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Tennessee Forestry Commission Fy 2013 Annual Report, Tennessee. Department Of Agriculture.

Forestry Commission Annual Report

No abstract provided.

Microplate Methodologies Applied To Environmental Biotechnology, Farrah Solomon

Open Access Master's Theses

Microarray technology is a high-throughput technique that allows a researcher to reduce the amount of reagents for each experiment as well as conduct multiple experiments with varying conditions simultaneously with the capability of analyzing this data quickly. Such microarray techniques have been applied in different fields such as environmental, pharmaceutical, microbiology, and biomedical among others (Kricka 2001).

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to microarray technology with a description of three different techniques: Phenotypic Microarray, DNA Microarray and Protein Microarray, used to study different aspects of microorganisms.

Chapter 2 presents the first manuscript, “A novel application of microarray technology to respiration …

From Alarm To Action: Closing The Gap Between Belief And Behavior In Response To Climate Change, Kathryn Laing Doherty

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The degree to which the climate continues to change will largely be determined by choices made by individuals and nations regarding greenhouse gas emissions. Many Americans engage in energy conservation actions. But, the political will in the United States to adopt emissions reduction policies is unlikely to exist without public demand. Therefore, public mitigation actions of individuals (e.g., contacting elected officials in support of emissions reduction) are critical to induce legislative response. The majority of individuals who are most concerned about climate change (the “Alarmed” segment) do not engage in public mitigation actions, but some do. The purpose of this …

Application Of Polychlorinated Biphenyl Signatures For Environmental Fingerprinting, David Peter Megson

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences Theses

Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) are a group of 209 ‘man-made’ chlorinated organic compounds that were widely used in the 20th century for a variety of industrial uses. PCBs were first commercially produced in the 1929 and were manufactured until the 1980s when their use was phased out due to environmental and human health risks. However, due to their widespread use and persistence they are ubiquitous in the environment and remain a contaminant of concern. The structural properties that determine the persistence of PCBs in humans were therefore elucidated by statistical analysis of data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey …

Securitize Me: Stimulating Renewable Energy Financing By Embracing The Capital Markets, Andrew C. Fink

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

The current system of financing renewable energy projects is broken and inadequate, especially when compared to the framework for participating in oil and gas ventures. The solution lies in borrowing accepted energy business practices and adapting them to solar and wind energy projects. This Article focuses on the current issues facing renewable energy project financing in the United States, analyzes failed attempts to stimulate growth, and presents the securitization of renewable energy assets as a solution. Drawing on current legal structure and debates from the corporate sphere, this Article also discusses specific securitization techniques that can help to democratize and …

Still More Studies In Rio Grande Valley History, Milo Kearney, Anthony K. Knopp, Antonio Zavaleta

Studies in Rio Grande Valley Regional History Series

Resaca, a poem / Josie Mixon -- Matamoros before the Texas Revolution : becoming Mexico’s pivitol port city on the northern frontier / Craig H. Roell -- The Great Sequoyah Mystery : a cover-up that stretched from the Cumberland Mountains to the Rio Grande Delta (and into Mexico) / Don Clifford -- Immigration to South Texas, 1850-1900 / Thomas Daniel Knight -- Cattle barons and the creation of an empire : a case study of the expansion of the Kennedy Ranch of South Texas / Elmer Sierra, William Yaworsky, and Amy Frazier -- A history of the Brownsville Police Department …

Map Of The Robert B. Gordon Natural Area For Environmental Studies, Facilities

Gordon Natural Area History & Strategic Plan Documents

No abstract provided.

Economic And Environmental Comparison Of Different Ordering Policies For An Integrated Inventory Control And Supplier Selection Problem, Sepideh Almasi Monfared

Masters Theses

"This study analyzes an integrated inventory control and supplier selection problem in stochastic demand environment under carbon emissions regulations. In particular, a continuous review inventory model with multiple suppliers is investigated under carbon taxing and carbon trading regulations. We analyze and compare the optimal supplier selection and order splitting decisions with single sourcing and two alternative delivery structures for multi-sourcing, namely, sequential ordering and sequential delivery. For each of the three ordering policies, a solution method is proposed and these policies are compared in terms of their economic as well as environmental performances. A numerical study is conducted to demonstrate …

A Qualitative Assessment Of Virginia Beach Dog Park Users, Edwin Gómez, John Hunting

Human Movement Studies & Special Education Faculty Publications

The purpose of this paper is to look at a Virginia Beach, Virginia (VA) dog park as a case study exploring the benefits and perceptions of dog parks by its users. The qualitative methodology follows an earlier dog park study by Gómez (2013) in Norfolk, VA. Our findings indicated three major themes: (a) dog exercise, (b) socialization for dogs (and humans), and (c) safe off-leash place. Findings from Virginia Beach are compared to earlier findings in Norfolk.

The True Cost Of Energy, Bryan Lehrer, Gwyn Browning, David Kurey

Community Engaged Research Reports

This project was a collaboration between students taking the environmental studies capstone course and community partners Julie Rosenbach and John Rasmussen with the purpose of supplementing current research on sustainable and cost effective energy sources at Bates College, by examining externalities. In order to compare and contrast the externalities of a fossil fuel against a feasible alternative energy, focus was placed on natural gas and biomass. The overall goal of the project was to elucidate the positive and negative impacts of different energy options on the environment and society, leading to a recommendation of the best energy option for Bates …

Energy Transitions In Kenya’S Tea Sector: A Wind Energy Assessment, Erik E. Nordman

Open Access Publishing Support Funded Articles

Kenya’s tea sector provides livelihoods for more than 500,000 farmers but energy access in the region remains limited. Clean, affordable distributed energy systems could transform the tea-growing regions by lowering tea production costs and increasing farmer profits. On-site generation could power tea factories and enhance grid stability by reducing electricity draw from the grid. Wind power’s potential in Kenya’s tea regions is unknown. A pre-feasibility study using the Solar and Wind Energy Resource Assessment (SWERA) data set revealed that 29% of Kenya’s tea factory sites have wind resources that could be suitable for development. There were more “moderate”-rated tea factory …

Water Governance Challenges In New Mexico's Middle Rio Grande Valley: A Resilience Assessment, Melinda Harm Benson, Dagmar Llewellyn, Ryan Morrison, Mark Stone

Law of the Rio Chama

No abstract provided.

Integrated Spatial Analysis Of Volunteered Geographic Information, Haydn Lawrence

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is becoming a pervasive form of data within geographic academic research. VGI offers a relatively new form of data, one with both potential as a sensitive way to collect information about the world, and challenges associated with unknown and heterogeneous data quality. The lack of sampling control, variable expertise in data collection and handling, and limited control over data sources are significant research challenges. In this thesis, data quality of VGI is tackled as a general composite measure based on coverage of the dataset, the evenness in the density of data, and the relative evenness in …

Self-Reliance Beyond Neoliberalism: Rethinking Autonomy At The Edges Of Empire, Karen Hébert, Diana Mincyte

Publications and Research

Across scholarly and popular accounts, self-reliance is often interpreted as either the embodiment of individual entrepreneurialism, as celebrated by neoliberal designs, or the basis for communitarian localism, increasingly imagined as central to environmental and social sustainability. In both cases, self-reliance is framed as an antidote to the failures of larger state institutions or market economies. This paper offers a different framework for understanding self-reliance by linking insights drawn from agrarian studies to current debates on alternative economies. Through an examination of the social worlds of semisubsistence producers in peripheral zones in the Global North, we show how everyday forms of …

Combining Limnology And Palaeolimnology To Investigate Recent Regime Shifts In A Shallow, Eutrophic Lake, Linda Randsalu-Wendrup, Daniel J. Conley, Jacob Carstensen, Lars-Anders Hansson, Christer Brönmark, Sherilyn C. Fritz, Preetam Choudhary, Joyanto Routh, Dan Hammarlund

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

In this study, we demonstrate that an integrated approach, combining palaeolimnological records and limnological monitoring data, can increase our understanding of changing ecological patterns and processes in shallow lakes. We focused on recent regime shifts in shallow Lake Krankesjön, southern Sweden, including the collapse of the clear-water state in 1975 and its subsequent recovery in the late 1980s. We used diatom, hydrocarbon, and biogenic silica sediment records, in concert with limnological data sets on nutrient concentrations, water clarity, chlorophyll-a and water depth, to investigate the shifts. The shift from clear to turbid conditions was abrupt and occurred over 1 to …

Predominant And Substoichiometric Isomers Of The Plastid Genome Coexist Within Juniperus Plants And Have Shifted Multiple Times During Cupressophyte Evolution, Wenhu Guo, Felix Grewe, Amie Cobo-Clark, Weishu Fan, Zelin Duan, Robert P. Adams, Andrea E. Schwarzbach, Jeffrey P. Mower

Health & Biomedical Sciences Faculty Publications

Most land plant plastomes contain two copies of a large inverted repeat (IR) that promote high-frequency homologous recombination to generate isomeric genomic forms. Among conifer plastomes, this canonical IR is highly reduced in Pinaceae and completely lost from cupressophytes. However, both lineages have acquired short, novel IRs, some of which also exhibit recombinational activity to generate genomic structural diversity. This diversity has been shown to exist between, and occasionally within, cupressophyte species, but it is not known whether multiple genomic forms coexist within individual plants. To examine the recombinational potential of the novel cupressophyte IRs within individuals and between species, …

Effects Of Cerium Oxide Nanoparticles In Cereals: Insights Into The Toxicity Mechanisms And Macromolecular Modifications, Cyren Mendoza Rico

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Despite the inundation of studies on the interaction of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) with plants, investigations involving complete life cycle (i.e from seedling establishment to full maturity) are still lacking. Assessments on the nutritional value of plants cultivated to full maturity in ENMs-treated soil are also missing. Cerium oxide nanoparticles (nCeO2) have significant interactions with plants; however, there are no life cycle studies yet on their implications in cereals like rice (Oryza sativa L.), wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), and barley (Hordeum vulgare L.). These cereals are globally important crops that support the economic activity, and nutritional and health needs of billions …

Geophysical Investigation Of Hot Springs In The Vicinity Of Shoshone, California, Felix Dziedzorm Ziwu

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Magnetic and gravity surveys were conducted in the vicinity of Shoshone, California to test a hypothesis from investigating hotsprings within Tecopa and Saratoga which states that deep faults must intersect with a specific orientation relative to the regional stress field in order to create hot springs along the Amargosa River.

Three isolated basalt flows with different gravity and magnetic properties were identified near the Shoshone hot spring. Two of the flows have very low magnetic anomalies and the remaining one has a high magnetic anomaly. The high magnetic anomaly basalt flow also has a significantly higher Bouguer anomaly than the …

Childhood Obesity In Asia: The Value Of Accurate Body Composition Methodology, Andrew P. Hills, Najat Mokhtar, Sharon Brownie, Nuala M. Byrne

School of Nursing & Midwifery, East Africa

Childhood obesity, a significant global public health problem, affects an increasing number of low- and middle-income countries, including in Asia. The obesity epidemic has been fuelled by the rapid nutrition and physical activity transition with the availability of more energy-dense nutrient-poor foods and lifestyles of many children dominated by physical inactivity. During the growing years the pace and quality of grow this best quantified by a combination of anthropometric and body composition measures. However, where normative data are available, this has typically been collected on Caucasian children. To better define and characterise overweight and obesity in Asian children, and to …

Bringing It All Together Through Group Learning, Shannon Chance

Articles

Interpersonal and trans-disciplinary collaboration can facilitate and amplify the benefits of learning. Drawing from ideas presented throughout this volume, this culminating chapter describes ways to enhance collaborative learning within and among various stakeholder groups.

Unilateral Climate Regulation, James W. Coleman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

It is now plain that decades of negotiation toward a binding global climate treaty have failed. Yet, at the same time, many nations are adopting a range of unilateral policies to address climate change. The existing literature on climate policy neglects these unilateral climate regulations because it focuses on the necessity and possible design of a multilateral climate treaty. But these domestic regulations present a unique puzzle: given that climate outcomes are determined by global emissions, and that unilateral regulations inevitably influence incentives to regulate elsewhere, how can domestic action achieve the greatest marginal reduction in global emissions? In other …

Wetland Issues Affecting Waterfowl Conservation In North America, Heath M. Hagy, Scott C. Yaich, John W. Simpson, Eduardo Carrera, David A. Haukos, W.Carter Johnson, Charles R. Loesch, Fritz A. Reid, Scott E. Stephens, Ralph W. Tiner, Brett A. Werner, Greg S. Yarris

Natural Resource Management Faculty Publications

This paper summarises discussions by invited speakers during a special session at the 6th North American Duck Symposium on wetland issues that affect waterfowl, highlighting current ecosystem challenges and opportunities for the conservation of waterfowl in North America. Climate change, invasive species, U.S. agricultural policy (which can encourage wetland drainage and the expansion of row-crop agriculture into grasslands), cost and competition for water rights, and wetland management for non-waterfowl species were all considered to pose significant threats to waterfowl populations in the near future. Waterfowl populations were found to be faced with significant threats in several regions, including: the Central …

Securing Food And Livelihoods: Opportunities And Constraints To Sustainably Enhancing Household Food Production In Santa Familia Village, Belize, Siobhan B. Lozada

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Rural households play an active role in reorganizing their livelihood strategies to respond to external stresses and shocks. What is unclear is the extent to which rural households can remain resilient in the face of continued external stresses and how policy actions at larger scales can more effectively encourage rural food and livelihood sustainability. Economic and ecological stresses and shocks have negatively impacted livelihood security and wider economic stability in Belize. This has increased the number of people below the poverty line to 41.3 percent, who remain disproportionately located in rural areas. With a high degree of import dependency, global …

Use And Effectiveness Of Wildlife Crossing Structures With Short Sections Of Wildlife Fencing, Elizabeth Rose Fairbank

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Our growing transportation infrastructure in the United States has many direct and indirect impacts to wildlife populations. Humans are also impacted by the interaction of roads and wildlife in terms of wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVC’s); which annually result in: hundreds of human fatalities, tens of thousands of human injuries, and billions of dollars in property damage. In response to concerns for wildlife and human safety, road mitigation measures are becoming an increasingly important tool for transportation agencies to minimize the risks of WVC’s. The construction of multiple wildlife crossing structures in combination with wildlife fencing have been shown to reduce WVC’s …

Adapting Resilience To A New Hazard: Oil And Oysters In Coastal Louisiana, Audrey Maass

LSU Master's Theses

Inherently resilient practices are one mechanism that communities engage in to cope with disruptive events. A community retains and passes down the practices associated with inherent resilience in their collective memory. The inherent resilience of a community is developed over time, yet the explanation provided by Colten et al. lacks a genesis of how this process developed particularly in relation to the oil industry’s entry into Louisiana. The foundations of these practices will be explored through historic court documents to find encounters between oystermen and oil spills. In addition to legal resources, I also investigate newspaper articles and other historic …

Thermal Decomposition Of Lower-Gwp Refrigerants, Makoto Ito, Chaobin Dang, Eiji Hihara

International Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Conference

The use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) has been widely restricted. They have been replaced with hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) in order to protect the ozone layer. However, the leakage of refrigerant into air from active or end-of-life air conditioners has been a serious environmental issue owing to the high global warming potential (GWP) of HFCs. It has therefore been widely recognized that the replacement of HFCs with lower-GWP refrigerants is a reasonable solution of the problem. In Japan, the lower-GWP refrigerants such as R1234yf, R1234ze, and R32 are considered as candidate alternatives for conventional HFC refrigerants. However, these lower-GWP refrigerants …

Science-Fictional North Korea: A Defective History, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Kafkaesque, Orwellian, eerie, surreal, bizarre, grotesque, alien, wacky, fascinating, dystopian, illusive, theatrical, antic, haunting, apocalyptic: these are just a few of the vaguely science-fictional adjectives that are now associated with North Korea. At the same time, North Korea has become an oddly convenient trope for a certain aesthetic – an uncanny opacity; an ominous mystique – that many writers and artists have exploited to generate striking science-fictional effects in texts with little or no connection to North Korean reality. (The 2002 Bond film Die another Day, for example, draws from North Korea’s science-fictional aura to animate North Korean super-villains who …

Influence Of Egg Oiling On Colony Presence Of Ring-Billed Gulls, Travis L. Devault, Paige M. Schmidt, Fred E. Pogmore, John Gobeille, Jerrold L. Belant, Thomas W. Seamans

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Egg oiling is a form of management in which bird eggs are coated with mineral or corn oil, preventing gas exchange through the shell and killing embryos. Unlike other nestdisturbance techniques, egg oiling reportedly precludes colony abandonment and, thus, can be advantageous when managers wish to limit dispersal within the breeding season to other locations while stabilizing the population or reducing productivity. However, unintended, indirect effects of egg oiling are not well-characterized. We evaluated the influence of egg oiling on ring-billed gulls (Larus delawarensis) within the Lake Champlain basin, Vermont, during the nesting season to determine whether egg …

Modeling Black Bear Population Dynamics In A Human-Dominated Stochastic Environment, David L. Lewis, Stewart W. Breck, Kenneth R. Wilson, Colleen T. Webb

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Many large carnivore populations exist in human-influenced stochastic environments where availability of natural food sources vary annually and anthropogenic food sources can supplement energetic demands, but at a potential demographic cost due to human–wildlife conflict and subsequent conflict management. Understanding how these competing factors influence a population is complex and difficult to study, but here we demonstrate the utility of using a stochastic projection matrix model and perturbation analysis to gain insight into this problem. We modeled a black bear population subjected to stochastic failures of fruiting and masting species, but with access to garbage in urban environments.We parameratized our …

The Role Of Disciplinary Expertise In Shaping Writing Tutorials, Sue Dinitz, Susanmarie Harrington

The Writing Center Journal

No abstract provided.