Digital Commons Network^™

Population Survey (Census) Of Stray Dog Population In Ahmedabad, Gujarat, Rahul Sehgal, Sunil Chawla, Jack Reece

Stray and Feral Animal Populations Collection

Ahmadabad, the biggest city of Gujarat with a human population of approximately, 6 million. The rapidly expanding population of Ahmadabad means that the metropolitan region extends far outside from the confines of the old city. However, the development is rapid but uncontrolled. Therefore, there are a large number of areas that are prone to stray dogs and these areas are constantly increasing. The old methods of population control by strychnine poisoning or electrocution employed by the municipal corporations have not proved effective in controlling street dog populations, as new dogs soon migrate into the areas, where the local dog population …

Physical Habitat And Social Conditions Across A Coral Reef Shape Spatial Patterns Of Intraspecific Behavioral Variation In A Demersal Fish, Meagan N. Schrandt, Kristin M. Hardy, Kaitlin M. Johnson, Sean C. Lema

Biological Sciences

As coral reef ecosystems decline in health worldwide, reef-associated fishes are being impacted by changes to their coral reef habitats. While previous studies have shown coral reef structure to affect the demography of reef fishes, changes in reef conditions may also impact the behavior of reef fishes as they cope with altered habitats. In this study, we examined spatial patterns of intraspecific behavioral variation in the bicolor damselfish (Stegastes partitus) across the fringing reefs of Curaçao (Caribbean Sea), and explored how this behavioral variation associated with physical and social conditions on the reef. Principal components analysis (PCA) condensed …

Implications Of Community Concordance For Assessing Stream Integrity At Three Nested Spatial Scales In Minnesota, U.S.A., Christine L. Dolph, David D. Huff, Christopher J. Chizinski, Bruce Vondracek

Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit: Staff Publications

1. Fish and invertebrate assemblage data collected from 670 stream sites in Minnesota (U.S.A.) were used to calculate concordance across three nested spatial scales (statewide, ecoregion and catchment). Predictive taxa richness models, calibrated using the same data, were used to evaluate whether concordant communities exhibited similar trends in human-induced taxa loss across all three scales. Finally, we evaluated the strength of the relationship between selected environmental variables and the composition of both assemblages at all three spatial scales.

2. Significant concordance between fish and invertebrate communities occurred at the statewide scale as well as in six of seven ecoregions and …

Current Status Of Lichen Diversity In Iowa, James T. Colbert

Journal of the Iowa Academy of Science: JIAS

No abstract provided.

Subaerial Freshwater Stromatolites In Deer Cave, Sarawak – A Unique Geobiological Cave Formation, Joyce Lundberg, Donald A. Mcfarlane

WM Keck Science Faculty Papers

A suite of distinctive freshwater subaerial phosphatic stromatolites is developed close to the northeastern entrance of Deer Cave, Gunung Mulu National Park, Sarawak, Borneo, in conditions of very low light but ample supply of nutrients from guano. These stromatolites are not particulate; they are composed of alternating layers of more porous and more dense amorphous hydroxylapatite. This biomineralization occurs as moulds of coccoid (the majority) and filamentous (less abundant) cyanobacteria. Mineralization occurs at a pH of ~ 7.0 in the extracellular sheaths and in micro-domains of varying carbonate content in the surrounding mucus of the biofilm. The most recent surfaces …

Epoxi: Comet 103p/Hartley 2 Observations From A Worldwide Campaign ; Astrophysical Journal Letters, K. Meech, M. A'Hearn, J. Adams, P. Bacci, J. Bai, L. Barrera, M. Battelino, J. Bauer, E. Becklin, B. Bhatt, N. Biver, D. Bockelee-Morvan, D. Bodewits, H. Bohnhardt, J. Boissier, B. Bonev, W. Borghini, J. Brucato, E. Bryssinck, M. Buie, H. Canovas, D. Castellano, S. Charnley, W. Chen, P. Chiang, Y. Choi, D. Christian, Y. Chuang, Anita Cochran, P. Colom, M. Combi, I. Coulson, J. Crovisier, N. Russo, K. Dennerl, K. Dewahl, M. Disanti, M. Facchini, T. Farnham, Y. Fernandez, H. Floren, U. Frisk, T. Fujiyoshi, R. Furusho, T. Fuse, G. Galli, D. Garcia-Hernandez, A. Gersch, Z. Getu

Physics Faculty Works

Earth- and space-based observations provide synergistic information for space mission encounters by providing data over longer timescales, at different wavelengths and using techniques that are impossible with an in situ flyby. We report here such observations in support of the EPOXI spacecraft flyby of comet 103P/Hartley 2. The nucleus is small and dark, and exhibited a very rapidly changing rotation period. Prior to the onset of activity, the period was ~16.4 hr. Starting in 2010 August the period changed from 16.6 hr to near 19 hr in December. With respect to dust composition, most volatiles and carbon and nitrogen isotope …

New England Faculty And College Students Differ In Their Views About Evolution, Creationism, Intelligent Design, And Religiosity, Guillermo Paz-Y-Miño C, Avelina Espinosa

Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications

Public acceptance of evolution in Northeastern U.S. is the highest nationwide, only 59%. Here, we compare perspectives about evolution, creationism, intelligent design (ID), and religiosity between highly educated New England faculty (n = 244; 90% Ph.D. holders in 40 disciplines at 35 colleges/universities) and college students from public secular (n = 161), private secular (n = 298), and religious (n = 185) institutions: 94/3% of the faculty vs. 64/14% of the students admitted to accepting evolution openly and/or privately, and 82/18% of the faculty vs. 58/42% of the students thought that evolution is definitely true or probably true, respectively. Only …

A Gis Tool For Plant Spatial Pattern Analysis, Yanli Zhang, Nathan Woodward, Daniel Unger, I-Kuai Hung, Brian P. Oswald, Kenneth W. Farrish

Faculty Publications

A GIS program, ArcPlantPattern, was developed with Visual Basic .NET and ArcObjects as an ArcGIS extension to assist the investigation of plant distribution patterns (species composition as occurrence probability and spacing as distances among species) and to design planting plan maps for patch planting. ArcPlantPattern is the first software of its kind. It can be used for arid and semiarid lands reclamation, burned area rehabilitation, or designing landscapes with a required plant community distribution. ArcPlantPattern may also be applicable to other spatial point pattern analysis, such as geology, geography and wildlife habitat.

State Of The Climate In 2010, Jessica Blunden, Derek S. Arndt, Molly O. Baringer

United States Department of Commerce: Staff Publications

Several large-scale climate patterns influenced climate conditions and weather patterns across the globe during 2010. The transition from a warm El Niño phase at the beginning of the year to a cool La Niña phase by July contributed to many notable events, ranging from record wetness across much of Australia to historically low Eastern Pacific basin and near-record high North Atlantic basin hurricane activity. The remaining five main hurricane basins experienced below- to well-below-normal tropical cyclone activity. The negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation was a major driver of Northern Hemisphere temperature patterns during 2009/10 winter and again in late …

Climate, Fire And Carbon: Tipping Points And Landscape Vulnerability In The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Erica A.H. Smithwick, Anthony L. Westerling, Monica G. Turner, William H. Romme, Michael G. Ryan

Joint Fire Science Program Research Project Reports

More frequent fires under climate warming are likely to alter terrestrial carbon (C) stocks by reducing the amount of C stored in biomass and soil. However, the thresholds of fire frequency that could shift landscapes from C sinks to C sources under future climates and whether these are likely to be exceeded during the coming century are not known. We used the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) as a case study to explore the conditions under which future climate and fire regimes would result in tipping points of C source/sink dynamics. We asked: (1) How great a change in climate and …

Laboratory Of Tree-Ring Research And School Of Natural Resources And The Environment, Thomas W. Swetnam, Donald Falk, Elaine K. Sutherland, Peter M. Brown, Timothy J. Brown

Joint Fire Science Program Research Project Reports

Understanding the role of climate variation in governing fire regimes remains one of the central needs in contemporary fire science and management. Ideally, this understanding should encompass both historical and current fire-climatology, and inform both basic science and ecosystem management. In this project, Fire and Climate Synthesis (FACS) we undertook a detailed synthesis of both paleofire and modern fire based on compilations of existing data sets. We also analyzed three major thematic pathways by which climate has impacted fire policy, including direct and indirect climate effects on fire policy. Paleofire. We assembled the largest and most comprehensive data set of …

Mixed-Source Reintroductions Lead To Outbreeding Depression In Second-Generation Descendents Of A Native North American Fish, David D. Huff, Loren M. Miller, Christopher J. Chizinski, Bruce Vondracek

Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit: Staff Publications

Reintroductions are commonly employed to preserve intraspecific biodiversity in fragmented landscapes. However, reintroduced populations are frequently smaller and more geographically isolated than native populations. Mixing genetically, divergent sources are often proposed to attenuate potentially low genetic diversity in reintroduced populations that may result from small effective population sizes. However, a possible negative tradeoff for mixing sources is outbreeding depression in hybrid offspring. We examined the consequences of mixed-source reintroductions on several fitness surrogates at nine slimy sculpin (Cottus cognatus) reintroduction sites in south-east Minnesota. We inferred the relative fitness of each crosstype in the reintroduced populations by comparing …

Ecological Design Of Marine Construction For Socio-Economic Benefits: Ecosystem Integration Of A Pipeline In Coral Reef Area, Sylvain Pioch, Philippe Saussola, Kirk Kilfoyle, Richard E. Spieler

Marine & Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles

It is critical to understand that an ecosystem integration of construction requires a close Engineering/Biology partnership to meet socio-economic benefits in management goals. Biologists are not typically trained or licensed for the requisite engineering involved in construction. Likewise, non-biologists designing habitat often can lead to egregious results. For example, unintentionally constructing the wrong habitat, i.e., refuge for predators in a nursery area, or habitat that facilitates the spread of non-desirable species can increase, rather than ameliorate, the impact of construction. In recent years, Pioch and co-workers (unpublished) developed an alternative to the “classic” engineering approach to marine construction. This new …

The Changing Structure Of Beef Production: Stockers, Calf Feds And Yearlings, Tom Brink

Range Beef Cow Symposium

Beef production is always in a state of flux. Nothing in this business stays the same for very long. The current situation is truly unique compared to anything we have experienced in the past. Demand is growing. Supply is shrinking. Cattle prices are rising and show no sign of stopping, despite reaching record highs this year. Production costs are also increasing. There are some very real opportunities in the cow-calf business and other producer segments. But financial risks exist as well. My belief is that the good outweighs the bad. Cow-calf producers could see some of the best profits during …

Angler Survey Of The Connecticut River, Justin P. Davis

EEB Articles

The Connecticut River is the largest and most diverse inland fishery resource in the State of Connecticut. Significant improvements in water quality over the past 30 years have led to progressive increases in recreational use, presumably increasing fishing pressure on some species and possibly decreasing overall fishing quality. To address this concern, the Inland Fisheries Division (IFD) of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (CT DEEP) conducted an angler survey on the entire portion of the Connecticut River within the state during March-October of 2008-09. The survey used a similar design as a smaller-scale survey of the river’s …

Mojave Applied Ecology Notes Winter 2011, Scott R. Abella, Alice C. Newton, Kenneth Chittick, Pam Sinanian

Mojave Applied Ecology Notes

Lake Mead’s collaborative applied science research program; “annoying the elephant” - ruminations on active management by Alice Newton, Lake Mead NRA vegetation manager; 2012 NWRA Lake Mead symposium sneak peak; assessing forest change using dendrochronology in the Spring Mountains.

Passing Pains: Revenge, Retaliation, And Redirected Aggression In A New Light, Lixing Sun

Biology Faculty Scholarship

A review of David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton, Payback: Why We Retaliate, Redirect Aggression, and Take Revenge, Oxford University Press: New York, 2011, 209 pp., US$24.95, ISBN 019539514X (hardcover).

Male Field Crickets Infested By Parasitoid Flies Express Phenotypes That May Benefit The Parasitoids, Oliver M. Beckers, William E. Wagner

School of Biological Sciences: Faculty Publications

Parasites can cause changes in the phenotypes of their hosts that may benefit the parasite, the host, or both. To understand the evolutionary dynamics of host–parasite interactions it is necessary to first examine the effect of parasitic infestation on the host phenotype and whether the host or parasite benefits from these changes. The fly Ormia ochracea parasitizes the variable field cricket, Gryllus lineaticeps, and it uses male song to locate hosts for its lethal larvae. Adult flies preferentially orient to male songs with faster and longer chirps. We tested the effect of larval infestation on two types of host traits. …

Community Structures Of Fecal Bacteria In Cattle From Different Animal Feeding Operations, Orin C. Shanks, Catherine A. Kelty, Shawn Archibeque, Michael Jenkins, Ryan Newton, Sandra L. Mclellan, Susan M. Huse, Mitchell L. Sogin

United States Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service / University of Nebraska-Lincoln: Faculty Publications

The fecal microbiome of cattle plays a critical role not only in animal health and productivity but also in food safety, pathogen shedding, and the performance of fecal pollution detection methods. Unfortunately, most published molecular surveys fail to provide adequate detail about variability in the community structures of fecal bacteria within and across cattle populations. Using massively parallel pyrosequencing of a hypervariable region of the rRNA coding region, we profiled the fecal microbial communities of cattle from six different feeding operations where cattle were subjected to consistent management practices for a minimum of 90 days. We obtained a total of …

New Records And Ecological Remarks Regarding The Tribe Stomoxyini (Diptera: Muscidae) From Israel, Günter Müller, Jerome Hogsette, Vasiliy Kravchenko, Edita Revay, Yosef Schlein

United States Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service / University of Nebraska-Lincoln: Faculty Publications

The Stomoxyini is a small tribe with only ten genera and 49 known species worldwide (Zumpt 1973) belonging to the Muscidae, one of the largest dipteran. Apart from feeding occasionally on nectar (Müller et al. 2011a), the adult flies of this tribe are obligate blood feeders and can easily be recognized by their conspicuous proboscis adapted for biting and sucking blood (Zumpt 1973). Several members of the tribe, especially Stomoxys and Haematobia species, are major pests of domestic livestock. Two species, Stomoxys calcitrans (Linnaeus 1758) and Haematobia irritans (Linnaeus 1758), cause billions of USD in damages annually in the cattle …

Potential Carbon Storage And Cost-Benefits Analysis Of A Small-Scale Community Reforestation Project, Chester County, Pennsylvania, Jason D. Ferrell

East Goshen Township Forest Restoration Project Documents

No abstract provided.

Eastern Michigan University Undergraduate Catalog, 2011-2012, Office Of The Registrar

Undergraduate Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Eastern Michigan University Undergraduate Catalog, 2011-2012, Office Of The Registrar

Undergraduate Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Eastern Ichigan University Graduate Catalog, 2011-2012, Office Of The Registrar

Graduate Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Gordon Natural Area Tour - Guide, Kendra Mcmillin, Gerard Hertel

Gordon Natural Area-related Curricula Documents

No abstract provided.

Homestead National Monument, Vegetation Classification [Map], United States National Park Service

United States National Park Service: Publications

Color graphic vegetation map of Homestead National Monument of America in Beatrice, Nebraska, USA. Created as part of the Homestead NM of America Vegetation Mapping Project in April and May 2011. Includes a color-coded vegetation classification.

Citizen Sensor Data Mining, Social Media Analytics And Development Centric Web Applications, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Amit P. Sheth, Selvam Velmuru

Kno.e.sis Publications

With the rapid rise in the popularity of social media (500M+ Facebook users, 100M+ twitter users), and near ubiquitous mobile access (4.1 billion actively-used mobile phones), the sharing of observations and opinions has become common-place (nearly 100M tweets a day, 1.8 trillion SMSs in US last year). This has given us an unprecedented access to the pulse of a populace and the ability to perform analytics on social data to support a variety of socially intelligent applications -- be it towards targeted online content delivery, crisis management, organizing revolutions or promoting social development in underdeveloped and developing countries. This tutorial …

Cultural Botany: Toward A Model Of Transdisciplinary, Embodied, And Poetic Research Into Plants, John C. Ryan

Research outputs 2011

Since the eighteenth century, the study of plants has reflected an increasingly mechanized and technological view of the natural world that divides the humanities and the natual sciences. In broad terms, this article proposes a context for research into flora through an interrogation of existing literature addressing a rapprochement between ways to knowledge. The natureculture dichotomy, and more specifically the plant-to-human sensory disjunction, follows a parallel course of resolution to the schism between objective (technical, scientific, reductionistic, visual) and subjective (emotive, artistic, relational, multi-sensory) forms of knowledge. The foundations of taxonomic botany, as well as the allied fields of environmental …

Plants, Processes, Places: Sensory Intimacy And Poetic Enquiry, John Ryan

Research outputs 2011

As an arts-based research approach, poetic enquiry has been theorised and applied recently in the social sciences and in education. In this article, I extend its usage to eco-critical studies of Australian flora and fauna. The Southwest corner of Western Australia affords opportunities to deploy arts-based methodologies, including field poetry, for celebrating the natural heritage of a region of distinguished biodiversity. I suggest that lyric practices in places such as Lesueur National Park and Anstey-Keane Damplands in southern Perth can catalyse embodied engagements with flora. The outcome of these practices is the invocation of the multiple senses— including the proximities …

A Phylogeographic And Population Genetic Analysis Of A Widespread, Sedentary North American Bird: The Hairy Woodpecker (Picoides Villosus), John Klicka, Garth M. Spellman, Kevin Winker, Vivien Chua, Brian T. Smith

Ornithology Program (HRC)

The Hairy Woodpecker (Picoides villosus) has one of the broadest breeding distributions of any North American bird and is also one of the most morphologically variable with as many as 21 described subspecies. This wide distribution and high degree of phenotypic diversity suggests the presence of underlying genetic structure. We used ND2 sequence from 296 individuals from 89 localities throughout the Hairy Woodpecker distribution to address this question and to explore this species’ evolutionary history. Phylogenetic analyses identified three main Hairy Woodpecker clades, each ~1.5% divergent from one another. One clade was comprised of birds from boreal and eastern zones …