Digital Commons Network^™

Bat Hibernacula In Caves Of Southern Idaho: Implications For Monitoring And Management, Jericho C. Whiting, Bill Doering, Gary Wright, Devin K. Englestead, Justin A. Frye, Todd Stefanic

Western North American Naturalist

Bat populations are being impacted by many threats, including white-nose syndrome, wind energy development, and hibernaculum disturbance and modification. Understanding the use of caves as hibernacula by bats in the western United States is necessary for the conservation and management of these mammals and their habitat, as well as for monitoring the arrival of white-nose syndrome. We identified biologically important hibernacula from 304 winter surveys (1 November–31 March) in 64 caves from 1984 to 2016 in southern Idaho, USA. During surveys researchers counted 37,693 bats representing 6 species. Townsend’s big-eared bats (Corynorhinus townsendii townsendii) comprised 96.1% (36,237 individuals …

Grafting Democracy: British Policy In The Burma Independence Process, Kylan Rutherford

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis investigates—through a case study of the independence process in Burma—what, if any, specific policies the British established and followed in granting independence to their former colonies. The author investigates the development of institutions in the first Burma constitution through primary source documents. Statements of policy found indicate that the British strove to create a policy of protection and representation of minorities, encouragement of democracy mirroring Western constitutions, and a desire to establish stability in the region and preserve self-interests. Documents indicate a large disparity between policy and practice. The author concludes that this disparity is caused primarily by …

End Matter

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

No abstract provided.

The Beef Basin Occupation As An Extension Of The Northern San Region: An In-Depth Analysis Of The Ceramics In Beef Basin, Utah, Jaclyn Marie Eckersley

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is a summary of the methods and key results of my analysis of 7,997 sherds from 14 sites in Beef Basin, Utah. I discuss physical attributes of the collection, the results of mean ceramic dating, the results of neutron activation analysis, and the results of refiring a sample of nips in an oxidizing atmosphere. I briefly summarize the architecture at each site , as well as possible Fremont cultural material found in and near Beef Basin. I conclude that Beef Basin was likely occupied in the early Pueblo III period and that the occupation was sudden and brief. …

Bacteriophages For Treating American Foulbrood And The Neutralization Of Paenibacillus Larvae Spores, Thomas Scott Brady

Theses and Dissertations

The causative agent of the most devastating honeybee disease, American foulbrood (AFB), is the spore-forming bacterium Paenibacillus larvae. To prevent AFB outbreaks beekeepers prophylactically treat their hives with antibiotics even though it decreases the overall health of uninfected hives. A new treatment for AFB is needed due to recent legislation against using antibiotics, antibiotic resistance developing in P. larvae, and the resilience of P. larvae spores. Bacteriophages, or phages, are an attractive alternative to traditional antibiotics because of their specificity and ability to evolve alongside their target bacterium. In this study, two phage cocktails were developed for the …

Automated Urban Parcel Ledger Generation To Track Spatiotemporal Parcel Dynamics, Naci Dilekli, Jennifer Koch

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Urban population growth is expected to continue into the 21st century, bringing about drastic changes to urban landscapes across the globe. Our particular focus is to understand and evaluate urban growth patterns through parcel splitting in the Oklahoma City Metropolitan Area (OKCMA). To this end, we present the background and methodology used to develop the absent land parcel history information in the OKCMA using parcel data from the previous two years. OKCMA multiyear parcel data does not align spatially due to shifts and distortions. We developed a method to identify parent:child parcel relationships using their attribute and geometry information. This …

Operationalizing Social Ecological Systems Resilience Analysis Using A Dynamic Index, Bruno Meirelles

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Governance of social ecological systems (SES) is a difficult task. Embrace its complexity, the coupled nature of social and ecological dimensions, feedbacks and non-linearity of its attributes and the necessity of dealing with society participation in the decision process make the challenge bigger. Resilience is a growing research field that can collaborate with this discussion. Resilience is a SES feature that enhance its capacity of maintain identity under different systems changes. This work uses system dynamics theory as foundation to build a Dynamic Resilience Index. This index uses Cobb-Douglas equation to encompass several resilience attributes as biodiversity, social networks, institutions, …

Culture Influences On Human Decision-Making Processes Toward Environmental Policy: An Integrative Model Of Human-Environment Interaction, Gabriel Granco, Jessica Heier Stamm, Jason Bergtold, Melinda Daniels, Matthew Sanderson, Aleksey Sheshukov, Martha Mather, David Haukos, Marcellus Caldas

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The Anthropogenic era marks the role of humans as agents of planetary modification. In this era, the search for sustainability in human-environment interactions has pushed the development of modeling techniques able to incorporate dynamic natural and human feedbacks across temporal and spatial scales. While researchers have refined models for both natural and human systems separately, the coupling of these systems via model integration continues to be a challenge. In response, researchers have concentrated their attention on how human decision-making processes respond to and affect the environment. New pathways to sustainability may be developed by examining how human culture informs the …

Analyzing The Relationship Between Climate, Vegetation Characteristics, And Water Use For The Oklahoma City Metro Area, Jennifer Koch, Tracy Boyer, Heather Mccarthy, Peter Kedron, Monika Ghimire, Qingtao Zhou

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Oklahoma’s highly variable weather and large precipitation gradient work together with population growth and urbanization to create a landscape that is extremely vulnerable to climatic extremes. As shown by the drought in 2011-2013, Oklahoma’s municipal water supply has come under stress from additional demand. To develop sustainable natural resource supplies that support a vibrant economy with healthy citizens, we need to develop robust understanding of these complex socio-environmental systems, which can be used to empower decision makers to effectively adapt to climate variability/change. For this purpose, we develop a spatio-temporal simulation model for the Oklahoma City Metropolitan area, which helps …

What's An "Actor"? What's A "System"? Breaking Knowledge Down To Build It Up Again In Collaborative Socio-Ecological Modeling Of The Rio Grande/Rio Bravo Basin., Stephanie Paladino, Jennifer Koch, Sophie Plassin, Jack R. Friedman

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Environmental modelling of complex human-environment dynamics faces many challenges, including key conceptual and methodological questions of what to model, at what scale, and what constitutes relevant data or knowledge. Given this complexity, socio-ecological modelling increasingly calls for collaborations that bring together different knowledge sets, both multi-disciplinary and of the actors in the environment to be modeled. A key challenge, however, is that collaborators bring to the exercise different epistemological, methodological, and experiential frameworks. In addition, modelling platforms themselves impose particular structures on ways of knowing particular problems. To help advance socio-ecological modelling, we describe a collaborative process among social scientists …

Modeling Dynamics Of Ecological Systems With Geospatial Networks And Agents, Taylor Anderson, Suzana Dragicevic

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Landscape connectivity networks are composed of sets of nodes representing georeferenced habitat patches that link together based on the maximum dispersal distance of a species of interest. Graph theory is used to measure the structure and connectivity of resulting networks to inform dispersal patterns, identify key habitat patches, and assess how changes in structure disrupts dispersal patterns. Despite their potential, landscape connectivity networks are mostly static representations, formed using maximum dispersal distance only, and thus do not account for network structure as a function of variation in habitat patch attributes and complex spatio-temporal dispersal dynamics. The main objective of this …

Integrating Public/Local And Scientific Knowledge In Model Development For Food-Energy-Water Systems, Grace B. Villamor, David L. Griffith, Andrew Kliskey, Lilian Alessa

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Conceptual and mental models are useful platforms for communicating and understanding how systems work. However, models or frameworks that are not aligned with the perceptions and understanding of the local stakeholders can propagate model output errors and uncertainties. This paper focuses on two sources of epistemic uncertainty in building food-energy-water systems (FEWS) models: (1) context and framing; and (2) model structure uncertainty. To address these uncertainties, we co-construct the FEWS conceptual model with key stakeholders using the Actor-Resources-Dynamics-Interaction (ARDI) method. The method was adopted to specifically integrate public (and local) knowledge of stakeholders in the Magic Valley region of Southern …

Simulating Dynamic Drought Adaptation Behaviour Of Agricultural Stakeholders Using Agent-Based Models, Marthe Wens, Mike Johnson

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Increasing climate variability and changing socio-economic conditions are expected to exacerbate agricultural drought risk in many parts of the world. Current risk assessments, however, do not elegantly incorporate emergent adaptation strategies and therefore fall short in their representation of vulnerability dynamics. Adopting a socio-hydrological framework allows modelers to simultaneously consider the temporal and spatial extents of meteorological and hydrological factors and dynamic human behavior. In our research, we use spatially-explicit agent-based models to investigate how humans respond to perceived drought risk and ultimately impact the hydrological system, in hopes of deriving a clearer understanding of future agricultural drought risk. Agent-based …

Space-Time Uncertainty Propagation Of Input Precipitation Across A Coupled Rainfall-Runoff Urban Drainage Model, Arturo Torres-Matallana, Ulrich Leopold

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Rainfall is one important source of uncertainty in the simulation of combined sewer overflows and the emissions of pollutants to the receiving water body. Studies often ignore the spatial dimension treating input rainfall as a non-spatially distributed time series. Neglecting spatial and space-time distribution of rainfall entering urban drainage systems may result in inaccurate quantification of rainfall and, hence, in substantial uncertainties associated to water quantity and quality predictions. We developed a space-time interpolation model for rainfall, based on space-time Kriging, using point rainfall measurements as the primary variable. We then interpolated rainfall over space and time and built a …

How Can We Develop Better Visualization Tool For Aquatic Modelers? Lessons From Developing An Aquatic Model Viewer, Jiacong Huang, Junfeng Gao

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Spatial visualization tool is critically useful to plot and compare the spatio-temporal simulation results from various aquatic models, however, is so far not well developed for free use. In this study, a free visualization tool named Aquatic Model Viewer (AMViewer) was developed using Python programing language for plotting and analyzing the spatio-temporal data from aquatic models. AMViewer included several useful functionalities: (a) comparing the differences of simulation results (e.g., water level) from different scenarios, (b) evaluating the model fits of scenarios with available measured data, (c) extracting time series values of cells from the spatio-temporal simulation results, and (d) viewing …

Comparison Of The Glue And Dream Methods For Estimating Variety Parameters For A Maize Crop Modelcomparison Of The Glue And Dream Methods For Estimating Cultivar Parameters For A Maize Crop Model, Meiling Sheng, Junzhi Liu, A-Xing Zhu, Liming Zhu

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Process-based crop models are popular scientific tools to study the impacts of environment, variety and management decisions on crop growth. Some cultivar parameters in crop models cannot be measured directly and need to be estimated. In this research, two Bayesian methods, namely the generalized likelihood uncertainty estimation (GLUE) and Differential Evolution Adaptive Metropolis (DREAM) algorithm, were used to estimate the parameters of the maize module of the Agricultural Productions Systems sIMulator (APSIM-Maize) for the first time. Six cultivar parameters of APSIM-Maize were estimated using GLUE and DREAM, respectively. Both the GLUE and DREAM methods were able to give accurate simulations …

Efficient Uncertainty Quantification In River Intervention Modelling Through Regression Of Correlated Output, Koen D. Berends, Menno W. Straatsma, Jord J. Warmink, Suzanne J.M.H. Hulscher

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

In river management, hydrodynamic models are used to predict the hydraulic effects of planned human intervention. Such interventions can range from small-scale vegetation management to large-scale flood risk reduction measures. Previous studies have shown significant uncertainty in the output of these models. However, despite the increasing call to be explicit about uncertainties of model output, high computational requirements prohibit systematic quantification of uncertainty in intervention effect studies.

We introduce a novel method that significantly reduces the computational requirements of uncertainty quantification for such studies. The main assumption of this method is that the model that describes the pre-intervention system and …

How Useful Are “Validated” Artificial Neural Network Models For Increasing Environmental System Understanding?, Holger R. Maier, Greer B. Humphrey, Wenyan Wu, Nick J. Mount, Graeme C. Dandy, Robert J. Abrahart, Christian W. Dawson

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Artificial neural network models have been used extensively for predictive purposes but can also be used to gain insights into the relationships that drive complex environmental systems that are poorly understood. However, while the validation of most types of environmental models includes residual analysis (replicative validation) and an assessment of how plausible the input-output relationship represented by the calibrated model is (structural validation), in addition to assessing predictive performance on an independent validation set (predictive validity), this is generally not done for ANN models. In order to enable these additional aspects of validation to be incorporated in the development of …

Integrated Modelling Approach To Assess Woody Biomass Supply, Demand And Environmental Impacts Of Forest Management In The Eu, Sarah Mubareka, Giorgio Vacchiano, Roberto Pilli, Maarten Hilferink, Giulia Fiorese, Ragnar Jonsson, Pablo Ruiz Castello, Wouter Nijs, Valerio Avitabile, Jasper Van Vliet, Andrea Camia

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Forests are at the intersection of European policies on climate, energy and environmental protection and will contribute significantly to the shift of the European economy towards a greater and more sustainable use of renewable resources. Knowledge of the current and future provision and use of woody biomass is necessary to support multiple policies, provide insight into how forest ecosystems and their services will respond to increasing material and energy demand, climate change, and land use competition. The main data source for forest biomass data in the European Union are National Forest Inventories (NFIs). These are carried out based on country-specific …

A Survey Of Precipitation Data For Environmental Modeling, Jan Sitterson, Chris Knightes, Rajbir Parmar, Kurt Wolfe, Brian Avant, Deron Smith

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

There is always a challenge of obtaining the “best” data to inform environmental models. Here we present different types of available precipitation datasets while detailing temporal and spatial resolution, potential errors in the dataset, and optimal performance scenarios. Our goal is to inform modelers of the various types, resolutions, and sources of precipitation data available for environmental modeling. Precipitation is the main driver in the hydrological cycle and modelers use this information to understand water quality and water availability. Environmental models use observed precipitation information for modeling past or current conditions, while simulated data are used to predict future conditions …

An Overview Of Rainfall-Runoff Model Types, Jan Sitterson, Chris Knightes, Rajbir Parmar, Kurt Wolfe, Brian Avant, Muluken Muche

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

This paper aims to inform the audience of the strengths and weaknesses of various rainfall-runoff models. Runoff plays an important role in the hydrological cycle by returning excess precipitation to the oceans and controlling how much water flows into water systems. Water resource managers use runoff data from models to help understand, control, and monitor the quality and quantity of water resources. Access to runoff data can be time consuming and restrictive. The goal of the USEPA’s Hydrologic Micro Service (HMS) project is to develop a collection of interoperable water quantity and quality modeling components that leverage existing internet-based data …

A Fast, Integrated Model To Explore Multiple Futures And Pathways For The Bangladesh Delta, Bhuiya Md Tamim Al Hossain, Marjolijn Haasnoot, Hans Middelkoop

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Bangladesh is one of the largest active deltas in the world, heavily dependent on the rivers and water resources for agriculture and other economic activities. Currently, the country is under threat from growing numbers of natural hazards and uncertainties due to climate change, sea level rise, population growth and socio-economic development. Bangladesh has recently formulated the Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100 focusing on the long term adaptive planning. To ensure sustainable development under the deep uncertainties, long term adaptive planning is required. Adaptive planning requires that the strategies/ policies are robust and flexible with changing future conditions. To explore different future …

Socio-Ecological Modeling For Guiding Water Management: Application Of The Envision Framework For The Rio Grande/Bravo Basin, Sophie Plassin, Jennifer Koch, Kellie B. Vaché, Stephanie Paladino, Kyndra Hanson, Jack R. Friedman

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Surface water resources in semi-arid watersheds are extremely vulnerable to changing climate conditions and demographic growth. The vulnerability is highest in basins with high stresses on water resources such as the transboundary Rio Grande/Bravo basin (RGB), shared by the United States and Mexico. Designing sustainable management responses for such systems calls for a better understanding of complex human-environment interactions and the exploration of alternative futures. We present a spatio-temporal simulation model that has been developed for the whole RGB basin to capture and explore the interplay between water and land resources management strategies and vegetation dynamics. We used the ENVISION …

Exploring Distributional Influences On And Effects Of Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways For Repeated Coastal Hazards, Nicholas Magliocca, Margaret Walls

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The economic costs of coastal hazards have been increasing for decades, and future projections are only exacerbated by continued coastal economic growth and frequency and/or severity of coastal hazards. Policy interventions in the United States to discourage coastal development, preserve or reclaim coastal habitat, and/or decrease regional vulnerability to subsequent hazards have been largely ineffective. The urgent need for more effective adaptation policy has shifted the question from “what is the best policy” to “what is the best combination and sequence of policies” – a shift captured by the increasingly popular concept of adaptive policy pathways. However, accounting for the …

Discoverwater: An Interactive Visualization Web App For Multiple Spatio-Temporal Datasets With Application To Water Resources, Misty Porter, Mary Hill, Xingong Li

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Our previous work resulted in a visualization platform capable of clearly depicting correlations and suggesting interdependencies between time-varying, spatially-distributed quantities; it is called DiscoverWater. DiscoverWater displays time-series data in a time-evolving map and graphs. While somewhat limited in the prototype, the idea is to enable user selection of points on the map and that results in associated time-series data being plotted in user-activated synchronized graphs. In the prototype, the data plotted include monthly average streamflow, irrigation pumping, county-wide irrigation pumping, and PDSI. Simulated results can also be plotted. DiscoverWater displays how water resources change on the landscape and in the …

An Integrated Modeling Approach Coupling Stakeholders’ Values And Policy Trade-Offs In Oklahoma, Usa, Gehendra Kharel Dr., Ronald Miller Dr., Chris Zou Dr., Jennifer Koch Dr., Tracy Boyer Dr., Heather Mccarthy Dr., Naci Dilekli Dr., Raymond Huhnke Dr.

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Oklahoma watersheds and urban areas are subject to increased water shortages, woody plant encroachment, and other socio-ecological issues. To investigate these issues in an integrated fashion, we are constructing an agent-based model using an integrated modeling platform, ‘ENVISION’. Three modeled areas represent the diversity within Oklahoma: Oklahoma City (urban), Kiamichi watershed (timber, reservoir), and Cimarron watershed (agriculture, grassland). Oklahoma City (OKC) stakeholders are concerned with the ‘greenness’ of the urban environment, and the water required to maintain it in the context of future urban growth and climate change, and the OKC model estimates urban greenness and the related water demand. …

An Agent-Based Approach To Evaluating Sustainable Drought Adaptation Policy, Mike Johnson, Marthe Wens

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Droughts are an increasingly prevalent and costly hazard that impact urban populations, agricultural production, and natural ecosystems. As climate becomes more variable, drought-prone regions are working to adapt through policy measures that address the diverse needs of urban centers, irrigation districts, farmers, governments, and NGOs. Developing policy pathways is a useful way to design such drought policies, however, their development requires an understanding of how human and biophysical systems interact and respond to a variety of climate and policy scenarios. In our research, we link a distributed hydrologic model with an agent based model to simulate the emergent, heterogeneous drought …

Neural Network For Tuning-Friendly Automatic Outlier Detection In Water Quality Time Series, Cyril Garneau, Peter A. Vanrolleghem

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

With the increasing presence of online sensors to monitor environmental systems, automatic outlier detection procedures are necessary to tackle the huge amount of data generated. Cleaned time series can afterwards be filtered, screened for fault detection, used for process control or decision support.

Outliers from time series exhibiting stable signals can easily be removed by tracking the local mean and standard deviation and accepting all data within, e.g., from the mean. However, environmental time series often exhibit large discontinuities or highly unstable behaviour, which requires more advanced outlier detection methods. Unfortunately, these advanced methods require complex parameterization that depends on …

Automated Feature Classification And Knowledge Extraction From Wireline Geophysical Observations: Big Data Potential For Offshore Resources Assessment, Galina Veres, Michelle Harris, Damon Teagle, Zoheir Sabeur

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Scientific drilling of the volcanic ocean crust recovers cores and undertakes downhole wireline logging. However, because core recovery rates are typically low (

A Method To Develop Signals To Trigger Adaptation To Sea-Level Rise, Scott Stephens, Rob G. Bell Dr, Judy Lawrence

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Dynamic adaptive pathways planning (DAPP) is being used to plan for adaptation to increasing, but uncertain, risk over time. Signals and triggers are critically needed—comparing observed values with their pre-specified trigger-values will enable timely adaptive actions. We demonstrate a statistical modelling approach to design signals and triggers to avoid the consequences of deeper and more frequent flooding as sea level continues to rise, and apply it to a New Zealand sea level case study. The key advance is the framing of storm-tide frequency in terms of probable timing of the number of events that reach a specific height threshold within …