Digital Commons Network^™

Scavenging Of Animal Carcasses By Gumaga Nigricula (Sericostomatidae, Trichoptera), An Apparent Herbivore, Stephanie M. Carlson, Pablo Rodriguez-Lozano, Hana Moidu, Robert A. Leidy

Western North American Naturalist

Caddisflies within the genus Gumaga are generally considered shredders (i.e., consumers of leaf litter) or grazers (i.e., consumers of algae). We report on observations of Gumaga nigricula scavenging animal carcasses within and adjacent to isolated pools along intermittent reaches of Coyote Creek, Santa Clara County, California, USA. In particular, during the summer of 2018, we observed G. nigricula scavenging fish carcasses within isolated pools as well as bits of flesh from the bones of a black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus) deposited on the stream bank. To the best of our knowledge, our observations represent the first published record …

Instructional Case Studies In The Field Of Windfarm Optimization, N. Francesco Baker

Theses and Dissertations

Wind farm layout optimization is a multidisciplinary undertaking, requiring students and researchers to integrate many skillsets in order to optimize turbine placement. There is currently a lack of useful benchmarking exercises for participants in the field to compare the efficacy of their methods. This work details the construction and completion of a set of four case studies meant to satisfy this need, with the hope of providing some insight into useful layout optimization approaches. These case studies are intended to also serve as instructive introductory exercises with which newcomers researching wind energy may incrementally practice and increase their abilities.The first …

Late Quaternary Voles From Persistence Cave, Black Hills, South Dakota, Christopher N. Jass, Jim I. Mead, Sandra L. Swift

Western North American Naturalist

Excavations at Persistence Cave (Black Hills, SD), produced a large sample of Quaternary microfauna including a diverse assemblage of arvicoline rodents. Identifiable lower first molars (n = 367) include specimens referred to heather vole (Phenacomys sp.), muskrat (Ondatra sp.), southern bog lemming (Synaptomys cooperi), red-backed vole (Myodes sp.), sagebrush vole (Lemmiscus curtatus), prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster), and a form of meadow vole (Microtus sp.). Direct radiocarbon dating of specimens of Lemmiscus curtatus is consistent with previous records from the Nelson–Wittenberg Site and indicates that sagebrush voles inhabited …

"Life Will Be A Brief, Hollow Walk": The Future Of Humanity Through Maternal Eyes In Tracy K. Smith's Life On Mars, Mallory Lynn Bingham

Theses and Dissertations

Tracy K. Smith's Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poetry, Life on Mars, has been celebrated and analyzed as an elegy to Smith's father by many reviewers and scholars. And while this reading is valid and has been openly endorsed by Smith herself, our understanding of this collection and Smith's father is incomplete without Smith's treatment of motherhood and religion, two previously unexplored fields in relation to Life on Mars that complete our picture of Smith's father. Smith uses her own new role as a mother and her religious questions about the afterlife and her father's fate to address her father's …

Designing A Job Aid To Prepare An On-Location Immersive Virtual Expedition (On-Live), Sandra Powell

Instructional Psychology and Technology Graduate Student Projects

Brigham Young University (BYU) Division of Continuing Education (DCE) completed the proof-of-concept phase of an innovation proposal to create On-Location Immersive Virtual Expeditions (on-LIVE) for an online geology course. On-LIVE uses 360-degree video to give students a front-row experience at locations of educational interest. Using Articulate Storyline, this 360-degree view allows viewers to look in all directions and interact with specific parts of the location.

The product is a set of documents including a decision tree to determine if an on-LIVE is valuable for a course, step-by-step instructions for designing the interaction, planning and preparing for the 360-degree video shoot, …

The Integration Of Iterative Convergent Photogrammetric Models And Uav View And Path Planning Algorithms Into The Aerial Inspection Practices In Areas With Aerial Hazards, Michael James Freeman

Theses and Dissertations

Small unmanned aerial vehicles (sUAV) can produce valuable data for inspections, topography, mapping, and 3D modeling of structures. Used by multiple industries, sUAV can help inspect and study geographic and structural sites. Typically, the sUAV and camera specifications require optimal conditions with known geography and fly pre-determined flight paths. However, if the environment changes, new undetectable aerial hazards may intersect new flight paths. This makes it difficult to construct autonomous flight path missions that are safe in post-hazard areas where the flight paths are based on previously built models or previously known terrain details. The goal of this research is …

Soil Water Dynamics Within Variable Rate Irrigation Zones Of Winter Wheat, Elisa Anne Woolley

Theses and Dissertations

Understanding the spatial and temporal dynamics of soil water and crop water stress within a field is critical for effective Variable Rate Irrigation (VRI) management. Proper VRI can result in improved protection of the crop from early onset of crop water stress while minimizing runoff and drainage losses. The objectives of this study are (1) to examine zone delineation for informing irrigation recommendations from volumetric water content (VWC) and field capacity (FC) to grow similar or greater wheat yields with less water, (2) evaluate the ability to model soil and crop water dynamics within a season and within a field …

Late-Holocene Treeline Shifts In The Northwestern Uinta Mountains, Northeastern Utah, W. Wyatt Oswald, Barry S. Goodell

Western North American Naturalist

Remnant wood found above the present-day altitudinal limit of trees provides a record of treeline shifts in response to past variations in climate. ¹⁴C dating and wood identification of remnant trees from Windy Ridge, a ridgeline in the northwestern Uinta Mountains of northeastern Utah, show treeline ~100 m higher than today between ~730 and 500 calibrated ¹⁴C years before present (cal yr BP; ~1220–1450 CE). This treeline shift coincides with the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (MCA), suggesting that warm temperatures allowed limber pine (Pinus flexilis) and Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii) to establish above the current …

¿Existe Un Español Antillano?, Orlando Alba

Faculty Publications

El objetivo fundamental de esta exposición consiste en demostrar, con el apoyo de más de 80 audio-clips y desde una perspectiva sociolingüística, que, a pesar de las conocidas semejanzas existentes en su modo de hablar, Cuba, República Dominicana y Puerto Rico mantienen su propia identidad lingüística.

Cada isla manifiesta su propia idiosincrasia lingüística, tanto en el terreno objetivo, de la actuación, como en el subjetivo, de la percepción. En el plano objetivo, existen estructuras sintácticas y unidades léxicas que actúan como elementos distintivos. Asimismo, son notables las discrepancias fonéticas cuantitativas y cualitativas entre los dialectos de cada país. A esto …

Jaguars And Roads In The Calakmul Region, Evidence Of Road Crossing And Collisions With Vehicles, Edwin L. Hernández-Pérez, Joaquín López Sosa, Diana Friedeberg, Fernando M. Contreras-Moreno, Mircea G. Hidalgo-Mihart

Western North American Naturalist

Jaguars (Panthera onca) suffer from the negative effects of roads, mostly significant habitat fragmentation and increased risk of mortality due to vehicle collisions. In Mexico records of jaguars killed on roads are scarce and mostly anecdotal. The Calakmul-Balam-Kú jaguar population is the most important jaguar population in Mexico, but it is threatened by an extensive road network in which Federal Highway 186 Escárcega–Chetumal (hereafter called Hwy. 186) serves as the main road in the region. As part of a study to determine the diversity and abundance of medium- and large-sized mammals around Hwy. 186, we set 47 camera …

William Clark, The Fur Trade, And Indian Affairs, Jay H. Buckley

Faculty Publications

There are so many things that are admirable about William Clark. Sometimes I shudder to think what the great expedition would have been if Clark had declined Lewis’ offer to share in what Clark called “the dangers, difficulties, and fatigues” of the journey. Without wishing to denigrate the possible contributions of Moses Hooke, I believe that the expedition would have been a much less successful enterprise if Clark had remained at the Falls of the Ohio when Lewis ventured into the unknown in 1803.

Das Paradies Meiner Kindheit, Luise Westkirch

Prose Nonfiction

No abstract provided.

Dulden, Dr. Hedwig Bleuler-Waser

Prose Nonfiction

No abstract provided.

Headwaters Fed By Subterranean Ice: Potential Climate Refugia For Mountain Stream Communities?, Lusha M. Tronstad, Scott Hotaling, J. Joseph Giersch, Debra S. Finn

Western North American Naturalist

Near-term extirpations of macroinvertebrates are predicted for mountain streams worldwide as a warming climate drives the recession of high-elevation ice and snow. However, hydrological sources likely vary in their resistance to climate change, and thus streams fed by more resistant sources could persist as climate refugia for imperiled biota. In 2015–2016, we measured habitat characteristics and quantified macroinvertebrate community structure along 6 alpine streams in the Teton Range, Wyoming, USA. Strong differences in habitat characteristics (e.g., temperature, bed stability, conductivity) confirmed 3 major stream sources: surface glaciers, perennial snowfields, and subterranean ice. Subterranean ice-fed streams—termed “icy seeps”—appear common in the …

The Restored Church Of Jesus Christ And The Holy Land: Beginnings, David M. Whitchurch

BYU Studies

It is a privilege to be with you as we celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the dedication of the Jerusalem Center and the impact it has made on the lives of so many students, faculty, administrators, members of the Church from around the world, and those who currently reside in the Holy Land. A heartfelt welcome to all.

Student Panel Discussion, David Rolph Seely, April Giddings Cobb, Julie Jenkins Elcock, Heidi Hatch Gilbert, Christopher Meldrum, Raven Alard Ngatuvai, Richard Reber

BYU Studies

The Jerusalem Center has lots of different functions, but it was made for students. Our family has been there both at times when the Jerusalem Center was closed to students and when it had students in residence. There’s nothing emptier or sadder than the Jerusalem Center without students.

Global Heat Uptake By Inland Waters, Inne Vanderkelen

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Heat uptake is a key variable for understanding Earth system response to greenhouse gas forcing. Recent assessments highlighted that most of the excess energy is stored in the oceans, whereas the land, atmosphere and ice melt take up smaller amounts. However, despite the importance of this heat budget, heat uptake by inland waters has so far not been quantified. Here we use a unique combination of global-scale lake models, global hydrological models and Earth system models from the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) to, for the first time, quantify global heat uptake by lakes, reservoirs and rivers over the …

Emulating An Integrated Activity Based Land Use €“ Transportation Model To Provide A More Effective Spatial Decision Support Tool, Tomas Crols

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Effective strategic regional planning requires both a capability for forecasting the future state of the system under business as usual conditions, and an ability to test the effect of possible infrastructure developments and policy interventions on the system. We use a comprehensive simulation platform designed to support strategic spatial planning by modelling the long-term spatial dynamics of land use, population, and economic activity. It is being used to evaluate planning and policy options for containing urban sprawl and enhancing environmental quality. Most applications have been to Flanders, Belgium, where it is known as the RuimteModel. Here we describe an extension …

Climate Change Impacts On Streamflow In Two Highly Abstracted English Catchments Under A High Emissions Scenario - Implications For Environmental Flow Protection, Cordula Wittekind

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The spatio-temporal water availability for environmental flows can be severely affected by climate change. Robust water management approaches are urgently required to alleviate pressure on abstracted freshwater ecosystems. Modelling of the impacts of climate change on streamflow and water availability at the catchment scale has become indispensable in informing decision makers. We use the 12 new Hadley Centre climate model regional projections with a resolution of 12km for a high emissions scenario: Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5. With the completely revised Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT+) we simulate natural daily flows until the 2080s in two English catchments. While …

Co-Developing A Knowledge Portal To Support Stakeholders In Utilizing Uncertain Multi-Model Based Information On Freshwater-Related Hazards Of Climate Change, Fabian Kneier

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Co-produced climate services are increasingly recognized as a means for effective generation and utilization of relevant climate information to support decision-makers in taking climate change into account in their risk portfolios. However, there is a structural lack of appropriate, tailored climate services and tools, particularly in developing countries. Among the challenges are (1) how to represent uncertainty quantitatively in a way that is both scientifically correct and utilizable to the diverse users of the hazard information and (2) how to integrate global information with quantified uncertainty into regional-scale assessments of water-related climate change risk and adaptation assessments in a participatory …

An Efficient Data-Driven Variance-Based Global Sensitivity Analysis For Identifying Dominant Factors That Control Unusual Hydrological Events, Razi Sheikholeslami

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

During the past decades, several distributed and semi-distributed process-based hydrologic models have been developed for simulating water flow dynamics at a range of spatio-temporal scales. Modelling complex hydrologic processes and their interaction with human inevitably introduces a considerable uncertainty associated with forcings, model parameters, and model structure. Adequate characterization of uncertainty is vital to draw appropriate inferences about the system’s behaviour to support decision making. The Global Sensitivity Analysis (GSA) has proven to be a promising tool for quantifying the model output uncertainty through apportioning the uncertainty to different sources. The sampling-based strategy is a common, yet computationally demanding, approach …

Enabling More Open And Reproducible Environmental Modelling, Jonathan Goodall

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Technical approaches for enabling more open and reproducible computational models are gaining attention in the environmental modelling and software community. We see three main themes emerging from this research: (1) advancing data sharing platforms, (2) using containers and notebooks for encapsulating complete computational environments and analyses, and (3) developing higher-level Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for simulation models to make them more scriptable and notebook-friendly. In this research, we explore an approach for leveraging these topics into a model agnostic framework able to support open and reproducible environmental modeling. The framework’s design consists of data sharing achieved through online repositories, notebook-based …

Scaling Of Urban Heat Island And No2 With Urban Population: A Meta-Analysis, Yufei Wei

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Due to urban population growth worldwide, thermal anomalies and toxic air pollution are increasing concern for citizens. Despite this increasing challenge and indications that these environmental problems increase with city size, there is still no consolidated understanding of the effect of city size on urban heat island (UHI) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) pollution. Meanwhile, research on urban scaling laws, which formally relates population size and urban characteristics, has been quickly increasing over the past decade but is mostly devoted to the socio-economic outcome of cities rather than pollution or heat stress. Most studies dedicated to UHI or NO2 consider only …

Software For Monitoring Forest Change In Tropical West Africa Using Satellite Remote Sensing, Michael Wimberly

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Satellite remote sensing is an essential source of data on forest landscape change that is necessary for estimating carbon stocks, assessing biodiversity, and developing conservation plans to sustain ecosystem services. The Upper Guinean Forest region of West Africa, a global biodiversity hotspot, currently lacks timely, consistent, and accurate long-term forest monitoring systems suitable for decision support. Major limitations include data gaps due to frequent cloud cover and limited satellite coverage. To address these limitations, we developed the West African Forest Degradation Data System (WAForDD) to use all available Landsat imagery to monitor forest change in the tropical forest zone of …

Silvio - Analyzing Social Vulnerability Under The Influence Of Local Climate Change, Thais Lopez-Inojosa

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

This paper presents the methodology SILVIO (Social Vulnerability Order Methodology), a method for the analysis of social vulnerability. Local knowledge is used to build an index of social vulnerability from demographic, economic and social variables (Social Vulnerability Index - SVI). Social vulnerability is understood here as a multitude of relationships between society and the environment that can impact significantly on the livelihood of residents in a specific geographical area. SILVIO consists of a correlation analysis between the SVI and two selected local climate variables, temperature and precipitation (Local Climate Variables - LCV). The variables of both, the SVI and the …

Local Biogeophysical Effects Of Deforestation, Steven De Hertog

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The impact of deforestation on climate is mostly pronounced through net carbon emissions (biogeochemical effects), leading to a global warming. However, deforestation also alters the water and energy cycles (biogeophysical effects), which can cause a local warming or cooling depending on the region. This additional warming can potentially offset or even exacerbate the initial global warming signal caused by the biogeochemical effect. The results of earth system models show a large spread on the magnitude of biogeophysical effects and can even vary on the sign of these impacts for some regions. Thus, uncovering the uncertainty related to the biogeophysical effect …

Integrated Hydro–Social Modeling At Catchment Scale – A Case For The Rhine Basin, Judith Ter Maat

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Climate change and socio-economical developments are increasing the pressure on available water resources. To realistically simulate changing water availability, natural hydrological processes and human water use need to be modeled following an integrated approach. While physical catchment information and meteorological datasets are readily available on a global scale, the collection of water demand data is often still a tedious exercise. Following Wada et al. (2016) a dataset was developed that integrates water demand information from amongst others EUROSTAT, AQUASTAT and the UN. The dataset is available for a variety of hydrological and water resources models. The dataset will be integrated …

Thirty Years Of Spatio-Temporal Modelling With Pcraster, Oliver Schmitz

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

The open-source PCRaster environmental modelling platform (http://www.pcraster.eu) is a long-time developed toolbox for the construction of earth science simulation models, providing tailored model building blocks with main applications in hydrology, ecology, and environmental health. We present the recent developments of the PCRaster package. The distribution supports the conda package manager for a simplified installation on Linux, macOS and Windows, the usage of PCRaster in Jupyter Notebooks, the "multicore" module providing multithreaded field-based operations, significantly reduced build complexity, and a refactored code basis to recent C and C++ standards. While PCRaster originally started as a raster-based toolbox, it is nowadays required …

Modeling Reductive Dechlorination Of 1,2-Dichloroethane In The Presence Of Chloroethenes And 1,2-Dichloropropane As Co-Contaminants – Using Prior Information And Multi-Objective Optimization, Uwe Schneidewind

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

1,2-Dichloroethane (1,2-DCA) is a major man-made chlorinated organic compound. It can often be found in plumes at sites contaminated with a mix of chlorinated ethenes that warrant some form of remedial treatment or at least monitored natural attenuation. A major attenuation pathway of 1,2-DCA is through reductive dechlorination by organohalide-respiring bacteria (OHRB), which is influenced by other chlorinated contaminants such as chloroethenes and chloropropanes, often co-existing with 1,2-DCA. To assess the effect of chloroethenes and 1,2-dichloropropane (1,2-DCP) on 1,2-DCA dechlorination by a microbial consortium containing ORHB, we simulated the (sequential) reductive dechlorination in a series of enriched batch cultures using …

Modelling Climate Change Impacts On The Water-Energy-Food Nexus, Seleshi Yalew

International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software

Various studies have investigated the potential impacts of future climate on water, energy, or food production separately. However, the impacts of climate change on the nexus between these interacting sectors is only recently gaining attention. At present, no quantitative modelling and global analysis is available to show the impacts of climate change on the water, energy and food (WEF) nexus. Two approaches can be followed to quantify the WEF nexus. The first is to use an integrated assessment model, using a model that includes modules for water, energy, and food. The second approach is to use separate cutting-edge models from …