Digital Commons Network^™

Semantic Provenance For Escience: Managing The Deluge Of Scientific Data, Satya S. Sahoo, Amit P. Sheth, Cory Andrew Henson

Kno.e.sis Publications

Provenance information in eScience is metadata that's critical to effectively manage the exponentially increasing volumes of scientific data from industrial-scale experiment protocols. Semantic provenance, based on domain-specific provenance ontologies, lets software applications unambiguously interpret data in the correct context. The semantic provenance framework for eScience data comprises expressive provenance information and domain-specific provenance ontologies and applies this information to data management. The authors' "two degrees of separation" approach advocates the creation of high-quality provenance information using specialized services. In contrast to workflow engines generating provenance information as a core functionality, the specialized provenance services are integrated into a scientific workflow …

Quantifying Twentieth Century Glacier Change In The Sierra Nevada, California, Hassan J. Basagic

Dissertations and Theses

Numerous small alpine glaciers occupy the high elevation regions of the central and southern Siena Nevada, California. These glaciers change size in response to variations in climate and are therefore important indicators of climate change. An inventory based on USGS topographic maps (l :24,000) revealed 1719 glaciers and perennial snow and ice features for a total area of 39.l5 ±7.52 km². The number of 'true' glaciers, versus non-moving ice, is estimated to be 118, covering 15.87 ± 1.69 Km². All glaciers were located on north to northeast aspects, at elevations >3000 m. Historical photographs, geologic evidence, …

Not Your Father’S Border: An Examination Of The Border In Northern Ireland And Its Relevance To The Global Change In The Importance Of World Borders, Aaron Patterson

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Humanity has long maintained barriers separating specific entities from others. Ranging from cultural, religious, financial, and racial differences among a few others, the reasoning behind borders has remained a purely human endeavor. But our current golden age of technology has somewhat shrunk, or at least reassessed the necessity for borders. The boundaries of today, while many remain in the same locations as in the past, are vastly different from the borders created by previous generations. Globalization, a relatively new term, has made communication simple and fast. The noticeable result has been, of course, better communication between locations, and thus easing …

Separating People And Wildlife: Zoning As A Conservation Strategy For Large Carnivores, Courtney L. Larson

Honors Theses

Large carnivores are some of the world’s most difficult species to conserve because of their large spatial requirements, low population density, and high potential for conflict with humans. However, large carnivores are valuable for ecological, cultural, and ethical reasons. Carnivore management can take a wide variety of forms, including translocation, sterilization, livestock compensation programs, regulated hunting, improved livestock husbandry practices, and zoning, among others. The objective of this thesis was to conduct a comparative analysis of examples of zoning from around the world to examine whether it is an effective carnivore management strategy.

Analysis of twelve case studies showed that …

Ecosystem Restoration In The Ouachita National Forest: Evaluating The Pragmatism Of Pre-European Settlement Benchmarks, John Lawrence Davenport

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

This paper looks at the intersections of nature and culture through a study of forest ecosystem restoration efforts in the Ouachita National Forest (Arkansas and Oklahoma). Ecosystem restoration goals are often informed by a pre-European settlement (PES) condition, with an implicit (and occasionally explicit) assertion that such conditions are both more natural than and preferable to the contemporary state. In many cases resuming pre-suppression fire regimes remains a key mechanism for achieving this restored condition. This study’s three main objectives include: (1) determining how PES benchmarks arose in restoration thought, (2) examining how the choice to use a PES benchmark …

The Role Of The Epikarst In Karst And Cave Hydrogeology: A Review, Paul W. Williams

International Journal of Speleology

The epikarst (also known as the subcutaneous zone) comprises highly weathered carbonate bedrock immediately beneath the surface or beneath the soil (when present) or exposed at the surface. Porosity and permeability are higher near the surface than at depth, consequently after recharge percolating rainwater is detained near the base of the epikarst, the detention ponding producing an epikarstic aquifer. Such an aquifer is found only where the uppermost part of the vadose zone is very weathered compared to the bedrock at depth. Sometimes this contrast in porosity and permeability does not occur either because the epikarst has been scraped off …

Characterization And Analysis Of Hailstorms In The Northern Great Plains, Thomas Sando

The Journal of Undergraduate Research

Hail is a meteorological occurrence that appears frequently during spring and summer across the Northern Great Plains. This paper first characterizes patterns associated with reported hail events occurring within a five-state region (North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Nebraska) from 2000-2006 using records taken from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) Severe Storms database. Patterns of interest include the seasonality of hail activity for each state and across the region, observational bias in the reporting of hailstone size, and temporal trends in the number of hail reports across the region and in each state. This paper then explores a …

Fixed-Effect Estimation Of Highly-Mobile Production Technologies, William Clinton Horrace, Kurt E. Schnier

Center for Policy Research

Revised from November 2006 and July 2007. We consider fixed-effect estimation of a production function where inputs and outputs vary over time, space, and cross-sectional unit. Variability in the spatial dimension allows for time-varying individual effects, without parametric assumptions on the effects. Asymptotics along the spatial dimension provide consistency and normality of the marginal products. A finite-sample example is provided: a production function for bottom-trawler fishing vessels in the flatfish fisheries of the Bering Sea. We find significant spatial variability of output (catch) which we exploit in estimation of a harvesting function.

Volcanic Activity: Processing Of Observation And Remote Sensing Data (Vapor), Mark Wylie

Reports

The World Bank makes a very clear distinction between disasters and natural phenomena. Natural phenomena are events like volcanic eruptions. A disaster only occurs when the ability of the community to cope with natural phenomenon has been surpassed, causing widespread human, material, economic or environmental losses. By these definitions, volcanic eruptions do not have to lead to disasters. On November 13, 1985, the second most deadly eruption of the twentieth century occurred in Colombia. Within a few hours of the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano, 23,000 people were dead because no infrastructure existed to respond to such an …

Nebraska Cooperative Fish And Wildlife Research Unit—Usgs: Report Of Activities October 2007 – October 2008

Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit: Annual Reports

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION . 1
PERSONNEL AND COOPERATORS . 3
Unit Personnel . 3
Coordinating Committee Members . 5
Cooperators. 6
MILESTONES . 9
AWARDS AND RECOGNITIONS . 10
THESES AND DISERTATIONS . 10
PROJECTS IN FISHERY SCIENCE . 13
Geographic Trends in Contamination of Nebraska’s Surface Waters as Indexed by Sex Steroids of Common Carp . 15
Impact of White Perch on Walleye at Branched Oak and Pawnee Reservoirs . 16
Population Assessment of Channel Catfish in Nebraska . 17
Predators of White Perch at Branched Oak and Pawnee Reservoirs . 18
Recruitment of Walleye and White Bass in Irrigation …

Power Laws, Discontinuities And Regional City Size Distributions, Ahjond S. Garmestani, Craig R. Allen, Colin M. Gallagher

Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit: Staff Publications

Urban systems are manifestations of human adaptation to the natural environment. City size distributions are the expression of hierarchical processes acting upon urban systems. In this paper, we test the entire city size distributions for the southeastern and southwestern United States (1990), as well as the size classes in these regions for power law behavior. We interpret the differences in the size of the regional city size distributions as the manifestation of variable growth dynamics dependent upon city size. Size classes in the city size distributions are snapshots of stable states within urban systems in flux.

Historic Resource Study: Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, Gail Evans-Hatch

United States National Park Service: Publications

As steward of many of the United States' most important cultural and natural resources, the National Park Service (NPS) is required to create background documents along with specific plans aimed at managing and protecting these resources for the enjoyment of present and future generations. An important aspect of managing cultural landscapes requires knowing the past of those landscapes. A historic resource study (HRS) project involves researching and presenting the history of a park. A HRS also attempts to identify and evaluate the importance of all cultural resources within that park. Researching and presenting the broader historical context of a park …

Intelligent Environmental Decision Support Systems, M. Sànchez-Marrè, K. Gibert, R. S. Sojda, J. P. Steyer, P. Struss, I. Rodríguez-Roda, J. Comas, V. Brilhante, E. A. Roehl

United States Geological Survey: Staff Publications

Introduction
Complexity of environmental systems
New tools for a new paradigm
Intelligent Environmental Decision Support Systems (IEDSS)
IEDSS development
About Uncertainty Management
Temporal Reasoning
Featuring the problem
Approaches to temporal reasoning
Case-based reasoning for temporal reasoning
Geographic Information and Spatial Reasoning
Understanding spatial reasoning
Kriging and variants
Representing change/time steps/feedback loops
Middleware. blackboards and communication protocols
Multiagent systems
Evaluation of IEDSS and Benchmarking
Benchmarking
Conclusions and Future Trends

Shading Facilitates Sessile Invertebrate Dominance In The Rocky Subtidal Gulf Of Maine, Ron J. Etter, Robert J. Miller

Biology Faculty Publication Series

Dramatic shifts in community composition occur between vertical and horizontal rocky surfaces in subtidal environments worldwide, yet the forces mediating this transition are poorly understood. Vertical rock walls are often covered by lush, diverse communities of sessile suspension-feeding invertebrates, while adjacent horizontal substrates are dominated by algae, or corals in the tropics. Multiple factors, including light, sedimentation, water flow, and predation have been proposed to explain this pattern, but experimental tests of these hypotheses are lacking. We manipulated light level and predation to test whether variation in these mechanisms could be responsible for the shift in composition of sessile communities …

Dms Air/Sea Flux And Gas Transfer Coefficients From The North Atlantic Summertime Coccolithophore Bloom, Christa Marandino, Warren J. De Bruyn, Scott Miller, Eric S. Saltzman

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

Dimethylsulfide (DMS) atmospheric and oceanic concentrations and eddy covariance air/sea fluxes were measured over the N. Atlantic Ocean during July 2007 from Iceland to Woods Hole, MA, USA. Seawater DMS levels north of 55 degrees N ranged from 3 to 17 nM, with variability related to the satellite-derived distributions of coccoliths and to a lesser extent, chlorophyll. For the most intense bloom region southwest of Iceland, DMS air/sea fluxes were as high as 300 mu mol m(-2) d(-1), larger than current model estimates. The observations imply that gas exchange coefficients in this region are significantly greater than those estimated using …

Evaluation Of An Oral Vaccination Program To Control Raccoon Rabies In A Suburbanized Landscape, Jason R. Boulanger, Laura L. Bigler, Paul D. Curtis, Donald H. Lein, Arthur J. Lembo Jr.

Human–Wildlife Interactions

We evaluated the efficacy of an oral rabies vaccination (ORV) program conducted in Erie County, New York, from July through September, 2002–2005. Ingress of the raccoon (Procyon lotor) rabies variant first occurred along the southern border of Erie County, New York, during 1992 and began to spread northward at a velocity of 31 km/year. Fixed-wing aircraft dropped ORV baits in rural landscapes; helicopters, hand baiting, and bait stations distributed baits in suburban landscapes (&#;x bait densities ranged 59–118 baits/km²). Our study objectives were to quantify rabies case densities, evaluate efficacy of intervention efforts, and determine biological, …

Landscape And Traffic Factors Influencing Deer–Vehicle Collisions In An Urban Enviroment, Janet W. Ng, Charlene Nielson, Colleen Cassady St. Clair

Human–Wildlife Interactions

Deer–vehicle collisions (DVCs) are steadily increasing across North America. The increase is particularly pronounced in urban green spaces where deer (Odocoileus spp.) populations and road densities are high. In the greater city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 333 DVCs occurred from 2002 to 2004. To identify landscape and traffic correlates of these collisions, we built 3 statistical models. The first model assessed the importance of local variables and was based on a spatial precision of the nearest intersection to which collisions were referenced. The second model was based on landscape characteristics and used the nearest township intersection to aggregate collisions. …

The Application Of Environmental Impact Assessment Legislation To The 2010 Winter Olympic Games Venue And Infastructure Development, Daniel Melbourne Patterson Kellar

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a tool which aims to make developments better by identifying, avoiding, and mitigating potential negative environmental impacts of projects and other action. With the 2010 Winter Olympic Games being held in the Vancouver to Whistler (sea-to-sky) corridor many developments have been initiated and EIA has played a role in 2010 site construction. Using case study analysis, legislative and literature reviews as well as open-ended interviews with key participants, stakeholders, and partners in the environmental impact assessment process, this study investigated the application of Canada’s and British Columbia’s environmental impact assessment legislations to the 2010 Olympic …

Tracer Tests In Karst Hydrogeology And Speleology, Nico Goldscheider, Joe Meiman, Michiel Pronk, Christopher Smart

International Journal of Speleology

This article presents an introduction to the fundamentals of tracing techniques and their application in cave and karst environments, illustrated by case studies from the Mammoth Cave, USA, and a small experimental site in Switzerland. The properties and limitations of the most important artificial tracers are discussed, and the available methods of tracer injection, sampling, online monitoring and laboratory analysis are presented. Fully quantitative tracer experiments result in continuous or discrete concentration-time data series, i.e. breakthrough curves, and concomitant discharge data, which make it possible to obtain detailed information about groundwater flow and contaminant transport. Within the frame of speleological …

Annually Laminated Speleothems: A Review, Andy Baker, Claire L. Smith, Catherine Jex, Ian J. Fairchild, Dominique Genty, Lisa Fuller

International Journal of Speleology

This review of annually laminated speleothems firstly considers the four types of annual laminae found within speleothems: fluorescent laminae formed by annual variations in organic matter flux; visible or petrographic laminae, formed by annual variations in calcite texture or fabric; calcite-aragonite couplets; and finally trace element laminae. The methods available to confirm the annual nature, or otherwise, of lamina deposition are reviewed. We consider the use of annual laminae in chronology building, with particular relevance to palaeoclimate reconstructions. Finally, the use of annual lamina width as a palaeoclimate proxy is reviewed.

Mobility Control For Complete Coverage In Wireless Sensor Networks, Zhen Jiang, Jie Wu, Robert Kline, Jennifer Krantz

Computer Science Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Hierarchical Structure Based Coverage Repair In Wireless Sensor Networks, Jie Wu, Zhen Jiang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Holocene Sediment Magnetic Properties Along A Transect From Isafjardardjup To Djupall, Northwest Iceland, Sarah M. Principato, J.T. Andrews, J. Hardardottir, J.S. Stoner

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

Holocene changes in terrestrial provenance and processes of sediment transport and deposition are tracked along a fjord-to-shelf transect adjacent to Vestfirdir, Iceland, using the magnetic properties ofmarine sediments.Magnetic susceptibility (MS) profiles of 10 cores (gravity and piston) were obtained onboard using a Bartington MS loop. Remanent magnetizations were measured at 1-cm intervals from u-channel samples taken from six cores on a cryogenic magnetometer. Between six and nine alternating field demagnetization steps were used to isolate the characteristic magnetization directions. The chronologies of the cores used in this study were determined from AMS14 C dates on mollusks and foraminifera and contrained …

Hispanics And Asians Increase In Numbers In Cuyahoga County An Analysis Of 2007 County Population Estimates, Mark Salling

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

No abstract provided.

The Cleveland-Akron-Elyria Region Doing Well: More Persons Attending College And Getting Degrees, 2000 To 2007, Mark Salling

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

Discussions of economic development and job availability in northeast Ohio often lament the unavailability of a qualified workforce in some sectors. Workforce training and attracting more educated population to the region are sited as important, even critical, objectives for the region. While a more detailed study of the regions’ workforce by The Center for Community Solutions is nearing completion, the release of new data by the Census Bureau provides some enlightening observations about college enrollments and educational attainment in the region.

Ohio Continues To Lag In Population Growth And Comments On Prospects For The Future An Analysis Of 2007 State Population Estimates, Mark Salling

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

No abstract provided.

Post-Miocene Deformation In The South Of The Galatean Volcanic Province, Nw Of Central Anatolia (Turkey), Bora Rojay, A. Karaca

Turkish Journal of Earth Sciences

Central Anatolia, located on the immense Alpine-Himalayan orogenic belt, has a complicated neotectonic evolution, and NE-SW-trending Neogene horsts-graben systems that rejuvenate pre-existing palaeostructures are among the most important structures which help us understand the tectonic evolution of Central Anatolia. Post-Miocene deformational studies were carried out in Miocene-Quaternary sequences situated at the southeastern margin of the Galatean Volcanic Province (NW of Central Anatolia, Turkey) in order to understand the deformational history of Central Anatolia. The structural analyses were based on bedding attitude data and fault plane slip data. Fold analysis in Miocene units gave an asymmetrical fold axis trending 046ºN. Although …

Stable Isotopes In Early Eocene Mammals As Indicators Of Forest Canopy Structure And Resource Partitioning, Ross Secord, Scott L. Wing, Amy Chew

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

The three dimensional structure of vegetation is an important component of ecosystems, yet it is difficult to reconstruct from the fossil record. Forests or woodlands prevailed at mid-latitudes in North America during the early Eocene but tree spacing and canopy structure are uncertain. Here we use stable carbon isotope values (δ¹³C) in early Eocene mammalian faunas to infer canopy structure. We compare δ¹³C values in two diverse fossil assemblages from the central Bighorn Basin to values predicted for mammals in a variety of open and closed habitats, based on modern floras and faunas. We conclude that …

Iron Ooid Beds Of The Carolinefjellet Formation, Spitsbergen, Norway, Jeremy Mutrux, Harmon D. Maher Jr., Robert Duncan Shuster

Geography and Geology Faculty Publications

Iron ooid beds are unusual deposits that have been linked to greenhouse conditions and the transgressive flooding of shallow shelves, and which were globally prevalent during certain periods. Within the marine, Aptian-Albian, Carolinefjellet Formation of Spitsbergen, chamosite ooids have been found within distinctive sandstone beds at six localities, and at a consistent stratigraphic position within the basal Dalkjegla Member. Distinctive characteristics include the iron ooids themselves, a coarser grain size, intercalation with silty siderites, grading, cross-beds indicating offshore or longshore transport, and a lack of burrowing. The enclosing sands display planar and hummocky crossstratification and abundant oscillation ripple marks, and …

Diminished Access, Diverted Exclusion: Women And Land Tenure In Sub-Saharan Africa, Michael Kevane, Leslie C. Gray

Economics

Increasing commercialization, population growth and concurrent increases in land value have affected women's land rights in Africa. Most of the literature concentrates on how these changes have led to an erosion of women's rights. This paper examines some of the processes by which women's rights to land are diminishing. First, we examine cases where rights previously utilized have become less important; that is, the incidence of exercising rights has decreased. Second, we investigate how women's rights to land decrease as the public meanings underlying the social interpretation and enforcement of rights are manipulated. Third, we examine women's diminishing access to …