Digital Commons Network^™

Correlations Between Educational Struggle, Toxic Sites By School District And Demographic Variables, With Geographical Information System Projections, Junu Shrestha, Raihan K. Khan, Shane Mcclintock, John Degroote, Catherine L. Zeman

Faculty Publications

This correlational study associated data on children enrolled in individualized educational plans in their K-12 schools (IEP) and an algorithm-calculated score of neurotoxins at contaminated sites located in each school district. The study also mapped and projected the correlations using Geographical Information System (GIS) technology. These data were populated in ArcMap 10.5 (a GIS software) for generating maps and data to conduct geospatial analysis. A total of 1 Superfund site and 39 CERCLA sites were identified as contaminated sites for this analysis. The majority of contaminants were heavy metals such as lead, arsenic, mercury, and cadmium. The mean toxic score …

Modeling Multi-Grained User Preference In Location Visitation, Yingrong Qin, Chen Gao, Zhen Tu, Hongsheng Wu, Shuangqing Wei, Yue Wang, Lin Zhang, Yong Li

Faculty Publications

Location prediction acts as a fundamental service in today's location-based information platform, which helps users access locations satisfying their demands, improving both user experience and platform profit. Since users with unambiguous demands prefer specific locations while users with compound demands consider first regions and then specific locations, it is necessary to model multi-grained user preferences at different geographical scales. However, most of the existing works concentrate on user preferences at the location-scale only, which can not understand users traveling behaviors thoroughly. In this paper, we propose to model both the fine-grained user preferences at the location scale and the coarsegrained …

Shifting Taxonomic And Functional Community Composition Of Rivers Under Land Use Change, Kai Chen, Stephen R. Midway, Brandon K. Peoples, Beixin Wang, Julian D. Olden

Faculty Publications

Land use intensification has led to conspicuous changes in plant and animal communities across the world. Shifts in trait-based functional composition have recently been hypothesized to manifest at lower levels of environmental change when compared to species-based taxonomic composition; however, little is known about the commonalities in these responses across taxonomic groups and geographic regions. We investigated this hypothesis by testing for taxonomic and geographic similarities in the composition of riverine fish and insect communities across gradients of land use in major hydrological regions of the conterminous United States. We analyzed an extensive data set representing 556 species and 33 …

Widespread Sympatry In A Species-Rich Clade Of Marine Fishes (Carangoidei), Jessica R. Glass, Richard C. Harrington, Peter F. Cowman, Brant C. Faircloth, Thomas J. Near

Faculty Publications

A universal paradigm describing patterns of speciation across the tree of life has been debated for decades. In marine organisms, inferring patterns of speciation using contemporary and historical patterns of biogeography is challenging due to the deficiency of species-level phylogenies and information on species' distributions, as well as conflicting relationships between species' dispersal, range size and co-occurrence. Most research on global patterns of marine fish speciation and biogeography has focused on coral reef or pelagic species. Carangoidei is an ecologically important clade of marine fishes that use coral reef and pelagic environments. We used sequence capture of 1314 ultraconserved elements …

Looking Back To Look Forward: Exploring Crenshaw’S Political, Structural, And Representational Intersectionality In Sport, Allison Anders Ph.D., James M. Devita, Leslee A. Fisher, Chris Corr, Christina L. Myers

Faculty Publications

Engaging with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, the authors (re)turn to its genesis in critical race theory (CRT) and specifically, its forms of structural intersectionality, political intersectionality, and representational intersectionality. Discussing each form in relation to contemporary issues in sport that Black women and women of Color navigate, they argue that Crenshaw’s intersectionality provides additional compelling layers of engagement with existing intersectional scholarship and scholarship about activism in sport, invites structural and discursive change through intersectional policies and practice, and promotes coalition building toward intersectional racial justice in sport.

Virtual Criminal Law Dualism, Itay Ravid, Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg

Faculty Publications

Since the start of the new millennium, technological and societal changes have initiated a transition from physical to virtual spaces. This farreaching phenomenon has extended to the law and legal institutions, including the criminal law domain. This essay coins the term “virtual criminal law dualism” to describe the dynamic relationship between the virtual and physical spaces in the criminal law sphere. We contend that the transition to virtual spaces has manifested in two distinct aspects. The first relates to formal doctrinal, procedural, and institutional changes that the mainstream criminal law and procedure have undergone due to the emergence of virtual …

Reply To: Beyond Microbial Carbon Use Efficiency, Feng Tao, Johannes Lehmann, Ying-Ping Wang, Lifen Jiang, Bernhard Ahrens, Kostiantyn Viatkin, Stefano Manzoni, Benjamin Z. Houlton, Yuanyuan Huang, Bruce A. Hungate, Serita D. Frey, Michael W. I. Schmidt, Markus Reichstein, Nuno Carvalhais, Philippe Ciais, Umakant Mishra, Gustaf Hugelius, Toby D. Hocking, Xingjie Lu, Zheng Shi, Ronald Vargas, Yusuf Yigini, Christian Omuto, Ashish A. Malik, Guillermo Peralta, Rosa Cuevas-Corona, Luciano E. Di Paolo, Isabel Luotto, Cuijuan Liao, Yi-Shuang Liang, Vinisa S. Saynes, Xiaomeng Huang

Faculty Publications

In their commentary, Xiao et al. cautioned that the conclusions on the critical role of microbial carbon use efficiency (CUE) in global soil organic carbon (SOC) storage in a paper by Tao et al. (2023) might be too simplistic. They claimed that Tao et al.’s study lacked mechanistic consideration of SOC formation and excluded important datasets. Xiao et al. brought up important points, which can be largely reconciled with our findings by understanding the differences in expressing processes in empirical studies and in models.

Does Investment In Green Employee Development Climate Matter For Environmental Commitment And Green Well-Being? A Case Study Of A Palm Oil Company In Malaysia, Patricia Yinyin Lau, Sunyoung Park, Yen Chen Hsu, Bella Ya Hui Lien, Jo Ann Ho

Faculty Publications

Drawing on social exchange theory and stakeholder responses to corporate social responsibility model, this study aimed to examine if the cross-level impacts of perceived investment in green employee development climate (PIGED) on environmental commitment (EC) and green well-being (GWB) were mediated by green person-job fit and green growth need strength. We collected a total of 412 employees and 80 operating units from a leading palm-oil company in Malaysia. The multilevel regression analysis found the cross-level effects of PIGED on EC and GWB that were partially mediated by green person-job fit and green growth need strength. Due to incomplete understanding of …

Spatial And Wavelet Analysis Of Precipitation And River Discharge During Operation Of The Three Gorges Dam, China, Lirong Yin, Lei Wang, Barry D. Keim, Kory Konsoer, Zhengtong Yin, Mingzhe Liu, Wenfeng Zheng

Faculty Publications

The Three Gorges Dam and Reservoir on the Yangtze River is one of the world's largest dams. After the dam's construction in 1997, the reservoir started filling up, expanding to a size of over 600 km2. Therefore, its possible influence on maintaining the size and water level of this waterbody is significant and concerning. This research utilized wavelet coherence analysis to examine the temporal correlation and phase coherence among various datasets, including dam injection (1998–2018) and discharge (2003–2018) data, ground station precipitation data along the Yangtze River (1998–2020), and river discharge raster maps 1998–2018. The analysis revealed a strong coherence …

Deficiency Of Healthcare Accessibility Of Elderly People Exposed To Future Extreme Coastal Floods: A Case Study Of Shanghai, China, Xinmeng Shan, Paolo Scussolini, Jun Wang, Mengya Li, Jiahong Wen, Lei Wang

Faculty Publications

Socioeconomic development, subsidence, and climate change have led to high flood risks in coastal cities, making the vulnerable, especially elderly people, more prone to floods. However, we mostly do not know how the accessibility of life-saving public resources for the elderly population will change under future scenarios. Using Shanghai as a case, this study introduced a new analytical framework to fill this gap. We integrated for the first time models of coastal flooding, local population growth, and medical resource supply-demand estimation. The results show that under an extreme scenario of coastal flooding in the year 2050, in the absence of …

U-Net-Lstm: Time Series-Enhanced Lake Boundary Prediction Model, Lirong Yin, Lei Wang, Tingqiao Li, Siyu Lu, Jiawei Tian, Zhengtong Yin, Xiaolu Li, Wenfeng Zheng

Faculty Publications

Change detection of natural lake boundaries is one of the important tasks in remote sensing image interpretation. In an ordinary fully connected network, or CNN, the signal of neurons in each layer can only be propagated to the upper layer, and the processing of samples is independent at each moment. However, for time-series data with transferability, the learned change information needs to be recorded and utilized. To solve the above problems, we propose a lake boundary change prediction model combining U-Net and LSTM. The ensemble of LSTMs helps to improve the overall accuracy and robustness of the model by capturing …

Geographic Differences In The Magnitude Of Black-White Disparities In Having Obesity, Steven A. Cohen, Monique J. Brown, Furong Xu, Caitlin C. Nash, Mary L. Greaney

Faculty Publications

Background

Obesity disparities in the United States are well documented, but the limited body of research suggests that geographic factors may alter the magnitude of these disparities. A growing body of evidence has identified a “rural mortality penalty” where morbidity and mortality rates are higher in rural than urban areas, even after controlling for other factors. Black-White differences in health and mortality are more pronounced in rural areas than in urban areas.

Objective

Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore how rural-urban status and region moderate Black-White health disparities in obesity.

Methods

Data were abstracted from the 2012 …

Friction-In-Design Regulation As 21st Century Time, Place, And Manner Restriction, Brett Frischmann, Susan Benesch

Faculty Publications

Digital networked society needs friction-in-design regulation that targets the digital architectures, supposedly smart (data-driven, algorithmic) systems, and interfaces that shape human interactions, behavior, and will (beliefs, preferences, values, intentions). The relentless push to eliminate friction for the sake of efficiency has hidden social costs that affect basic human capabilities and society. A general course correction is needed.

Friction in the digital networked environment can come in many forms. It can be as simple as a time delay prior to publishing a social media post, a notice that provides salient information coupled with a nudge toward actual deliberation, or a query …

Weakly Forced Thunderstorms In The Southeast Us Are Stronger Near Urban Areas, P. Miller, N. Debbage

Faculty Publications

While cities are well documented to enhance precipitation through the urban rainfall effect (URE), the distinguishing characteristics of urban-influenced storms that help establish the URE are poorly understood. The purpose of this study is to examine the morphological traits (i.e., size, duration, intensity, etc.) and near-storm environmental conditions of weakly forced thunderstorms (WFTs) occurring near urban areas in the Southeast US relative to storms forming in surrounding rural areas. Urban WFTs are found to have higher reflectivities, are more likely to contain hail, and produce more lightning than nearby non-urban storms, but their sizes and shapes are statistically indistinguishable. When …

El Español En La Repúblida Dominicana, Orlando Alba

Faculty Publications

Este capítulo presenta un panorama general del español en la República Dominicana desde dos perspectivas: la percepción y la actuación de los hablantes. Desde la perspectiva subjetiva, se examina la inseguridad lingüística que exhibe gran parte de la población, que piensa que su español es inferior al de otros lugares. Por otra parte, se analizan los rasgos objetivos que caracterizan el dialecto. Se describen los procesos fonéticos de la variación consonántica, subrayando el avanzado estado del proceso de reducción de la /s/, la variación de las líquidas /r, l/ y de la /d/ intervocálica. En el terreno sintáctico, se discuten …

Emission Factors For Crop Residue And Prescribed Fires In The Eastern Us During Firex-Aq, Katherine R. Travis, James H. Crawford, Amber J. Soja, Emily M. Gargulinski, Richard H. Moore, Elizabeth B. Wiggins, Glenn S. Diskin, Joshua P. Digangi, John B. Nowak, Hannah Halliday, Robert J. Yokelson, Jessica L. Mccarty, Isobel J. Simpson, Donald R. Blake, Simone Meinardi, Rebecca S. Hornbrook, Eric C. Apel, Alan J. Hills, Carsten Warneke, Matthew M. Coggon, Andrew W. Rollins, Jessica B. Gilman, Caroline C. Womack, Michael A. Robinson, Joseph M. Katich, Jeff Peischl, Georgios I. Gkatzelis, Ilann Bourgeois, Pamela S. Rickly, Aaron Lamplugh, Jack E. Dibb, Jose L. Jimenez, Pedro Campuzano-Jost, Douglas A. Day, Hongyu Guo, Demetrios Pagonis, Paul O. Wennberg, John D. Crounse, Lu Xu, Thomas F. Hanisco, Glenn M. Wolfe, Jin Liao, Jason M. St. Clair, Benjamin A. Nault, Alan Fried, Anne E. Perring

Faculty Publications

Agricultural and prescribed burning activities emit large amounts of trace gases and aerosols on regional to global scales. We present a compilation of emission factors (EFs) and emission ratios from the eastern portion of the Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) campaign in 2019 in the United States, which sampled burning of crop residues and other prescribed fire fuels. FIREX-AQ provided comprehensive chemical characterization of 53 crop residue and 22 prescribed fires. Crop residues burned at different modified combustion efficiencies (MCE), with corn residue burning at higher MCE than other fuel types. Prescribed fires burned …

The World's 100 Worst Invasive Alien Insect Species Differ In Their Characteristics From Related Non-Invasive Species, Zihua Zhao, Cang Hui, Shuo Peng, Shanqing Yi, Zhihong Li, Gadi V.P. Reddy, Mark Van Kleunen

Faculty Publications

While there has been great interest in species characteristics that promote invasiveness, still little is known about the characteristics that distinguish invasive from non-invasive insects. Using a database on the naturalised distributions of alien insects and expert opinions about their impacts, we identified the world's 100 worst invasive insect species. By comparing species characteristics reported in the literature using a meta-analysis, between the 100 worst invasive species and related non-invasive species, we found that invasive insects overall have more pathways of introduction, occur in more habitats, have higher fecundities, higher voltinism, more genes, shorted lifespans and faster development from egg …

Yolov4_Cspbi: Enhanced Land Target Detection Model, Lirong Yin, Lei Wang, Jianqiang Li, Siyu Lu, Jiawei Tian, Zhengtong Yin, Shan Liu, Wenfeng Zheng

Faculty Publications

The identification of small land targets in remote sensing imagery has emerged as a significant research objective. Despite significant advancements in object detection strategies based on deep learning for visible remote sensing images, the performance of detecting a small and densely distributed number of small targets remains suboptimal. To address this issue, this study introduces an improved model named YOLOV4_CPSBi, based on the YOLOV4 architecture, specifically designed to enhance the detection capability of small land targets in remote sensing imagery. The proposed model enhances the traditional CSPNet by redefining its channel partitioning and integrating this enhanced structure into the neck …

The Town That Built Its Own River: La Plaza Del Cerro At Taos County New Mexico, José A. Rivera Ph.D

Faculty Publications

Cerro is an unincorporated community in Taos County, New Mexico, and is situated near New Mexico State Highway 522 heading north to the Colorado border. Nearby is Cerro de Guadalupe, a peak that has an elevation of 8,796 feet and Cerro at 7,490 feet. The connection to Guadalupe Mountain gave the town its original name as “La Plaza del Cerro de Guadalupe.” Cerro was established in the early 1850s by settlers who arrived from nearby Questa and Taos. By itself, Guadalupe Mountain did not provide sufficient water to sustain an agrarian economy based on farming and livestock ranching as was …

Increasing Equity In The Transnational Allocation Of Vaccines Against Emerging Pathogens: A Multi-Modal Approach, Ana Santos Rutschman

Faculty Publications

This article proposes the adoption of a multi-modal system for allocating vaccine doses during large transnational outbreaks of infectious diseases. The chosen allocative criteria (public health need; country-income level; qualification through funding; and, subsidiarily, a modified lottery system) are adapted from a current embodiment of allocative multi-modality outside the context of public health: the New York City Marathon

Reply To: Contribution Of Carbon Inputs To Soil Carbon Accumulation Cannot Be Neglected, Feng Tao, Benjamin Z. Houlton, Serita D. Frey, Johannes Lehmann, Stefano Manzoni, Yuanyuan Huang, Lifen Jiang, Umakant Mishra, Bruce A. Hungate, Michael W. I. Schmidt, Markus Reichstein, Nuno Carvalhais, Philippe Ciais, Ying-Ping Wang, Bernhard Ahrens, Gustaf Hugelius, Toby D. Hocking, Xingjie Lu, Zheng Shi, Kostiantyn Viatkin, Ronald Vargas, Yusuf Yigini, Christian Omuto, Ashish A. Malik, Guillermo Peralta, Rosa Cuevas-Corona, Luciano E. Di Paolo, Isabel Luotto, Cuijuan Liao, Yi-Shuang Liang, Vinisa S. Saynes, Xiaomeng Huang, Yiqi Luo

Faculty Publications

In the accompanying Comment1, He et al. argue that the determinant role of microbial carbon use efficiency in global soil organic carbon (SOC) storage shown in Tao et al. (2023)2 was overestimated because carbon inputs were neglected in our data analysis while they suggest that our model-based analysis could be biased and model-dependent. Their argument is based on a different choice of independent variables in the data analysis and a sensitivity analysis of two process-based models other than that used in our study. We agree that both carbon inputs and outputs (as mediated by microbial processes) matter when predicting SOC …

Doctors’ Duty To Provide Abortion Information, Michelle Oberman, Lisa Soleymani Lehmann

Faculty Publications

With abortion remaining legal in over half of the country and a proliferation of websites offering information on how to access abortion medications, ending an unwanted early-stage pregnancy remains surprisingly easy. That is, easy for those who know where to look. But not all patients have equal access to reliable information. This Article addresses the urgent downstream harms caused by the lack of access to abortion information, particularly among the most vulnerable Americans, and argues that, in view of these consequences, regardless of abortion’s legal status, clinicians have a duty to provide their patients with abortion information.

We begin with …

Against Silence: Why Doctors Are Obligated To Provide Abortion, Michelle Oberman

Faculty Publications

As a lawyer, I have long been interested in the gap between law and the books and law in practice. In 2008, this curiosity led me to Latin America, where I began studying the impact of the world's most restrictive abortion bans. My first stop was Chile, which at the time banned abortion under all conditions–– there was not even an exception to save women's lives. Raised on the history of what happened when abortion was illegal in the United States prior to Roe v. Wade, I knew asking doctors to share their experiences was one way to gauge the …

A Systematic Review On The Ecosystem Services Provided By Green Infrastructure, Daniel Jato-Espino, Fabio Capra-Ribeiro, Vanessa Moscardó, Leticia Bartolome Del Pino, Fernando Mayor-Vitoria, Laura Gallardo, Patricia Carracedo, Kristin Dietrich

Faculty Publications

Urbanization and climate change are endangering the sustainability of public spaces through increased land artificialization, ecological fragmentation, reduced resource availability, and limited accessibility to natural and seminatural areas. Properly managing Green Infrastructure (GI) can contribute to mitigating these challenges by delivering multiple provisioning, regulating, supporting and cultural Ecosystem Services (ES). This would facilitate the implementation of strategically planned GI networks in cities for urban regeneration purposes. In this context, this study developed a systematic review on the ES provided by GI using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement. The analysis of 199 eligible articles indicated …

Roles Of Reservoirs In Regulating Basin Flood And Droughts Risks Under Climate Change: Historical Assessment And Future Projection, Jingxuan Sun, Wei Chen, Boting Hu, Y. Jun Xu, Guangxin Zhang, Yanfeng Wu, Baojun Hu, Zheng Song

Faculty Publications

Study region: Nenjiang River Basin (NRB), Northeast China. Study focus: Water safety management and sustainable development planning increasingly seek to incorporate the impact of reservoirs on downstream floods and droughts; while the effectiveness of reservoir operation in regulating flood and drought risks under climate change has not been assessed extensively. We focus on discerning whether and to what extent reservoirs can mitigate the risk of hydrologic extremes from the perspective of historical and future climate change. New hydrological insight for the region: We found that coupling reservoir operations into basin hydrological simulation can efficiently improve model capacity to capture both …

Science Diplomacy From The Global South: The Case Of Intergovernmental Science Organizations, Anna Lena Rüland, Nicolas Rüffin, Katharina Cramer, Prosper Ngabonziza, Manoj Saxena, Stefan Skupien

Faculty Publications

Intergovernmental science organizations (IGSOs) address many challenges of the 21st century. Several countries of the Global South have joined established IGSOs or have created new ones. Yet we know little about their interests in IGSOs. Our study addresses this blind spot by investigating which objectives Southern actors pursue in IGSOs and under which conditions they are likely to achieve their objectives. Using insights from three strands of literature, we compare four IGSOs with Southern participation: the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, the Square Kilometer Array, and the African Lightsource. We show that countries of the …

U-Net-Stn: A Novel End-To-End Lake Boundary Prediction Model, Lirong Yin, Lei Wang, Tingqiao Li, Siyu Lu, Zhengtong Yin, Xuan Liu, Xiaolu Li, Wenfeng Zheng

Faculty Publications

Detecting changes in land cover is a critical task in remote sensing image interpretation, with particular significance placed on accurately determining the boundaries of lakes. Lake boundaries are closely tied to land resources, and any alterations can have substantial implications for the surrounding environment and ecosystem. This paper introduces an innovative end-to-end model that combines U-Net and spatial transformation network (STN) to predict changes in lake boundaries and investigate the evolution of the Lake Urmia boundary. The proposed approach involves pre-processing annual panoramic remote sensing images of Lake Urmia, obtained from 1996 to 2014 through Google Earth Pro Version 7.3 …

Object-Oriented Remote Sensing Approaches For The Detection Of Terrestrial Impact Craters As A Reconnaissance Survey, Habimana Emmanuel, Jaehyung Yu, Lei Wang, Sung Hi Choi, Digne Edmond Rwabuhungu Rwatangabo

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study is to employ a remote sensing reconnaissance survey based on optimal segmentation parameters and an object-oriented random forest approach to the identification of possible terrestrial impact craters from the global 30-m resolution SRTM DEM. A dataset consisting of 94 confirmed and well-preserved terrestrial impact craters, 104 volcanic calderas, and 124 valleys were extracted from real-world surface features. For craters with different sizes, eight optimal scale parameters from 80 to 3000 have been identified using multi-resolution segmentation, where the scale parameters have a positive correlation (R2 = 0.78) with the diameters of craters. The object-oriented random …

The Dynamic Nature Of Wrack: An Investigation Into Wrack Movement And Impacts On Coastal Marshes Using Suas, Grayson R. Morgan, Daniel R. Morgan, Cuizhen Wang, Michael E. Hodgson, Steven R. Schill

Faculty Publications

This study investigates the use of small unoccupied aerial systems (sUAS) as a new remote sensing tool to identify and track the spatial distribution of wrack on coastal tidal marsh systems. We used sUAS to map the wrack movement in a Spartina alterniflora-dominated salt marsh monthly for one year including before and after Hurricane Isaias that brought strong winds, rain, and storm surge to the area of interest in August 2020. Flight parameters for each data collection mission were held constant including collection only during low tide. Wrack was visually identified and digitized in a GIS using every mission orthomosaic …

Putin's Matryoskha: A War Reparations Facility For Rebuilding Ukraine, Lev E. Breydo

Faculty Publications

This Article addresses a critical, trillion-dollar question: How do we hold Russia accountable for the reconstruction of Ukraine? The nation has been devastated by Russia's brutal war of aggression, with tens of thousands killed, millions displaced and its economy in shambles. The enormity of the problem cannot be overstated.

Existing proposals to support Ukraine, including many from prominent scholars, largely focus on seizing Russian assets, particularly central bank reserves "frozen" by sanctions. Such strategies, however, are legally problematic-- likely well beyond the scope of Presidential authority-- and financially insufficient. Moreover, while prospective new legislation could expand presidential powers, it risks …