Digital Commons Network^™

Virtual Training Prepared For The Former Afghanistan Ministry Of Energy And Water—Streamgaging, Fluvial Sediment Sampling, Bathymetry, And Streamflow And Sediment Modeling, Joel T. Groten, Joshua F. Valder, Brenda K. Densmore, Logan W. Neal, Justin Krahulik, Thomas J. Mack

United States Geological Survey: Water Reports and Publications

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) created a virtual training series for the Afghanistan Ministry of Energy and Water (MEW), now known as the National Water Affairs Regulation Authority (NWARA), to provide critical hydrological training as an alternative to an in-person training. The USGS was scheduled to provide in-person surface-water training for NWARA during 2020; however, travel was halted because of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID–19) pandemic. The virtual training consisted of prerecorded and live presentations that were scheduled during 4 weeks in August 2021. However, the training was halted after the second week due to the collapse of the …

Coming To Know The Local Environment: Children's Experiences In Rautamai Gaunpalika, Nepal, Elsie Nicole Love

Dissertations and Theses

This qualitative research, conducted over three months from late monsoon season into early fall of 2018 with twenty-six children and thirteen adults, explores how children in the hills of Rautamai Gaunpalika, Province 1, Nepal come to know their local environment. Semi-structured interviews with children, their family members, and teachers, and participant observation with children as they worked and played in forests, fields, and streams, suggest that outside of school, children come to know their local environment in the following ways: through participation in and application of knowledge to subsistence practices; through collaborative learning and teaching in mixed-age groups; through relationships …

Connecticut Embayment Characteristics 2022, Jamie M.P. Vaudrey, James E. O'Donnell

Department of Marine Sciences

Data on Connecticut embayment characteristics. This Excel file is the centerpiece for capturing embayment characteristics as presented in RESPEC (2022), developed specifically for this project. Some parameters such as watershed size, embayment size, and tidal range were pulled from other sources described in Appendix A of RESPEC (2022), but much of the data and indicators in the Excel file were developed for this project. Each parameter included in the spreadsheet is fully defined in Appendix A of RESPEC (2022). All data available in the spreadsheet are provided by embayment in Appendix C of RESPEC (2022), including the results of bathymetric …

Resource Selection Of Deer Hunters In Georgia's Appalachian Mountains, Jacalyn P. Rosenberger, Andrew R. Little, Adam C. Edge, Cheyenne J. Yates, David A. Osborn, Charlie H. Killmaster, Kristina L. Johannsen, Karl V. Miller, Gino J. D'Angelo

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

White‐tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and hunters on 2 Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) within the Chattahoochee National Forest of northern Georgia, USA, significantly declined in number from the 1980s to 2018. Managers were interested in understanding how they could manipulate hunter distribution according to deer management goals. To understand the spatial distribution of hunting pressure and factors driving hunter resource selection, we analyzed GPS tracking data from 58 deer hunters over the 2018–2019 and 2019–2020 hunting seasons. We evaluated hunter selection on 3 spatial scales relative to elevation, slope, and distance from roads, trails, wildlife openings, deciduous forest, mixed …

Agricultural Carbon Markets: How Could They Work?, Andrew Havens

Department of Environmental Studies: Undergraduate Student Theses

The resurgence of voluntary markets in which consumers can purchase carbon credits generated by agricultural carbon sequestration has brought up many questions for farmers looking to potentially enter the market. Past carbon markets, such as the Chicago Climate Exchange, ended when a recession hit, causing demand for credits to swiftly decline. How can modern voluntary markets face these challenges along with new ones and be successful? This research paper, completed as an undergraduate thesis project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, examines the economic and scientific factors behind soil carbon sequestration credits. An extended literature review combined with estimation of a …

Agricultural Carbon Markets: How Could They Work?, Andrew Havens

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

The resurgence of voluntary markets in which consumers can purchase carbon credits generated by agricultural carbon sequestration has brought up many questions for farmers looking to potentially enter the market. Past carbon markets, such as the Chicago Climate Exchange, ended when a recession hit, causing demand for credits to swiftly decline. How can modern voluntary markets face these challenges along with new ones and be successful? This research paper, completed as an undergraduate thesis project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, examines the economic and scientific factors behind soil carbon sequestration credits. An extended literature review combined with estimation of a …

The Fierce Green Fire: Vol. 12 Issue 12, Wofford College. Department Of Environmental Studies

The Fierce Green Fire

No abstract provided.

An Industry Life Cycle Assessment (Lca) For Sheep Production In Western Australia, Stephen Wiedemann, Darcia Mcrae, Emma Longworth

Animal production and livestock research reports

The Western Australian Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) has identified the need to understand greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the livestock sector in detail, with a view to developing emission reduction plans for the state. To achieve this, DPIRD commissioned a life cycle assessment (LCA) for the sheep industry in Western Australia (WA) for the financial years (FY) 2005 (July 1, 2004 to June 30, 2005) and 2020 (July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020). The analysis of one historic period provided a baseline reference point for the more recent results, and the intent was to develop …

Copy Of Revision Summary, Atlantic Richfield Company

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Sars-Cov-2 Rna Abundance In Wastewater As A Function Of Distinct Urban Sewershed Size., Rochelle H. Holm, Anish Mukherjee, Jayesh P. Rai, Ray A. Yeager, Daymond Talley, Shesh N. Rai, Aruni Bhatnagar, Ted Smith

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

During the COVID-19 pandemic, wastewater-based epidemiology has emerged as a promising approach for monitoring SARS-CoV-2 prevalence on a community-level. Despite much being known about the utility of making these measurements in large wastewater treatment plants, little is known about the correlation with finer geographic resolution, such as those obtained through sewershed sub-area catchments. This study aims to identify community wastewater surveillance characteristics between sewershed areas that affect the strength of the association of SARS-CoV-2 RNA detection in a metropolitan area. For this, wastewater from 17 sewershed areas were sampled in Louisville/Jefferson County, Kentucky (USA), from August 2020 to April 2021 …

A General Pattern Of Trade-Offs Between Ecosystem Resistance And Resilience To Tropical Cyclones, Christopher J. Patrick, John S. Kominoski, William H. Mcdowell, Benjamin Branoff, David Lagomasino, Miguel Leon, Enie Hensel, Marc J. S. Hensel, Bradley A. Strickland, T. Mitchell Aide, Anna Armitage, Marconi Campos-Cerqueira, Victoria M. Congdon, Todd A. Crowl, Donna J. Devlin, Sarah Douglas, Brad E. Erisman, Rusty A. Feagin, Simon J. Geist, Nathan S. Hall, Amber K. Hardison, Michael R. Heithaus, J. Aaron Hogan, J. Derek Hogan, Sean Kinard, Jeremy J. Kiszka, Teng-Chiu Lin, Kaijun Lu, Christopher J. Madden, Paul A. Montagna, Christine S. O'Connell, C. Edward Proffitt, Brandi Kiel Reese, Joseph W. Reustle, Kelly L. Robinson, Scott A. Rush, Rolando O. Santos, Astrid Schnetzer, Delbert L. Smee, Rachel S. Smith, Gregory Starr, Beth A. Stauffer, Lily M. Walker, Carolyn A. Weaver, Michael S. Wetz, Elizabeth R. Whitman, Sara S. Wilson, Jianhong Xue, Xiaoming Zou

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

Tropical cyclones drive coastal ecosystem dynamics, and their frequency, intensity, and spatial distribution are predicted to shift with climate change. Patterns of resistance and resilience were synthesized for 4138 ecosystem time series from n = 26 storms occurring between 1985 and 2018 in the Northern Hemisphere to predict how coastal ecosystems will respond to future disturbance regimes. Data were grouped by ecosystems (fresh water, salt water, terrestrial, and wetland) and response categories (biogeochemistry, hydrography, mobile biota, sedentary fauna, and vascular plants). We observed a repeated pattern of trade-offs between resistance and resilience across analyses. These patterns are likely the outcomes …

Cetacean Strandings In The Us Pacific Northwest 2000–2019 Reveal Potential Linkages To Oceanographic Variability, Amanda J. Warlick, Jessica L. Huggins, Dyanna M. Lambourn, Deborah A. Duffield, Dalin Nichole D'Alessandro, James M. Rice, John Calambokidis, M. Bradley Hanson, Joseph K. Gaydos, Multiple Additional Authors

Biology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Studying patterns in marine mammal stranding cases can provide insight into changes in population health, abundance, and distribution. Cetaceans along the United States West coast strand for a wide variety of reasons, including disease, injury, and poor nutritional status, all of which may be caused by both natural and anthropogenic factors. Examining the potential drivers of these stranding cases can reveal how populations respond to changes in their habitat, notably oceanographic variability and anthropogenic activities. In this study, we aim to synthesize recent patterns in 1,819 cetacean strandings across 26 species in the Pacific Northwest from 2000 to 2019 to …

Calgreen: California Green Building Standards Code: Blog 3, San Diego Regional Climate Collaborative, Gabriella Medina, Darbi Berry

San Diego Regional Climate Collaborative

CALGreen encourages local governments to go beyond statewide Energy Code regulations to achieve greater building energy efficiency and cost savings, all while providing the necessary resources to do so. The currently enforced version of CALGreen is the 2019 CALGreen code. Mandates and voluntary provisions in the 2022 CALGreen update will go into effect January 1, 2023.¹ If both the 2022 Energy Code and 2022 CALGreen mandatory and voluntary standards were to be adopted statewide, the carbon reductions would be equivalent to removing 8,000 fuel-powered cars off the road for the first year and 24,000 fuel-powered cars by the third year.² …

Autonomous, Long-Range, Sensor Emplacement Using Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Adam Plowcha, Justin Bradley, Jacob Hoberg, Thomas Ammon, Mark Nail, Brittany Duncan, Carrick Detweiler

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

Automated, in-ground sensor emplacement can significantly improve remote, terrestrial, data collection capabilities. Utilizing a multicopter, unmanned aircraft system (UAS) for this purpose allows sensor insertion with minimal disturbance to the target site or surrounding area. However, developing an emplacement mechanism for a small multicopter, autonomy to manage the target selection and implantation process, as well as long-range deployment are challenging to address. We have developed an autonomous, multicopter UAS that can implant subsurface sensor devices. We enhanced the UAS autopilot with autonomy for target and landing zone selection, as well as ensuring the sensor is implanted properly in the ground. …

The Coastal Monitor: Vol. 8 No. 4, John Tanacredi Ph.D.

The Coastal Monitor

The original five acre of land portion of the historic Blue Points Oyster Company is located at the southern end of Atlantic Ave in West Sayville, Islip Town, Suffolk County, New York on the shore of Great South Bay. The Center for Environmental Research and Coastal Oceans Monitoring (CERCOM) is the science field station serving Molloy College’s BCES programs in Earth & Environmental Sciences and Biology. Our mission is to provide unique hands-on educational opportunities in the physical and life sciences, in collaboration with a host of Federal, State, and local and NGO groups, to bolster students’ career path. Great …

Iowa Waste Reduction Center Newsletter, March 2022, University Of Northern Iowa. Iowa Waste Reduction Center.

Iowa Waste Reduction Center Newsletter

Contents:

--- Upcoming Events
--- Important Reminder about Student Health Insurance
--- UNI Hosts Cedar Valley Sustainability Business Workshops and Competition
--- Compost Operator Re-certification Training Course
--- Welcome, Molly!
--- International Compost Awareness Week
--- Minor Source Emissions Inventory Assistance
--- Industry News

Polymer Coated Urea Microplastics: Urban Landscape, C. J. Seely, B. T. Geary, B. G. Hopkins

Library/Life Sciences Undergraduate Poster Competition 2022

• Polymer Coated Urea (PCU) is an effective fertilizer.
• Microplastics, from a wide range of waste materials, pollute water bodies.
• One potential source of microplastics are from PCU fertilizers if the coatings are transported overland into water bodies.
• Various urban landscape systems vary in the potential for surface runoff.

Uranium Isotopic Composition And Constraints On The Provenance Of The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau's Surface Dust, Xiaoyu Jiao, Zhiwen Dong, Eric J. R. Parteli, Janice Brahney, Ting Wei, Marcelli Augusto, Junsheng Nie, Jiawen Ren, Xiang Qin

Watershed Sciences Faculty Publications

The production and emission of aeolian dust can provide key information on the contemporary and historical links between geological evolution and climate. Here we use ²³⁴U/²³⁸U isotope ratios and the uranium (U) comminution age method on samples collected from Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (TP) surface dust and glacier snowpack/cryoconites to determine the erosion and potential transport provenance of the dust, regardless of petrological origin. The spatial variation of the (²³⁴U/²³⁸U) isotope ratios of TP dust showed relatively high values in the Songpan-Ganzi-Hoh Xil, Himalayan and the Kunlun-Qaidam-Qilian terranes, while showing relatively low (²³⁴U/ …

Deception-Based Knowledge In Indigenous And Scientific Societies American Indian Tricksters And Experimental Research Designs, Yancey Orr, Raymond Orr

Environmental Science and Policy: Faculty Publications

The emerging movement to decolonize the sciences, social sciences, and humanities has emphasized the differences between Indigenous and Western scientific ways of knowing. Paradoxically, emphasizing the difference between these systems has also been the principle undergirding modern science’s claim to being a uniquely valid means of knowledge creation. Yet as each approach focused solely on contrasting Indigenous and scientific ways of knowing, potential similarities between these knowledge systems may have been ignored. One such oversight is the use of deception by each system, which is central to experimental research designs in the social and psychological sciences, and in American Indian …

Draft Final Quarterly Operations And Maintenance Report Butte Treatment Lagoon System – Fourth Quarter 2021, Pioneer Technical Services, Inc.

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Humboldt Bay Sea Level Rise Regional Planning Feasibility Study - Stakeholder Catalogue, Michael Richardson, Lisa Shikany, Sarah Wickman, Kristen Orth-Gordinier

Local Reports and Publications

This catalogue seeks to identify asset owners, managers, and other parties that will or could be implicated in a regional Humboldt Bay sea level rise (SLR) planning effort. It provides information regarding assets they own or manage, their authority or area of interest within the SLR regional planning area, or other concerns as they may pertain to regional SLR management. The parties identified range from those that would be significantly or directly involved in regional SLR planning to those that could be indirectly involved or have a tangential interest in such an effort.

This catalogue will serve as a tool …

Spatial And Temporal Analysis Of Big Dataset On Pm2.5 Air Pollution In Beijing, China, 2014 To 2018, Hutong Fan

Great Lakes Center Masters Theses

Air particulate matter (PM_2.5) pollution is a critical environment problem worldwide and also in Beijing, China. We gathered five-year PM_2.5 contaminate concentrations from 2014 to 2018, from the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center and China Air Quality Real-time Distribution Platform. This is a big dataset, and we collected with crawler technology from Python programming. After examining the quality of the recorded data, we determined to conduct the temporal and spatial analysis using 27 observation stations located in both urban and suburb area in the municipality of Beijing. The big dataset of five-year hourly PM_2.5 concentrations was …

Monitoring Extinction Risk And Threats Of The World's Fishes Based On The Sampled Red List Index, Rafael Miranda, Imanol Miqueleiz, William Darwall, Catherine Sayer, Nicholas K. Dulvy, Kent E. Carpenter, Beth Polidoro, Nadia Dewhurst-Richman, Caroline Pollock, Craig Hilton-Taylor, Robin Freeman, Ben Collen, Monika Böhm

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Global biodiversitytargets require us to identify species at risk of extinction and quantify status and trends of biodiversity. The Red List Index (RLI) tracks trends in the conservation status of entire species groups over time by monitoring changes in categories assigned to species. Here, we calculate this index for the world’s fishes in 2010, using a sampled approach to the RLI based on a randomly selected sample of 1,500 species, and also present RLI splits for freshwater and marine systems separately. We further compare specific traits of a worldwide fish list to our sample to assess its representativeness. Overall, 15.1% …

Irrigation’S Impact On A Precipitation Event During Grainex In Nebraska, Usa, Daniel Whitesel

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

Numerous precipitation events were observed during the Great Plains Irrigation Experiment (GRAINEX). However, the precipitation event that was observed the morning of 23 July 2018 is the focus of this thesis. Six experiments were conducted which involved increasing or decreasing soil moisture by 5% increments over the irrigated cropland. An additional experiment, which changed the irrigated land use to grassland, showed precipitation increases. It was found that regardless of strength of irrigation, average precipitation decreased. Average precipitation decreased by up to 72% when irrigation increased compared to the control simulation and decreased by up to 85% when irrigation decreased compared …

The Research And Design Of Sustainlnk: An Online Hub Of Sustainability Resources In Lincoln, Nebraska, Kayla Kremke

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

SustainLNK (www.sustainlnk.org) is a website serving as a hub of sustainability resources in Lincoln, Nebraska. The site began as a personal project before becoming my UNL Honors Program Senior Project in Spring 2021, and consists of a website of resources along with two social media accounts providing more timely updates on sustainability-related events. This document outlines the thought and planning that was behind the development of the resource, along with relevant links to grow a deeper understanding of this new community resource.

Does Restoration Of Urban Riparian Zones Impact Stream Water Quality In Portland, Oregon, Ash Ivanov

University Honors Theses

Riparian zones influence urban stream quality through factors such as shading the stream, adding nutrients through leaf litter, stabilizing the stream banks to reduce turbidity, and filtering toxins out of the water. Riparian restoration often involves changing plant assemblage to be more diverse and include primarily native species instead of non-native, improving connection to the stream through changing stream morphology, improving species habitat, and reducing pollution. The goal of this study was to determine if urban riparian restoration projects in the region were successful, and if not, why that may be the case. The study was performed in the Portland, …

Comparative Evaluation Of Physicochemical And Fermentative Responses Of Three Sorghum Varieties From Dryland And Irrigated Land And The Properties Of Proteins From Distillers’ Grains, Jikai Zhao, Thomas Weiss, Zhenjiao Du, Shan Hong, Scott R. Bean, Yonghui Li, Donghai Wang

School of Earth, Environmental, & Marine Sciences Faculty Publications

Three sorghum varieties [waxy sorghum (WS), high protein sorghum (HPS), and normal sorghum (NS)] grown under dryland and irrigated conditions were evaluated with respect to the physicochemical and fermentative properties. The proteins were extracted from wet distillers' grains with solubles (WDGS) and characterized in terms of purity and in vitro digestibility. Starch, crude protein, crude fat, and fiber contents of the sorghums ranged from 64.16 to 68.05 g/100 g, 11.49–13.54 g/100 g, 2.45–2.98 g/100 g, and 1.62–1.80 g/100 g, respectively. For the same variety, the sorghums grown under dryland conditions had higher protein (0.33–0.91 g/100 g) and lower …

Oria Stage Ii Expansion: Keep River Post-Development Aquatic Fauna And Targeted Sawfish Survey - 2021, Indopacific Environmental, Department Of Primary Industries And Regional Development, Western Australia

Irrigated Agricultural Development in the North

This report presents the results of the 2021 Keep River Aquatic Fauna and Targeted Sawfish Survey which represents the second of three post-development surveys required to be completed as per the project conditions of the Goomig Irrigation Development. Whilst a limited number of potentially impacted sites were not able to be surveyed in 2021 as a result of i) COVID-19 travel restrictions implemented by the Western Australian Government during the survey and ii) access limitations as a result of rain associated with the wet season due to the late completion of the survey, the data collected and current analyses were …

Habitat Restoration Restores Underwater Soundscapes And Larval Recruitment, Jack Butler, Emily R. Anderson, Mark J. Butler

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Habitat degradation alters many ecosystem processes, and the potential for the reestablishment of ecosystem function through restoration is an area of active research. Among marine systems, coastal habitats are particularly vulnerable to anthropogenic degradation and, in response, are the focus of marine ecological restoration. One of the crucial functions of structurally complex coastal habitats (e.g., saltmarshes, seagrass meadows, kelp forests, coral reefs) are as nurseries to coastal and offshore species, many of whose larvae utilize sound to locate suitable nursery habitat. However, the effect of habitat degradation and subsequent restoration on underwater soundscapes and their function as navigational cues for …

Fire Effects In Montane Meadows, Rosie Deak

Master's Theses

The impact of forest fires on downstream meadow communities across California is of great ecological interest, as meadows are an important source of biodiversity in this region. Over a century of fire suppression has led to increased forest stand densities, which in turn has resulted in less water availability due to increased transpiration of densely growing trees. This potentially has left less available water for downstream plant communities in meadows. If true, then high mortality wildfires in surrounding forest are predicted to lead to an increase in available downstream moisture where obligate and facultative-wetland taxa increase and dry-adapted upland taxa …