Digital Commons Network^™

Modeling Connectivity Of Black Bears In A Desert Sky Island Archipelago, Todd C. Atwood, Julie K. Young, Jon P. Beckmann, Stewart W. Breck, Jennifer A. Fike, Olin E. Rhodes Jr., Kirby D. Bristow

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Landscape features such as rivers, mountains, desert basins, roads, and impermeable man-made structures may influence dispersal and gene flow among populations, thereby creating spatial structure across the landscape. In the US–Mexico borderland, urbanization and construction of the border fence have the potential to increase genetic subdivision and vulnerability to isolation in large mammal populations by bisecting movement corridors that have enabled dispersal between adjacent Sky Island mountain ranges. We examined genetic variation in black bears (Ursus americanus) from three regions in central and southern Arizona, US, to assess genetic and landscape connectivity in the US–Mexico border Sky Islands. We found …

A Review And Synthesis Of Bird And Rodent Damage Estimates To Select California Crops, Karen Gebhardt, Aaron M. Anderson, Katy N. Kirkpatrick, Stephanie A. Shwiff

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

A comprehensive literature review was conducted to identify the magnitude of bird and rodent damage to 19 economically important crops in California. Interviews with agriculture experts provided additional information about damages. Monte Carlo simulations were used to derive summary estimates of damages to each crop. A meta-analysis indicated that summary damage estimates from expert interviews were higher than estimates from field studies and surveys. It was also found that there has been a downward trend over time in damages to almonds and grapes. The results of our study indicate that damages from bird and rodents remain high for many crops …

Rapid Landscape Transformation In South Island, New Zealand, Following Initial Polynesian Settlement, David B. Mcwethy, Cathy Whitlock, Janet M. Wilmshurst, Matt S. Mcglone, Mairie Fromont, Xun Li, Ann Dieffenbacher-Krall, William O. Hobbs, Sherilyn C. Fritz, Edward R. Cook

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

Humans have altered natural patterns of fire for millennia, but the impact of human-set fires is thought to have been slight in wet closed-canopy forests. In the South Island of New Zealand, Polynesians (Māori), who arrived 700–800 calibrated years (cal y) ago, and then Europeans, who settled ∼150 cal y ago, used fire as a tool for forest clearance, but the structure and environmental consequences of these fires are poorly understood. High-resolution charcoal and pollen records from 16 lakes were analyzed to reconstruct the fire and vegetation history of the last 1,000 y. Diatom, chironomid, and element concentration data were …

News Consumption Habits Of Students At The University Of Nebraska, Ford G. Clark

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Theses

People in America today have many choices when it comes to the media. There are hundreds of channels available on cable or satellite television, hundreds of radio stations across the United States, as well as myriad newspapers. Many of these traditional media outlets have Internet websites available as well. Many studies have been done as well as current ratings, subscription information and website tracking to determine who is consuming news in this country. However, information about college students and news consumption is difficult to find. This study attempts to find out what, if any, news is being consumed, and through …

Small Rural School Districts In Nebraska: A Case Study Of Challenges And Solutions, Michael R. Montgomery

Department of Educational Administration: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of this study was to determine the problems faced by small, rural Nebraska school districts. For this study, 15 possible challenges were identified (a) student enrollment, (b) instructional programs, (c) instructional support services, (d) extra curricular activities, (e) hiring and retaining administrative staff, (f) hiring and retaining teaching staff, (g) hiring and retaining non-certified staff, (h) building and grounds, (i) transportation services, (j) food services, (k) school finances, (l) student assessment, (m) accountability school performance, (n) family support, and (o) community support. There were no data on this topic for the state of Nebraska. The case for this …

A Predictive Modeling For Water Consumption And Wastewater Flow Management For A Food Processing Manufacturer, Jairo A. De Jesus

Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The City of Cumming, GA, issues special permits for industrial users of sewer services, who meet one or more criteria of discharge regulations. The criteria includes discharge of 25,000 gallons per day or more of processed wastewater, the presence for the potential to inhibit the Advanced Water Reclamation Facility (AWRF) treatment processes, the potential to cause AWRF’s bio-solids to be contaminated, and other regulations. The Food Processing Manufacturer in this study is a meat processing facility (processes pork cooked sausage) and its operation and associated wastewater treatment plant meets at least one of the criteria requiring a special sewer service …

The Effect Of Enso On Nebraska Winter Snowfall, Jonathan Burnham

Department of Environmental Studies: Undergraduate Student Theses

No abstract provided.

The Interaction Of Fire And Grazing In Oklahoma Artemisia Filifolia Shrubland, Stephen L. Winter

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

I. FIRE-RESILIENCY OF A NORTH AMERICAN ARTEMISIA (ASTERACEAE) SHRUB: IMPLICATIONS FOR RESTORATION OF A CRITICAL ECOSYSTEM PROCESS. Conclusions: Unlike most North American Artemisia shrub species, our research suggests that A. filifolia is highly resilient to the effects of fire. Therefore, use of prescribed fires for the restoration and maintenance of ecosystem processes and properties is appropriate in A. filifolia shrublands of the southern Great Plains in North America.

II. RESTORATION OF THE FIRE-GRAZING INTERACTION IN ARTEMISIA FILIFOLIA SHRUBLAND OF THE SOUTHERN GREAT PLAINS, NORTH AMERICA. Synthesis and applications. Vegetation structure in Artemisia filifolia shrublands of our study were readily altered …

Mapping And Measuring Country Shapes, Nils B. Weidmann, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch

The R Journal

The article introduces the cshapes R package, which includes our CShapes dataset of contemporary and historical country boundaries, as well as computational tools for computing geographical measures from these maps. We provide an overview of the need for considering spatial dependence in comparative re search, how this requires appropriate historical maps, and detail how the cshapes associated R package cshapes can contribute to these ends. We illustrate the use of the package for drawing maps, computing spatial variables for countries, and generating weights matrices for spatial statistics.

Improving Student Achievement Through Professional Learning Communities, Mindy L. Roberts

Department of Educational Administration: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study determined how general education teachers in a Midwestern school district perceived their personal skill level in working collaboratively and focusing on academic results while working in a Professional Learning Community (PLC). The overarching question for the research was: Do educator perceptions of their personal skill level in working collaboratively and focusing on academic results while implementing a Professional Learning Community have an effect on student achievement? The study looked at teacher perceptions within the three themes of PLCs: (a) assuring students learn at high levels, (b) creating a culture of collaboration, and (c) focusing on academic results. Student …

Office Of Research And Economic Development Annual Report 2009-2010

Office of Research and Economic Development: Publications

Planting Seeds for the Future 1
New Institute Focuses on Water for Food 2
Probing the Evapotranspiration Equation 3
Yield Potential Key to Food Security 4
Water-smart Sensors Going Underground 6
Lakes Showing Signs of Warming Climate 7
Informed Choices–Assessing Green Features 9
Powering Roadways with Solar and Wind 10
Improving Sustainable Energy Technologies 11
Biosensor Work Aims for Simple HIV Test 12
Developing Stronger Nanomagnets 14
Peering into Ultra-fast Molecular World 15
Getting the Skinny on Dietary Fat 17
Novel Approach Targets Tuberculosis 18
Pathways to Homelessness for Women 19
Bison Books–50 Years of Great Reading 21
Historian Weaving …

An Account Of The Kingdom Of Caubul, And Its Dependencies, In Persia, Tartary, And India (1842), Mountstuart Elphinstone

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

v.1. Geographical description of Afghaunistaun. Situation and boundaries of Afghaunistaun -- Mountains of Afghaunistaun -- Rivers of Afghaunistaun -- Natural and political divisions of Afghaunistaun -- Of the climate of Afghaunistaun--rain -- Animals, vegetables, minerals of Afghaunistaun -- General account of the inhabitants of Afghaunistaun. Introduction, origin, and early history of the Afghauns -- Divisions and government of the Afghaun nation -- Marriages, condition of women, funerals, etc. -- Education, language, and literature of the Afghauns -- Religion, sects, moollahs, superstitions, etc. -- Hospitality, predatory habits, etc. -- Manners, customs, and character of the Afghauns -- Of the inhabitants of …

The Nebraska Dispatches, Christopher Cartmill

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Standing Bear, a Ponca Native American chief, is best known for successfully arguing in U.S. District Court in 1879 that Native Americans are “persons within the meaning of the law” who have the right of habeas corpus. When playwright Christopher Cartmill returned to his hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska, to write a play about Chief Standing Bear, he unknowingly began a complicated adventure. As he followed the story of the Ponca chief who fought so hard to return from a reservation in Oklahoma to his homeland in northern Nebraska, Cartmill stumbled into the politics of identity, contested notions of homeland, and …

The Hard Way Home, Steve Kahn

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

A lifelong Alaskan, Steve Kahn moved at the age of nine from the “metropolis” of Anchorage to the foothills of the Chugach Mountains. A childhood of berry picking, fishing, and hunting led to a life as a big-game guide. When he wasn’t guiding in the spring and fall, he worked as a commercial fisherman and earned his pilot’s license, pursuits that took him to the far reaches of the Alaskan wilderness. He lived through some of the most important moments of the state’s history: the 1964 earthquake (the most powerful in U.S. history), the Farewell Burn wildfire, the last king …

Daviborshch's Cart, David Fraser

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

In the spring of 1942, Nazi forces occupying the Ukraine launched a wave of executions targeting the region’s remaining Jewish communities. These mass shootings were open, public, and intimate. Although the victims themselves could never testify against their killers, many eyewitnesses could and did identify the perpetrators. Among these communities, three local men from the villages of Serniki, Israylovka, and Gnivan were intimately implicated in such killing operations: Ivan Polyukhovich, a forester in the German-controlled administration; Heinrich Wagner, a Volksdeutscher liaison officer; and Mikolay Berezowsky, a member of the local police force. More than fifty years later, these three men …

Wyoming Folklore, Federal Writers' Project

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

In 1935, in the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order creating the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). Out-of-work teachers, writers, and scholars fanned out across the country to collect and document local lore. This book reveals the remarkable results of the FWP in Wyoming at a time when it was still possible to interview Civil War veterans and former slaves, homesteaders and Oregon Trail migrants, soldiers of the Great War and Native Americans who remembered Little Big Horn. The work of the FWP in Wyoming, collected and edited here for the first time, comprises a rich …

On The Road Again Consumptives Traveling For Health In The American West, 1840-1925, Jeanne Abrams

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From the mid-nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of health seekers, on the advice of their physicians, family members, or popular advertisements, took to the road to "chase the cure" for tuberculosis, the most dreaded disease of the era. Indeed, tuberculosis, also commonly known as consumption or "the White Plague," held the dubious distinction of being the leading cause of death in nineteenth century America. In the first years of the twentieth century 150,000 Americans died of it yearly, and more than ten times that number were afflicted with the disease.¹ Whether …

Review Of Wallace Stegner And The American West By Philip L. Fradkin, Bonney Macdonald

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Philip L. Fradkin's biography constitutes a balanced and well-researched addition to the biographical scholarship currently available on a treasured and enduring American and western American author, environmentalist, and teacher. Adding to previous work by Forrest and Margaret Robinson (1977), as well as by Jackson Benson (1996), Fradkin supplements these portraits of Wallace Stegner with his own emphases-in particular Stegner's continuing commitment to thinking about the American West, about water and aridity, and about public intellectuals' obligations to conservation and environmental responsibility.

Review Of Delaware Tribe In A Cherokee Nation By Brice Obermeyer, Dawn G. Marsh

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The federal acknowledgment process is a highly contested procedure under the best of circumstances. For the Delaware Tribe of Oklahoma the negotiations to establish their national identity while living within the physical boundaries of the Cherokee Nation continue to divide its members and challenge modern interpretations of enrollment. Brice Obermeyer, a cultural anthropologist at Emporia State University and NAGPRA representative for the Delaware Tribe, provides a comprehensive discussion of this historic relationship.

Obermeyer summarizes the histories that brought the Cherokees and Delawares to eastern Oklahoma and the legal efforts to establish an independent Delaware identity since the 1867 Cherokee-Delaware Agreement. …

Review Of The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story By Elliott West, Dennis Baird

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Nez Perce people (who call themselves Nimiipuu) are ancient inhabitants of Idaho's Clearwater Valley and of the Wallowa Mountains of eastern Oregon. Driven by both curiosity and economics, they have a rich history of travels to distant places, including California, the Rio Grande Valley, and across the Plains to Missouri. Buffalo drew large segments of the tribe to the Great Plains, where many leaders where born. They have an equally rich history of generosity to visitors, a category that included Lewis and Clark, fur traders and missionaries, and eventually the miners and settlers who helped various federal officials …

From Pseudoscience To Protoscience: Estimating Human Trafficking And Modern Forms Of Slavery, Amanda J. Gould

Annual Interdisciplinary Conference on Human Trafficking: 2nd (2010)

Scholars and authors in the field of human trafficking and modern slavery are quick to note the problem of estimating the number of victims. Their works are usually devoid of an appropriate explanation, though, of why there is a problem. Many recognise victims are part of a hidden population and know that they cannot simply be counted. From this they assume that estimates are inherently unreliable. The problem here is not that there are only estimates, but that the estimates are based on either faulty grounds or no apparent methodology at all. Estimation techniques are common in many fields including …

Mcnair News, Volume 5, Number 1, Fall 2010

McNair News: Newsletter of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln McNair Scholars Program

Meet the 2010 McNair Cohort
Scholars Present at National McNair Conference
Making the Transition from Student to Scholar
Mentor Spotlight - Dr. Carl Nelson
Khoa Chu Earns NASA Research Internship
Brittany Sznajder-Murray Completes Summer Research at Ohio State
Alumni News: Advanced Degrees
Scholars Receive 2010-11 UCARE funding
Kudos to Scholars and Alumni: Masoud Mahjouri-Samani & Tyler Scherr
Getting the Most Out of a Research Conference

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 30 / Number 4 / Fall 2010

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Review Of Taming The Land: The Lost Postcard Photographs Of The Texas High Plains By John Miller Morris, Anne E. Peterson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The advent of the real photographic postcard (RPPC) and the burgeoning growth in the early twentieth century of the Texas Panhandle area of the southern Great Plains coincide. More than 100,000 "optimists" spilled into the region after 1906. The frontier receded as farmsteads grew around railroad towns. The era also witnessed a surge in popularity of the real photographic postcard from 1906 into the 1920s, mailed by the tens of thousands and collected in albums documenting the region. As the population grew, photographers increasingly worked for land developers making images of farmland and also of excursionists traveling to see the …

Wish List Wilderness Endgame In The Black Hills National Forest, Robert Wellman Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In January 1979 Dave Foreman loosened his tie, propped his cowboy boots up on his desk, and brooded awhile on RARE II. In a second try at Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE), the u.s. Forest Service had just spent two years deciding once and for all how much of its undeveloped land should be designated Wilderness. To Foreman, a Washington executive of the Wilderness Society, RARE II tasted of bitter defeat, and he lonesomely "popped the top on another Stroh's" as he brooded. The Forest Service had just recommended increasing its Wilderness acres from 18 million to 33 million, …

Body Lice, Yersinia Pestis Orientalis, And Black Death, Mark Welford, Brian Bossak, Robert G. Mclean, Michael W. Fall, Michel Drancourt, Didier Raoult

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Letters exchanged on role of Y. pestis in European plague Black Death.

Our colleague and mentor David E. Davis researched and wrote in his retirement after years of research and reflection on rat ecology and rodent-borne diseases (3,4). Rattus rattus is commonly recognized as the vertebrate host of fl ea-borne plague that swept through Europe in the 1300s, killing >50% of the population. Davis believed this explanation did not fit what he knew of the ecologic requirements of fleas and black rats. He studied reports of archeologic excavations and reviewed poems, medieval bestiaries, and paintings and concluded that these rats …

Fifteen New Species Of Sonoma Casey From The Eastern United States And A Description Of The Male Of Sonoma Tolulae (Leconte) (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae: Pselaphinae), Michael L. Ferro, Christopher E. Carlton

Insecta Mundi

Fifteen new species of faronine pselaphines in the genus Sonoma Casey are described: S. baylessae; S. brasstownensis; S. chouljenkoi; S. cygnus; S. gilae; S. gimmeli; S. holmesi; S. mayori; S. nicholsae; S. parkorum; S. nhunguyeni; S. sokolovi; S. streptophorophallus; S. tishechkini; S. tridens. Male specimens of Sonoma tolulae (LeConte) were collected from the type locality and this species is redescribed. These species bring the total diversity of the genus to 43 species. The genus is divided into four species groups based on characters of the male genitalia. Sonoma corticina Casey was not included in the genus when it was …

Afghan Frontier: The Substance Of A Speech Not Delievered (1879), George Campbell Sir

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

The situation before the war - The present situation - The history of Afghanistan - The geography of Afghanistan - The people of Afghanistan - The demand for residents - The scientific frontier - The last resort - Summary

Global Competence: Determination Of Its Importance For Engineers Working In A Global Environment, Gregg M. Warnick

Department of Educational Administration: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

We live and work in a world that is even more interconnected and interdependent than ever before. Engineers must now not only develop technical engineering competence, but must also develop additional skills and competencies including global competence to obtain success within a global engineering environment.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether multinational companies considered global competence an important skill in mechanical engineering graduates when making hiring decisions. The study was an exploratory study that utilized an extensive literature review to identify eight global competencies for engineering success within a global environment and also included a survey instrument …

An Intercomparison Of Regional Atmospheric Circulation And The Melt Season Loss Of Arctic Snow Cover And Sea Ice Extent Across The Land–Ocean Boundary, Angela C. Bliss

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study is designed to compare the monthly continental snow cover and sea ice extent loss in the Arctic with regional atmospheric conditions including: mean sea level pressure, 925 hPa air temperature, and mean wind direction among others during the melt season (March-August) over the 29-year study period 1979-2007. Little research has gone into studying the concurrent variations in the annual loss of continental snow cover and sea ice extent across the land-ocean boundary, since these data are largely stored in incompatible formats. However, the analysis of these data, averaged spatially over three autonomous study regions located in Siberia, North …