Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Homestead National Monument Of America, Acoustic Monitoring Report, 2017, Emma Brown

United States National Park Service: Publications

Executive Summary

This report presents acoustical data gathered by Student Conservation Association interns and the Natural Resource Specialist at Homestead National Monument of America in 2017. Data were collected at one site to provide park managers with information about the acoustical environment, sources of noise, and the existing ambient sound levels within the monument. This deployment also captured acoustic conditions during the total solar eclipse on 8/21/2017. (Results of the eclipse monitoring effort are provided in Appendix B.)

In this deployment, sound pressure level (SPL) was measured continuously every second by a calibrated sound level meter. Other equipment included an …

Homestead National Monument Of America, Acoustic Monitoring, 2011-2012

United States National Park Service: Publications

Executive Summary

This report presents acoustical data gathered by Student Conservation Association interns and the Natural Resource Specialist at Homestead National Monument of America in 2011 and 2012. Data were collected at four sites to provide park managers with information on the acoustical environment, sources of noise, and the existing ambient sound levels within the monument. The data will also inform the park managers with information regarding the potential impact of traffic on Highway 4.

Monitoring occurred at each site during two different seasons (except HOME002) in order to document seasonal variations. In each deployment, sound pressure level (SPL) was …

The Prairie Post Quarterly Newsletter Of The High Plains Regional Climate Center- January 2020, Natalie Umphlett, Rezaul Mamood, Paul Flanagan, Logan Winters, Kierstin Blomberg, Emilee Lachenmeier, Crystal J. Stiles

HPRCC Newsletter

Inside this issue:

Message from the director........................................1

Staff spotlight...........................1

Year in review............................2

Updates on engagement and tools.....................................3

Observer awards......................3

Overview of regional climate conditions..................................4

AMS annual meeting.............5

Recent and upcoming travel and activities.............................6

Save The Tax Break, Megan Bilstein

Op-Eds from ENSC230 Energy and the Environment: Economics and Policies

Saving 26% on inputting a clean form of energy sounds pretty good to me. According to the U.S. Department of Energy by inputting a solar panel into your house, property, or shop you could have 30% of the cost to install a solar panel system deducted from your federal income taxes, that was in 2019. Come 2020 it decreased to 26% and 22% in 2021 then completely gone in 2022. Unless something is done to save the tax credit this form of renewable energy may be completely forgotten about or put to the side in Nebraska while other forms will …

Lincoln’S Brightest Policy On Solar Energy, Jerin Tekolste

Op-Eds from ENSC230 Energy and the Environment: Economics and Policies

The push towards renewable energy is ubiquitous, with reasons varying from greater independence from foreign energy markets to environmental considerations or sustainable futures. Many countries, states, and cities all around the world are pursuing different ways to better their energy generation and Lincoln is no different. The current policy provides some incentive towards residential solar power but can be improved upon. There are typically three mechanisms used for residential photovoltaic (PV) solar generation: Feed-In Tariffs (FITs), Net Metering, and Net Purchase and Sale. This paper will compare the options Lincoln could use and will conclude with what would be the …

Climate Change In Rwanda, Mig Shyaka

Op-Eds from ENSC230 Energy and the Environment: Economics and Policies

Climate change has become the world’s upmost threat. Different ideas of mitigation and adaptation have been developed to target climate change. These solutions stretch from development and innovation of different technologies like clean energy (solar and wind), to simpler local procedures (planting trees and simple green agroecological practices like farming). However, the need for the rapid action on climate change has created a narrow understanding of the issue and the necessary participation for the process to be smoother in developing and under-developed countries. It can be argued to be the case in some developed countries too.

Swine Slurry Characteristics As Affected By Selected Additives And Disinfectants, Jon Duerschner, Shannon L. Bartelt-Hunt, Kent Eskridge, John E. Gilley, Xu Li, Amy M. Schmidt, Daniel D. Snow

Nebraska Water Center: Faculty Publications

Current swine industry practice is to house animals in confinement facilities which capture and store feces and urine as slurry in pits below the production area. Additives and disinfectants may be introduced into the manure pits. This study was conducted to measure the effects of additives and disinfectants on temporal changes in swine slurry characteristics. Slurry from a commercial swine production facility in southeast Nebraska, USA was collected and transferred to 57 L reactors located within a greenhouse. Selected additives and disinfectants were added to the reactors and physical properties, chemical characteristics, and antibiotic concentrations were monitored for 40 days. …

Applied Injected Air Into Subsurface Drip Irrigation: Plant Uptake Of Pharmaceuticals And Soil Microbial Communities, Matteo D'Alessio, Lisa M. Durso, Clinton Williams, Christopher A. Olson, Chittaranjan Ray, Ellen Paparozzi

Nebraska Water Center: Faculty Publications

The growing global food security crisis is complicated by the need for increased crop production with less arable land and limited water resources. Reuse of treated wastewater for agricultural irrigation is becoming more common, often paired with other conservation measures such as subsurface drip irrigation (SDI). Passively injecting air into SDI systems increases crop yields and overcomes root zone wetting issues. However, when used with treated irrigation water, contaminants in the water might be taken up by the crops. This paper investigates the impact of air-injected water containing caffeine, carbamazepine, and gemfibrozil on plant uptake and soil microbial communities in …

Mitogenome Of Northern Long-Eared Bat, Sarah Gaughan, Kevin L. Pope, Jeremy A. White, Cliff Lemen, Patricia Freeman

Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit: Staff Publications

The complete mitogenome of the northern long-eared bat (Myotis septentrionalis) was determined to be 17,362 bp and contained 22 tRNA genes, 2 rRNA genes and one control region. The whole genome base composition was 33.8% GC. Phylogenetic analysis suggests that M. septentrionalis be positioned next to M. auriculus in the Nearctic subclade of the Myotis genus. This complete mitochondrial genome provides essential molecular markers for resolving phylogeny and future conservation efforts.

Use And Expenditures On Public Access Hunting Lands, Lyndsie S. Wszola, Lutz F. Gruber, Erica F. Stuber, Lindsey N. Messinger, Christopher J. Chizinski, Joseph J. Fontaine

Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit: Staff Publications

The recreational and economic benefits of hunting on traditional permanent public lands are well-established. Increasingly popular “open fields” hunting access programs temporarily open private lands to public hunting through public-private partnerships. Open fields programs have the potential to create public hunting opportunities and economic development in rural communities, but the extent to which open fields programs compare to traditional public lands at providing benefits to hunters and rural communities has not yet been evaluated. We compared hunter use and expenditures on open fields lands and traditional public lands in Nebraska, USA. We used Convolution Likelihood Ecological Abundance Regression, a novel …

Exit Here: Strategies For Dealing With Aging Dams And Reservoirs, Henry H. Hansen, Emily Forzono, Alisha Grams, Lindsay Ohlman, Christine Ruskamp, Mark A. Pegg, Kevin L. Pope

Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit: Staff Publications

Aging infrastructure is prevalent throughout the world, but water control management structures, specifically dams, are of growing concern. Dams and their corresponding reservoirs have inherent, but separate, lifespans. The proportion of dams around the world that continue operation beyond their intended lifespans is growing at an alarming rate. Society will not only have to navigate the tradeoffs associated with the deterioration of services provided by reservoirs and dams, but also impending structural failures. Society is nearing a critical pinch point where we will have to decide how to deal with dams and reservoirs at scales that range from a single …

Droughtscape- 2019 Winter, Cory Matteson

Droughtscape, Quarterly Newsletter of NDMC, 2007-

Contents

From the Director.......... 2

4th quarter climate summary......... 3

2019 year in review summary.......... 5

4th quarter drought impact summary.......... 7

2019 drought impact summary..........9

New form helps ‘see more’ drought............ 11

Landscape photographers invited to submit photos............ 12

Helping Central and South America planning........... 13 Database includes more drought planning.......... 14

Heigh-Ho, They Blow, Husker Balloons Have Got To Go, Zowie Vincent

Op-Eds from ENSC230 Energy and the Environment: Economics and Policies

One petition, one billboard, one lawsuit, and a 52% majority vote. Multiple attempts have been made to challenge the balloon releases at Memorial Stadium. Though there are mild surges of advocacy against this action during the football season and the annual spring semester vote, this issue, despite numerous attempts, continues to fall on deaf ears.

Nebraska’S Need For A Renewable Standard Portfolio, Trevor Cutsor

Op-Eds from ENSC230 Energy and the Environment: Economics and Policies

Nebraska has the 3^rd highest potential for wind energy in the country but ranks 12^th in installed wind capacity. Our reliance on fossil fuels and lagging investment in generation technologies of the future mean that our beloved low cost of electricity will increase in the near future. We need a renewable portfolio standard.

The U.S. Should Rejoin The Paris Agreement. Moral, Economic, And Political Reasons Why Rejoining Paris Agreement Is Right, Libert Niyonkuru

Op-Eds from ENSC230 Energy and the Environment: Economics and Policies

Climate change and global warming are not only environmental issues rather ethical and policy-driven issues that need global attention from all governments. This is the only way Climate equity and justice can be achieved.

Public Power’S Addiction To Coal, Drew Havens

Op-Eds from ENSC230 Energy and the Environment: Economics and Policies

A benefit of living in Nebraska is the accessibility and reliability of our electricity. It powers our homes and businesses and allows us to be productive, hard-working people. But public power and its addiction to coal is not the path forward. Our state’s insistence on burning coal for electricity leaves us physically dependent, economically vulnerable, and financially burdened.

Measuring The Occurrence Of Antibiotics In Surface Water Adjacent To Cattle Grazing Areas Using Passive Samplers, Nasrin Naderi Beni, Daniel D. Snow, Elaine D. Berry, Aaron R. Mittelstet, Tiffany Messer, Shannon L. Bartelt-Hunt

Nebraska Water Center: Faculty Publications

A wide variety of antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals are used in livestock production systems and residues passed to the environment, often unmetabolized, after use and excretion. Antibiotic residuesmay be transported frommanure-treated soils via runoff and are also capable of reaching surface and groundwater systems through a variety of pathways. The occurrence and persistence of antibiotics in the environment is a concern due to the potential for ecological effects and proliferation of environmental antibiotic resistance in pathogenic organisms. In the present study, the occurrence and seasonal variation of 24 commonly-used veterinary antibiotics was evaluated in surface water adjacent to several livestock …

The Fluxnet2015 Dataset And The Oneflux Processing Pipeline For Eddy Covariance Data, Gilberto Pastorello, Timothy Arkebauer, Dave P. Billesbach, Anatoly Gitelson, Adam Liska, Andrew Suyker, Elizabeth Walter-Shea, More Than 200 Other

Adam Liska Papers

The FLUXNET2015 dataset provides ecosystem-scale data on CO2, water, and energy exchange between the biosphere and the atmosphere, and other meteorological and biological measurements, from 212 sites around the globe (over 1500 site-years, up to and including year 2014). These sites, independently managed and operated, voluntarily contributed their data to create global datasets. Data were quality controlled and processed using uniform methods, to improve consistency and intercomparability across sites. The dataset is already being used in a number of applications, including ecophysiology studies, remote sensing studies, and development of ecosystem and Earth system models. FLUXNET2015 includes derived-data products, such as …

Comparative Evaluation Of Machine Learning Models For Groundwater Quality Assessment, Shine Bedi, Ashok Samal, Chittaranjan Ray, Daniel D. Snow

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

Contamination from pesticides and nitrate in groundwater is a significant threat to water quality in general and agriculturally intensive regions in particular. Three widely used machine learning models, namely, artificial neural networks (ANN), support vector machines (SVM), and extreme gradient boosting (XGB), were evaluated for their efficacy in predicting contamination levels using sparse data with non-linear relationships. The predictive ability of the models was assessed using a dataset consisting of 303 wells across 12 Midwestern states in the USA. Multiple hydrogeologic, water quality, and land use features were chosen as the independent variables, and classes were based on measured concentration …

Critical Analysis Of The Value Of Drought Information And Impacts On Land Management And Public Health, Tingting Liu, Kelly Helm Smith, Richard Krop, Tonya Haigh, Mark Svoboda

Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

This paper reviews previous efforts to assign monetary value to climatic or meteorological information, such as public information on drought, climate, early warning systems, and weather forecast information. Methods and tools that have been explored to examine the benefits of climatic and meteorological information include the avoided cost, contingent valuation, choice experiments, benefit transfer, and descriptive approaches using surveys. The second part of this paper discusses specific considerations related to valuing drought information for public health and the Bureau of Land Management. We found a multitude of connections between drought and the land management and health sectors in the literature. …

Using Climate To Explain And Predict West Nile Virus Risk In Nebraska, Kelly Smith, Andrew Tyre, Jeff Hamik, Michael Hayes, Yuzhen Zhou, Li Dai

Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

We used monthly precipitation and temperature data to give early warning of years with higher West Nile Virus (WNV) risk in Nebraska. We used generalized additive models with a negative binomial distribution and smoothing curves to identify combinations of extremes and timing that had the most influence, experimenting with all combinations of temperature and drought data, lagged by 12, 18, 24, 30, and 36 months. We fit models on data from 2002 through 2011, used Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC) to select the best‐fitting model, and used 2012 as out‐of‐sample data for prediction, and repeated this process for each successive year, …

Use Of Otolith Chemistry To Assess Recruitment And Habitat Use Of A White Bass Fishery In A Nebraska Reservoir, Matthew A. Perrion, Mark A. Kaemingk, Keith D. Koupal, Casey W. Schoenebeck, Nate A. Bickford

Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit: Staff Publications

Managing fisheries that exhibit variable annual recruitment is challenging, and maintenance stockings are often prescribed to minimize interannual population variation. Maintenance stockings are costly and may not be necessary if sufficient natural recruitment is occurring. Therefore, developing tools and techniques that can collectively assess hatching origin and subsequent habitat use of individuals would be valuable. Herein, we aimed to assess the efficacy of otolith chemistry techniques to (1) determine whether there was evidence of natural recruitment within an annually stocked white bass population and (2) examine the potential to describe spatial reservoir use of these age-0 fish. A sample of …