Environmental Monitoring Commons^™

Ecosystem Services In The Wet Tropics: A Literature Review And Economic Valuation, Alyson Cheney

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The present study can be broken down into two sections. First, it created a literature review on the current body of knowledge regarding ecosystem services in the Australian Wet Tropics World Heritage Area. The second portion of the study was an economic valuation determining how much residents that live in the Wet Tropics value the benefits provided to them through ecosystem services. The literature review found that there were large gaps in the present body of knowledge. Biophysical studies made up the vast majority of the literature and very few ecosystem service economic valuations have been carried out for the …

Carbon Dioxide Emissions From Switchgrass And Cottonwood Grown As Bioenergy Crops In The Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, Michele Lea Helton

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Marginal land of the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley (LMAV) has the potential to be utilized for the production of bioenergy feedstocks. Soil respiration is the gaseous emission of carbon dioxide (CO₂) from microbes and plant roots in the soil, and these emissions play an important role in the global cycling of carbon. Soil respiration can act as a positive feedback affecting climate change, and has been shown to vary depending on soil moisture, temperature, and vegetation. The objectives of this study where to evaluate the effects of land use [switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), cottonwood (Populus deltoides …

Methane Production By A Packed-Bed Anaerobic Digester Fed Dairy Barn Flush Water, Sean Richard Thomson

Master's Theses

Packed-bed digesters are an alternative to covered lagoon digesters for methane production and anaerobic treatment of dilute wastewaters such as dairy barn flush water. The physical media of packed-beds retain biofilms, often allowing increased treatment rates. Previous studies have evaluated several types of media for digestion of dilute wastewaters, but cost and media fouling have setback commercial development. A major operational cost has been effluent recirculation pumping.

In the present effort, a novel approach to anaerobic digestion of flush dairy water was developed at pilot-scale: broken walnut shells were used as a low-cost packed-bed medium and effluent recirculation was replaced …

U.S. Drought Monitor, November 25, 2014, Eric Luebehusen

United States Agricultural Commodities in Drought Archive

Drought map of U.S. for November 25, 2014 (11/25/14) plus: U.S. crop areas experiencing drought (map), Approximate percentage of crop located in drought, by state (bar graph), Percent of crop area located in drought, past 52 weeks (line graph) for: Corn, Soybeans, Hay, Cattle, Winter wheat.

Upward Flow Constructed Wetland For Treatment Of Water Contaminated With Chlorinated Aliphatics, Michael Shelley, Abinash Agrawal, Ke Qin, Garrett Struckhoff, Carl Enfield, James Waldron, Christina Powell

AFIT Patents

An improved upward flow constructed wetland cell for treatment of water contaminated with chlorinated aliphatics is disclosed. The improvements include adding ammonia-oxidizing microorganisms to the methane-oxidizing microorganisms already present in an oxygenated root zone and adding improved pore-water sample chambers for measuring the performance of the constructed wetland cell.

U.S. Drought Monitor, November 18, 2014, Eric Luebehusen

United States Agricultural Commodities in Drought Archive

Drought map of U.S. for November 18, 2014 (11/18/14) plus: U.S. crop areas experiencing drought (map), Approximate percentage of crop located in drought, by state (bar graph), Percent of crop area located in drought, past 52 weeks (line graph) for: Corn, Soybeans, Hay, Cattle, Winter wheat.

Water Scarcity In The Jordan River Basin, Matthew Cook

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

The watershed of the Jordan River stretches over four countries – Jordan, Syria, Israel, and Lebanon – and includes the region of Palestine. With the land and its resources hotly contested by all parties involved, the dwindling supply of drinking and irrigation water from viable sources has led to scrambling exploitation, leaving the river and its connected lakes in an ever-worsening state of deterioration. Increased suspended solids, presence of toxin-producing cyanobacteria, and accelerated evapotranspiration have led to a slower, shallower, murkier, and lower health quality trickle taking the place of the once-revered River Jordan (Comair et al., “Watershed Delineation” …

Agricultural Advisors As Climate Information Intermediaries: Exploring Differences In Capacity To Communicate Climate, Tonya Haigh, Lois Wright Morton, Maria Carmen Lemos, Cody Knutson, Linda Stalker Prokopy, Yun Jia Lo, Jim Angel

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

Although agricultural production faces chronic stress associated with extreme precipitation events, high temperatures, drought, and shifts in climate conditions, adoption of climate information into agricultural decision making has been relatively limited. Agricultural advisors have been shown to play important roles as information intermediaries between scientists and farmers, brokering, translating, and adding value to agronomic and economic information of use in agricultural management decision making. Yet little is known about the readiness of different types of agricultural advisors to use weather and climate information to help their clients manage risk under increasing climate uncertainty. More than 1700 agricultural advisors in four …

U.S. Drought Monitor, November 11, 2014, Matthew Rosencrans

United States Agricultural Commodities in Drought Archive

Drought map of U.S. for November 11, 2014 (11/11/14) plus: U.S. crop areas experiencing drought (map), Approximate percentage of crop located in drought, by state (bar graph), Percent of crop area located in drought, past 52 weeks (line graph) for: Corn, Soybeans, Hay, Cattle, Winter wheat.

Low Cost Infrared And Near Infrared Sensors For Uavs, Samuel T. Aden, James P. Bialas, Zachary Champion, Eugene Levin, Jessica L. Mccarty

Michigan Tech Research Institute Publications

Thermal remote sensing has a wide range of applications, though the extent of its use is inhibited by cost. Robotic and computer components are now widely available to consumers on a scale that makes thermal data a readily accessible resource. In this project, thermal imagery collected via a lightweight remote sensing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) was used to create a surface temperature map for the purpose of providing wildland firefighting crews with a cost-effective and time-saving resource. The UAV system proved to be flexible, allowing for customized sensor packages to be designed that could include visible or infrared cameras, GPS, …

A Methodology For Near-Field Tsunami Inundation Forecasting: Application To The 2011 Tohoku Tsunami, Aditya Riadi Gusman, Yuichiro Tanioka, Breanyn Macinnes, Hiroaki Tsushima

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

Existing tsunami early warning systems in the world can give either one or a combination of estimated tsunami arrival times, heights, or qualitative tsunami forecasts before the tsunami hits near-field coastlines. A future tsunami early warning system should be able to provide a reliable near-field tsunami inundation forecast on high-resolution topography within a short time period. Here we describe a new methodology for near-field tsunami inundation forecasting. In this method, a precomputed tsunami inundation and precomputed tsunami waveform database is required. After information about a tsunami source is estimated, tsunami waveforms at nearshore points can be simulated in real time. …

U.S. Drought Monitor, November 4, 2014, Matthew Rosencrans

United States Agricultural Commodities in Drought Archive

Drought map of U.S. for November 4, 2014 (11/4/14) plus: U.S. crop areas experiencing drought (map), Approximate percentage of crop located in drought, by state (bar graph), Percent of crop area located in drought, past 52 weeks (line graph) for: Corn, Soybeans, Hay, Cattle, Winter wheat.

Peptide Arrays For Detecting Naphthenic Acids In Oil Sands Process Affected Water, Kamaljit Kaur, Subir Bhattacharjee, Rajesh G. Pillai, Sahar Ahmed, Sarfuddin Azmi

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

Naphthenic acids (NAs) are water-soluble components of petroleum. The characterization and quantification of NAs by analytical methods have proved quite challenging, whilst the toxic effects of these water-soluble compounds on a variety of organisms adversely affecting reproduction and steroid production is becoming apparent. In this study, we report a fluorescence-based competitive binding method for rapid sensing of the presence of NAs using cellulosic peptide array strips as sensors. The peptide array was designed from sequences derived from the estrogen receptor (ER). Several of these peptides were able to detect the presence of NAs at low micromolar (∼5 mg L^{−1 …}

Fisheries Management Paper No.266 - Exmouth Gulf Prawn Managed Fishery Bycatch Action Plan 2014-2019. Version 1.0, Department Of Fisheries, Western Australia

Fisheries Management Papers

Bycatch is described as the part of the catch which is returned to the sea (usually referred to as non-retained or discarded) either because it has no commercial value or because legislative requirements preclude it being retained. Thus, this Bycatch Action Plan (BAP) includes unmarketable finfish and invertebrate species, along with endangered, threatened and protected (ETP) species, such as marine mammals, reptiles and some elasmobranchs.

It is Government policy to minimise bycatch in all commercial fisheries. This BAP details a program of actions to address bycatch issues in the Exmouth Gulf Prawn Managed Fishery (EGPMF), in accordance with the EGPMF …

Fisheries Management Paper No.265 - Exmouth Gulf Prawn Managed Fishery Harvest Strategy 2014 - 2019 Version 1.0, Department Of Fisheries Western Australia

Fisheries Management Papers

This fishery-specific harvest strategy has been developed in line with the Department of Fisheries' (Department) over-arching Harvest Strategy Policy for Aquatic Resources (Department of Fisheries in prep.) and in consultation with licensees. The broad scope of the Harvest Strategy Policy for Aquatic Resources is consistent with the National Harvest Strategy Guidelines but as well as considering all retained target species, it also incorporates retained non-target species, bycatch' and other ecological components to ensure the risks to these elements are managed effectively.

The Exmouth Gulf Prawn Managed Fishery (EGPMF) harvest strategy outlines the longand short-term fishery-specific management objectives; a description of …

Reduction Of The Long-Term Inaccuracy From The Avhrr–Based Ndvi Data, Md Zahidur Rahman, Leonid Roytman, M. Nazrul Islam

Publications and Research

This paper investigated the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) stability in the NOAA/NESDIS Global Vegetation Index (GVI) data during 1982-2003, which was collected from five NOAA series satellites. An empirical distribution function (EDF) was developed to eliminate the long-term inaccuracy of the NDVI data derived from the AVHRR sensor on NOAA polar orbiting satellite. The instability of data results from orbit degradation as well as from the circuit drifts over the life of a satellite. Degradation of NDVI over time and shifts of NDVI between the satellites were estimated using the China data set, because it includes a wide variety …

Inventory Of Alabama Irrigated Acreage Based On Naip Imagery, Roger Allen

Von Braun Symposium Student Posters

No abstract provided.

Enhancing Hurricane Hazard Mapping Methods Using A Geographic Information System, Amanda Weigel, Robert Griffin

Von Braun Symposium Student Posters

No abstract provided.

Reply To ‘Co2 Emissions From Crop Residue-Derived Biofuels’, Adam Liska, Haishun Yang, Matthew P. Pelton, Andrew E. Suyker

Adam Liska Papers

The soil organic carbon (SOC) model that we used was parameterized with data from arable land under normal farming conditions in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia, but the equation is insensitive to changes in tillage, soil texture and moisture. The model has reasonable accuracy, however, in predicting changes in SOC, residue remaining and CO₂ emissions from initial SOC, carbon inputs from residue, and daily temperature; the shoot-to-root ratio used in the geospatial simulation was 0.29 (that is, root carbon is 29% of total aboveground carbon), which did not underestimate carbon input to soil (Supplementary Figure 2 in Ref. …

Optimization Of An Integrated Uav Imaging System For Agricultural Applications, Nishanth Goli

Von Braun Symposium Student Posters

No abstract provided.