Indiana University – Purdue University Fort Wayne
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Temporal Trends and Influence of Habitat on Freshwater Mussel Communities within Cedar Creek, Indiana
No full textOut of the nearly 300 species of freshwater mussels (Family: Unionidae) represented in North America, most have exhibited declines in abundance and distribution largely due to anthropogenic impacts. I compared community composition, abundance and richness of mussels in Cedar Creek, Indiana in 2015 with published data from 1988 and 2005. In 2015, five sites in Cedar Creek and seven sites in agricultural headwater streams were surveyed. Additionally, one headwater stream in Hillsdale County, Michigan was surveyed as a high-quality reference site. At each 200 m long site, mussels were sampled with quadrats (sixteen per site) and visual searches. From each quadrat, a quart of sediment was retained for sediment analysis. Physicochemical measurements, habitat analyses, and water chemistry data were collected concurrently with surveys. Fishes were sampled using electrofishing to document the presence of fish host species. Out of thirteen sites sampled in 2015, only six had live mussels. Ten species and 84 individuals were identified and measured from these six sites. The reference and two Cedar Creek sites comprised almost 90% of the individuals found, with the furthest upstream Cedar Creek site having the greatest abundance (28). Only two agricultural headwater streams that were located close to the main stem of Cedar Creek had mussels and only six individuals were found. Lampsilis siliquoidea occurred at four sites in 2015 and was the most abundant and widespread species comprising 31% of the individuals found. The abundance of live mussels within four Cedar Creek main stem sites exhibited a decrease in individuals from 168 in 1988 to 110 in 2005 to 56 in 2015. Additionally, since 1988, no live mussels have been recorded in Cedar Creek between Waterloo and Auburn, Indiana. To assess which factors explain the variation in mussel parameters, I evaluated the relationships of instream habitat, physicochemical, and water chemistry variables with mussel abundance and species richness. Generalized linear regression models revealed a significant positive correlation between dominant riparian vegetation and mussel richness (p\u3c0.01) as well as mussel abundance (p\u3c0.001). A positive relationship with water temperature (p\u3c0.01) and a negative relationship with host fish abundance (p\u3c0.05) also significantly explained mussel abundance. In the CEAP analysis, both mussel richness and abundance were significantly negatively correlated with ammonia and total phosphorous (p\u3c0.05)
Effects of the Urban Matrix on Avian Assemblages in Forest Fragments
No full textHabitat loss due to anthropogenic development is one of the greatest threats to birds, particularly in urban and suburban areas. While it is clear that avian assemblages are adversely affected by unsuitable habitat in such situations, there is less known about which aspects of this type of development are the important ones affecting birds. In order to explore anthropogenic impacts on birds influenced by cities, I monitored bird diversity at 25 woodlot study sites in and around Fort Wayne, Indiana, over the course of a breeding season. Point counts were conducted in each site and visited 3 times to obtain a species richness list. Study sites were characterized by area, the area to perimeter ratio, percent canopy cover, and mid- and overstory vegetation. The identity, number, and size of the vegetation was measured. The landscape matrix around the sites was characterized by distance to woodlots larger than the site itself, and distance to rivers, lakes/ponds, and wetlands. To obtain measurements of the urban matrix, the densities of habitable structures, distances of roads, and volume of vehicle traffic were measured in 5 concentric buffers ranging from 100 m to 3 km distance from the site.
After removing collinear factors with variance inflation factors \u3e 5, within each buffer size multiple linear regressions were chosen on the basis of best subsets analyses with all significant predictors. The models were ranked with Akaike Information Criterion with correction.
Log transformed site area appeared in every model and had the largest positive effect on woodland bird richness. Greater mean area of an individual stem and distance to rivers were also positive predictors of richness in the 300 m buffer model. The densities roads, buildings, and vehicles adversely affected richness. Roads adversely affected richness in the 100 m buffer model. The effect of buildings extended to 300 m and had the largest negative impact, while vehicles appeared in the 300 m and 3000 m buffer models. The effect of vehicles, likely an indication of the degree of site isolation, was present out to 3 km demonstrating that urban and suburban development influences deciduous woodlot birds in a large radius around the site.
The results from my study reinforce the findings from other researchers that site area is a very important factor for predicting bird diversity. Consequently, maintaining suitable habitat in patches of substantial size is the best way to aid birds. While of less importance but still of significance, forests with larger trees, associated with a forest’s age, should be maintained. The ramification of this is that forests must be left alone without removal of the larger trees in order to best provide for birds. Building development should be kept to at least 300 m from these patches as a greater density of habitable buildings nearer significantly caused a decrease in the bird richness. With these things in mind, site preservation for birds should focus on large mature sites surrounded by the least amount of urban development
IPFW Student Research and Creative Endeavor Commons: Showcasing Collaboration
No full textHow can a regional campus use an open access platform to accentuate that which makes it unique? The Helmke Library at Indiana University – Purdue University Fort Wayne has recently created a new area within Opus, our institutional repository, called the Student Research and Creative Endeavor Commons, designed to promote and showcase undergraduate research and student/faculty collaborations. Regional campuses provide many valuable opportunities for undergraduates to collaborate with faculty members in research, publications, presentations, and creative works to a degree they may not have at larger institutions. The Student Research and Creative Endeavor Commons will showcase such collaborations, as well as providing undergraduates the satisfaction of seeing their works published in an institutional repository and providing them with permanent URLs to share with potential employers and graduate schools.
In addition to hosting student works in specifically undergraduate focused conferences and journals hosted by IPFW, the Student Research and Creative Endeavor Commons also includes sections called Student/Faculty Collaborative Presentations and Student/Faculty Collaborative Publications which will serve to highlight the many opportunities IPFW undergraduates have to gain valuable real world experience working hand-in-hand with faculty scholars. We have sought to streamline the process of promoting such collaborations for our professors by adding a button to the submission fields for publications and presentations in the various departmental areas of our repository which simply says, “Does this work include student research?” If “Yes” is selected, a copy of the work will automatically flow into the Student/Faculty Collaborative Presentations or Student/Faculty Collaborative Publications areas.
Beyond publishing student works, the Student Research and Creative Endeavor Commons will also seek to be a driving force in the future of undergraduate research by hosting an open access scholarly journal relating to the pedagogical underpinnings of student research and publishing.
In addition outlining present accomplishments and future goals, I will also discuss some of the practical challenges we have faced in creating a space within the repository designed to meet the unique needs undergraduate research in its myriad varieties and navigating the treacherous waters of wildly varying faculty paradigms of student/faculty collaboration from discipline to discipline, as well as how we, along with our faithful bepress consultants, have met and will continue to meet these challenges.
In summary, the Student Research and Creative Endeavor Commons will showcase undergraduate research and publishing, along with student/faculty collaborations, and will, in turn, promote the unique opportunities students at IPFW have to work alongside faculty in scholarship and creative endeavors. We also hope that the presence of a uniquely undergraduate focused area within our repository will serve to further drive rigorous undergraduate scholarship, creative endeavor, and student/faculty collaborations at IPFW
The Reader’s Enactivist Travels in the Spenserian Storyworld: Virtual and Allegorical Bodies
No full textIn this paper, I analyze how Spenser leads his reader to make moral judgments by using the unique characteristics of allegory—that is, the fact that readers transfer not only meanings but also emotional reactions and moral judgments from the source domain to the target domain. I build upon enactivist literary theories as well as other cognitive theories of allegory to analyze two episodes in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the Castle of Alma episode, in which a body is figured as a place, and the Belge episode, in which a place is figured as a body. The Castle of Alma, although it explicitly allegorizes human emotions, is a strangely affectless place, conveying a stoic version of temperance that the reader experiences by imaginatively identifying with the fictional bodies of Guyon and Arthur who travel through this body-place. The focus on the body as material, including the personifications of both emotional states and mental faculties, intellectualizes the experience of having a body in ways that discourage the reader from engaging emotionally with this episode. In contrast, the Belge episode, by making a place into a suffering maternal body, works to prompt both intellectual and emotional responses by inviting the reader to identify with the suffering of the Low Countries by identifying with the experiences of Belge’s body. A key instance occurs in 5.10.25, when the ambiguity of whether the pronoun “her” refers to Belge herself or to one of her cities leads by stanza’s end to the jarring image of a castle built in Belge’s neck. In both cases, the emotional reaction and its associated moral intuition derive from the literal level, not the allegorical projection. Spenserian allegory does not transfer only “meaning”; that is, the full package of what the reader projects from the source-domain of the literal level of the text is not just propositional information. Before the reader even makes that projection from source-domain to target-domain she or he has already had an emotional reaction and an intuitive moral response. Through control of this process, Spenser hopes to influence the moral intuitions of his readers
Advanced K-means clustering algorithm for large ECG data sets based on a collaboration of compressed sensing theory and K-SVD approach
No full textClustering of long-term recording electrocardiography (ECG) signals in the healthcare systems is the most common source in detecting cardiovascular diseases as well as treating heart disorders. Currently used clustering algorithms do have their share of drawbacks: (1) Clustering and classification cannot be done in real time; (2) Implementing existing algorithms would lead to higher computational costs. These drawbacks motivated us in developing novel optimized clustering algorithm which could easily scan large ECG datasets for characteristic biomarkers. In this paper, we present an advanced K-means clustering algorithm based on compressed sensing theory in combination with the K-singular value decomposition method. We validate the proposed algorithm’s performance with principal component analysis and linear correlation coefficient dimensionality reduction methods followed by sorting the data using the K-nearest neighbors and probabilistic neural network classifiers. The proposed algorithm outperforms existing algorithms by achieving a classification accuracy of 99.98 % (increasing 11 % classification accuracy compared to the existing algorithm). This ability allows reducing 15 % of average classification error, 10 % of training error, and 20 % of root- mean-square error. The proposed algorithm also reduces 13 % clustering energy consumption compared to the existing clusteringalgorithm by increasing the classification performance
Systems and methods for high rate OFDM communications
No full textMessages transmitted between a receiver and a transmitter are used to maximize a communication data rate. In particular, a multicarrier modulation system uses messages that are sent from the receiver to the transmitter to exchange one or more sets of optimized communication parameters. The transmitter then stores these communication parameters and when transmitting to that particular receiver, the transmitter utilizes the stored parameters in an effort to maximize the data rate to that receiver. Likewise, when the receiver receives packets from that particular transmitter, the receiver can utilize the stored communication parameters for reception
Improved low-complexity zero-padded OFDM receivers
No full textThe recently suggested Generalized Prefix–Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (GP–OFDM) uses an optimal non-zero guard interval (GI). A GI consisting of all zeros is also known, and the technique is referred to as Zero Padding (ZP–OFDM). ZP–OFDM performs very well, but suffers from a complexity problem. This paper provides two improved and low-complexity receiver designs for ZP–OFDM, which make the convolutions between the transmitted signal and the channel skew-cyclic. The channel matrix becomes ϕ-circulant. Both designs require a one-dimensional optimization. The first new design requires the result of the optimization to be available at the transmitter. The second new design eliminates completely the feedback to the transmitter. Simulation results indicate that proposed ZP–OFDM receivers have significant performance advantages compared with existing ZP–OFDM receivers such as ZP–OFDM–OLA and ZP–OFDM–FAST. The performance advantages are maintained in the presence of channel estimation errors and error-correction coding