry for the low operating costs involved, this research involved working with a cheap thermal airborne sensor mounted on DJI Phantom 4 system. Data were collected in two scenarios, first scenario is collecting data in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula at a petroleum company location and the second scenario was an indoor experiment simulating an …

Forensic Analysis Of Immersive Virtual Reality Social Applications: A Primary Account, Ananya Yarramreddy, Peter Gromkowski, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Our work presents the primary account for exploring the forensics of immersive Virtual Reality (VR) systems and their social applications. The Social VR applications studied in this work include Bigscreen, Altspace VR, Rec Room and Facebook Spaces. We explored the two most widely adopted consumer VR systems: the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. Our tests examined the efficacy of reconstructing evidence from network traffic as well as the systems themselves. The results showed that a significant amount of forensically relevant data such as user names, user profile pictures, events, and system details may be recovered. We anticipate that this …

Early Detection Of Mild Cognitive Impairment In Elderly Through Iot: Preliminary Findings, Hwee-Xian Tan, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) results in the gradual decline in a person’s cognitive abilities, and subsequently an increased risk of developing dementia. Although there is no cure for dementia, timely medical and clinical interventions can be administered to elderly who have been diagnosed with MCI, to decelerate the process of further cognitive decline and prolong the duration that they enjoy quality of life. In this paper, we present our preliminary findings of early detection of MCI in elderly who are living in the community, through the use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices for continuous, unobtrusive sensing. Multimodal sensors are …

Multi-Scale Approaches For Evaluating The Success Of Habitat Restoration In Tampa Bay, Florida, Stephanie Thompson Powers

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research aims to further the understanding of ecological restoration success in the Tampa Bay, Florida, region. Although over four hundred restoration projects have been completed in the bay area, knowledge of their success has been hindered by the lack of assessment and transfer of information concerning project outcomes. Without comprehensive project assessment, local science will be limited in its ability to inform practice because we lack the advantage of past knowledge.

Using a multi-scaled approach, a diverse set of restoration projects are evaluated, providing information on how the projects are contributing to defined targets established by the Tampa Bay …

Slides: Water Governance Innovation And Transnational Networks, Michele-Lee Moore

Coping with Water Scarcity in River Basins Worldwide: Lessons Learned from Shared Experiences (Martz Summer Conference, June 9-10)

Presenter: Michele-Lee Moore, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, University of Victoria; Water, Innovation, and Global Governance Lab

10 slides

Value-Inspired Service Design In Elderly Home-Monitoring Systems, Na Liu, Sandeep Purao, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The provision of elderly home-monitoring systems to enhance aging-in-place requires the service to meet the needs of both the elderly and their caregivers. The design of such IT services requires interdisciplinary efforts to look beyond the technical requirements. Taking a value-inspired design perspective, the study argues that service design for promoting aging-in-place needs to reconcile the values of both the elderly and caregivers. Drawn from the framework of basic human values and the unique experience of the SHINESeniors project, the study extracts the core values for elderly and caregivers using a multi-method case analysis. We suggest that both system and …

Slides: Gwc Review Report, Larry Macdonnell

Innovations in Managing Western Water: New Approaches for Balancing Environmental, Social and Economic Outcomes (Martz Summer Conference, June 11-12)

Presenter: Larry MacDonnell, University of Colorado Law School

12 slides

Slides: New Era Of Water Banking And Refined "Water Accounting", Bonnie Colby

Innovations in Managing Western Water: New Approaches for Balancing Environmental, Social and Economic Outcomes (Martz Summer Conference, June 11-12)

Presenter: Professor Bonnie Colby, Departments of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Hydrology and Water Resources, University of Arizona

23 slides

Evaluation Of Current Community-Based Monitoring Efforts And Recommendations For Developing A Cohesive Network Of Support For Monitoring Long Island Sound Embayments., Jamie M.P. Vaudrey, Jamie Alonzo, Adrienne Esposito, Curt Johnson, Maureen Dolan Murphy, Charles Yarish

Department of Marine Sciences

This project focuses on Long Island Sound embayments and represents an exploration of the potential for coordination among community-based water quality monitoring groups, and coordination between community-based groups and data end users, including scientists and managers. Community-based monitoring groups represent a potential valuable source of water quality information. The development of standardized protocols, training methods and reporting procedures will serve to provide end users with the confidence necessary to utilize the data collected as part of community-based monitoring programs. Both groups of stakeholders stand to benefit from this type of coordination with the ultimate benefit being a healthier, better understood …

Bryophyte Species Composition Over Moisture Gradients In The Windmill Islands, East Antarctica: Development Of A Baseline For Monitoring Climate Change Impacts, J Wasley, S A. Robinson, J D. Turnbull, D H. King, W Wanek, M Popp

Sharon Robinson

Extreme environmental conditions prevail on the Antarctic continent and limit plant diversity to cryptogamic communities, dominated by bryophytes and lichens. Even small abiotic shifts, associated with climate change, are likely to have pronounced impacts on these communities that currently exist at their physiological limit of survival. Changes to moisture availability, due to precipitation shifts or alterations to permanent snow reserves, will most likely cause greatest impact. In order to establish a baseline for determining the effect of climate change on continental Antarctic terrestrial communities and to better understand bryophyte species distributions in relation to moisture in a floristically important Antarctic …

Location And Tracking Of Mobile Devices: Überveillance Stalks The Streets, Katina Michael, Roger Clarke

Professor Katina Michael

During the last decade, location-tracking and monitoring applications have proliferated, in mobile cellular and wireless data networks, and through self-reporting by applications running in smartphones that are equipped with onboard global positioning system (GPS) chipsets. It is now possible to locate a smartphone-user's location not merely to a cell, but to a small area within it. Innovators have been quick to capitalise on these location-based technologies for commercial purposes, and have gained access to a great deal of sensitive personal data in the process. In addition, law enforcement utilise these technologies, can do so inexpensively and hence can track many …

Agenda: Monitoring And Protecting Groundwater During Oil And Gas Development, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center. Intermountain Oil And Gas Bmp Project, Colorado Water And Energy Research Center

Monitoring and Protecting Groundwater During Oil and Gas Development (November 26)

This workshop is cosponsored by the Intermountain Oil and Gas BMP Project and the Colorado Water and Energy Research Center, with financial support from the Environmentally Friendly Drilling Project and the CU-Boulder Outreach Committee.

The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) recently initiated a rule making process to develop new, statewide regulations for baseline sampling and monitoring of groundwater near new oil and gas wells. COGCC’s first rule making hearing was held November 14; the rule is expected to be finalized December 10. This workshop will discuss oil and gas development procedures that can impact groundwater, the current rules …

Bryophyte Species Composition Over Moisture Gradients In The Windmill Islands, East Antarctica: Development Of A Baseline For Monitoring Climate Change Impacts, J Wasley, S A. Robinson, J D. Turnbull, D H. King, W Wanek, M Popp

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

Extreme environmental conditions prevail on the Antarctic continent and limit plant diversity to cryptogamic communities, dominated by bryophytes and lichens. Even small abiotic shifts, associated with climate change, are likely to have pronounced impacts on these communities that currently exist at their physiological limit of survival. Changes to moisture availability, due to precipitation shifts or alterations to permanent snow reserves, will most likely cause greatest impact. In order to establish a baseline for determining the effect of climate change on continental Antarctic terrestrial communities and to better understand bryophyte species distributions in relation to moisture in a floristically important Antarctic …

Environmental (Re)Education And Local Environmental Knowledge: Statutory Ground-Based Monitoring And Pastoral Culture In Central Australia, Nicholas J. Gill

Nicholas J Gill

Ground-based monitoring of rangeland condition is common in Australian pastoral administration systems. In the Northern Territory, such monitoring is officially seen as a key plank of sustainable pastoral land use. In the NT and elsewhere, these monitoring schemes have sought to increase participation by pastoralists. Involvement of pastoralists in monitoring is theoretically an educative process that will cause pastoralists to more critically examine their management practices. Critical perspectives on the relationship between rangelands science/extension and pastoralist knowledge systems and concerns, however, suggest that pastoralists’ reception of such monitoring schemes will be influenced by a range of social contexts, including the …

Slides: Natural Gas: Game Changer Or Runner Left On Base? Working To Get It Right In Co!, Gary Graham

Drawing the Blueprint for a Sustainable Natural Gas Future (January 18)

Presenter: Dr. Gary Graham, Director, Lands Program, Western Resource Advocates

21 slides

Slides: Drawing The Blueprint For A Sustainable Natural Gas Future, Mark K. Boling

Drawing the Blueprint for a Sustainable Natural Gas Future (January 18)

Presenter: Mark. K. Boling, Executive Vice-President and General Counsel, Southwestern Energy

23 slides

Resident Identification Using Kinect Depth Image Data And Fuzzy Clustering Techniques, Tanvi Banerjee, James M. Keller, Marjorie Skubic

Kno.e.sis Publications

As a part of our passive fall risk assessment research in home environments, we present a method to identify older residents using features extracted from their gait information from a single depth camera. Depth images have been collected continuously for about eight months from several apartments at a senior housing facility. Shape descriptors such as bounding box information and image moments were extracted from silhouettes of the depth images. The features were then clustered using Possibilistic C Means for resident identification. This technology will allow researchers and health professionals to gather more information on the individual residents by filtering out …

Long-Term Ecology Of Asiatic Wild Ass (Equus H. Hemionus Pallas) In Central Asia, Annegret Stubbe, Michael Stubbe, Nyamsuren Batsaikhan, Ravčigijn Samjaa

Erforschung biologischer Ressourcen der Mongolei / Exploration into the Biological Resources of Mongolia, ISSN 0440-1298

The main population of the nominate form Equus hemionus hemionus Pallas, 1775 occurs in the south-east Gobi desert of Mongolia. From 2003 to 2012 we studied the reproductive ecology and mortality of dschiggetajs or khulans (English also ‘hulan’). During these years, the rate of reproduction was variable, ranging from 6.4% to 23.0% depending on climate, feeding conditions, and fitness of the mares. Our research shows that there appears to be a relationship between minimum temperatures in June (main foaling time) and rate of successful reproduction. The primary cause of decline in the numerical density of the population of E. hemionus …

Location Privacy Under Dire Threat As Uberveillance Stalks The Streets, Katina Michael, Roger Clarke

Associate Professor Katina Michael

Location tracking and monitoring applications have proliferated with the arrival of smart phones that are equipped with onboard global positioning system (GPS) chipsets. It is now possible to locate a smart phone user down to 10 metres of accuracy on average. Innovators have been quick to capitalise on this emerging market by introducing novel pedestrian tracking technologies which can denote the geographic path of a mobile user. At the same time there is contention by law enforcement personnel over the need for a warrant process to track an individual in a public space. This paper considers the future of location …

Using Remotely-Sensed Fuel Connectivity Patterns As A Tool For Fire Danger Monitoring, Gabriele Caccamo, Laurie A. Chisholm, Ross A. Bradstock, Marjetta L. Puotinen

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

Spatial connectivity of areas of dry fuels is considered a significant influence on the incidence of large fires. Precipitation patterns can dynamically affect fuel connectivity through controls on the distribution of dry fuels. Spatio-temporal monitoring of precipitation-driven variations in dry fuel connectivity patterns could therefore offer the potential to monitor fire danger. In this paper we present an innovative graph theoretic-based approach to monitor fire danger using remotely sensed patterns of dry fuel connectivity. We analysed the temporal evolution of dry fuel connectivity in south-eastern Australia during recent fire seasons. The analysis showed that rapid changes in the connectivity of …

The Social And Behavioral Implications Of Location-Based Services, Katina Michael, M.G. Michael

Associate Professor Katina Michael

The social and behavioral implications of location-based services (LBS) are only now beginning to come to light in advanced markets where the services have been adopted by just a little over half the market (Microsoft 2011). Depending on one’s definition of what constitutes location-based services, statistics on the level of adoption differ considerably. While it is helpful to provide as broad a list of applications as possible in what constitutes LBS (e.g. everything from in-vehicle navigation systems to downloading a map using a computer), it can also cloud the real picture forming behind this emerging technology. Emerging not in the …

Slides: Arctic Ecosystem Services Measurement And Modeling Project, Eric Biltonen

Best Management Practices (BMPs): What? How? And Why? (May 26)

Presenter: Eric Biltonen, PhD, Environment Economist, Houston Advanced Research Center

8 slides

Slides: Bmps For Reclamation: Do We Know What Is Effective?, Peter Stahl

Best Management Practices (BMPs): What? How? And Why? (May 26)

Presenter: Pete Stahl, Wyoming Reclamation and Restoration Center

19 slides