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Sustaining Bend's Urban Forest: An assessment of the City's urban forest management approach and recommendations for future adaptations
Get PDFThe City of Bend’s current urban forest management strategy consists of a series of city codes and ordinances, tree protection and planting standards, and two different plans created by the Bend Park and Recreation District. The analysis of these documents, as well as review of existing management approaches in Boise, Idaho and Spokane, Washington and the application of the Sustainable Forestry Initiative’s Urban and Community Forest Sustainability Standard allowed for a critical evaluation of how the City approaches the management of its trees and green spaces, while providing a series of recommendations on how to evolve their approach in the future. Conducting a city-wide tree inventory and canopy assessment, creating a City Urban Forester position and instituting a Community Tree Committee are proposed recommendations for the City to advance its plan. Implementing these would allow the city to take active steps towards executing long-term goals and creating a more comprehensive plan in the care and management of its current and future urban forest resource
Documenting and Advancing an Organizational Landscape of Teaching-related Routines for Science and Engineering Faculty: Informing Teaching Improvement Initiatives’ Design and Implementation
Get PDFThe numerous initiatives targeting postsecondary science education improvement are diverse. Yet a key strategy of many initiatives are new organizational routines, that can regularly bring faculty together to learn new teaching-related knowledge, skills, and commitments. Regardless of some evidence of the success of these initiatives, more theory-informed empirical investigations are needed to explain and predict their efficacy. Such research is especially important for designers and implementers to plan for successful initiatives in light of potential costs. We report on the standing organizational routines through which faculty from science and engineering units typically construct and transfer teaching-related knowledge. We describe characteristics of these routines that can act as affordances and barriers for attending to faculty members’ teaching-related concerns and encourage engagement of faculty in teaching-related improvement activities. We found diverse, shared organizational routines across units, including those created and maintained by faculty to attend to their diverse teaching-related interests. Certain routine types and characteristics both attended to faculty needs and promoted faculty participation in teaching improvement activities, namely routines that felt safe and inclusive, were of varying levels of formality, and that catered to diverse knowledge interests and needs. We identified a tension of educator autonomy which, via coupling with routine membership, can dissuade teaching improvements through constrained knowledge creation and transfer across educators. We discuss implications for those attempting to design and implement successful improvement initiatives, specifically comprehensive initiatives targeting institutions. Initiative proponents need to learn about and build from the routines that faculty have created, sustained, and engage in. Building on faculty knowledge and commitments, initiative designers and implementers can help cultivate a landscape of teaching improvement-related organizational routines that can encourage faculty participation in improvement-related activities and meet their teaching-related needs
UAS-SfM Lab Exercise
Get PDFThe objective of this lab is to gain experience collecting imagery with an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) and processing it in structure from motion (SfM) photogrammetry software to obtain georeferenced data products, including an orthomosaic in GeoTiff format and a point cloud in ASPRS’s LAS format
20 GB in 10 minutes: a case for linking major biodiversity databases using an open socio-technical infrastructure and a pragmatic, cross-institutional collaboration
Get PDFBiodiversity information is made available through numerous databases that each have their own data models, web services, and data types. Combining data across databases leads to new insights, but is not easy because each database uses its own system of identifiers. In the absence of stable and interoperable identifiers, databases are often linked using taxonomic names. This labor intensive, error prone, and lengthy process relies on accessible versions of nomenclatural authorities and fuzzy-matching algorithms. To approach the challenge of linking diverse data, more than technology is needed. New social collaborations like the Global Unified Open Data Architecture (GUODA) that combines skills from diverse groups of computer engineers from iDigBio, server resources from the Advanced Computing and Information Systems (ACIS) Lab, global-scale data presentation from EOL, and independent developers and researchers are what is needed to make concrete progress on finding relationships between biodiversity datasets. This paper will discuss a technical solution developed by the GUODA collaboration for faster linking across databases with a use case linking Wikidata and the Global Biotic Interactions database (GloBI). The GUODA infrastructure is a 12-node, high performance computing cluster made up of about 192 threads with 12 TB of storage and 288 GB memory. Using GUODA, 20 GB of compressed JSON from Wikidata was processed and linked to GloBI in about 10 - 11 min. Instead of comparing name strings or relying on a single identifier, Wikidata and GloBI were linked by comparing graphs of biodiversity identifiers external to each system. This method resulted in adding 119,957 Wikidata links in GloBI, an increase of 13.7% of all outgoing name links in GloBI. Wikidata and GloBI were compared to Open Tree of Life Reference Taxonomy to examine consistency and coverage. The process of parsing Wikidata, Open Tree of Life Reference Taxonomy and GloBI archives and calculating consistency metrics was done in minutes on the GUODA platform. As a model collaboration, GUODA has the potential to revolutionize biodiversity science by bringing diverse technically minded people together with high performance computing resources that are accessible from a laptop or desktop. However, participating in such a collaboration still requires basic programming skills
Proteolytic systems in milk : perspectives on the evolutionary function within the mammary gland and the infant
Get PDFMilk contains elements of numerous proteolytic systems (zymogens, active proteases, protease inhibitors and protease activators) produced in part from blood, in part by mammary epithelial cells and in part by immune cell secretion. Researchers have examined milk proteases for decades, as they can cause major defects in milk quality and cheese production. Most previous research has examined these proteases with the aim to eliminate or control their actions. However, our recent peptidomics research demonstrates that these milk proteases produce specific peptides in healthy milk and continue to function within the infant’s gastrointestinal tract. These findings suggest that milk proteases have an evolutionary function in aiding the infant’s digestion or releasing functional peptides. In other words, the mother provides the infant with not only dietary proteins but also the means to digest them. However, proteolysis in the milk is controlled by a balance of protease inhibitors and protease activators so that only a small portion of milk proteins are digested within the mammary gland. This regulation presents a question: If proteolysis is beneficial to the infant, what benefits are gained by preventing complete proteolysis through the presence of protease inhibitors? In addition to summarizing what is known about milk proteolytic systems, we explore possible evolutionary explanations for this proteolytic balance
A mid-Cretaceous ambrosia fungus, Paleoambrosia entomophila gen. nov. et sp. nov. (Ascomycota: Ophiostomatales) in Burmese (Myanmar) amber, and evidence for a femoral mycangium
Get PDFAn ambrosia fungus is described from filamentous sporodochia adjacent to a wood-boring ambrosia beetle (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Platypodinae) in mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber. Yeast-like propagules and hyphal fragments of Paleoambrosia entomophila gen. nov. et sp. nov. occur in glandular sac mycangia located inside the femur of the beetle. This is the first record of a fossil ambrosia fungus, showing that symbiotic associations between wood-boring insects and ectosymbiotic fungi date back some 100 million years ago. The present finding moves the origin of fungus-growing by insects from the Oligocene to the mid-Cretaceous and suggests a Gondwanan origin. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of British Mycological Society
Airman Knowledge Testing Supplement for Sport Pilot, Recreational Pilot, and Private Pilot
No full textThis testing supplement supersedes FAA-CT-8080-2F, Airman Knowledge Testing Supplement for Sport Pilot, Recreational Pilot, and Private Pilot, dated 2013.
This Airman Knowledge Testing Supplement is designed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Flight Standards Service
An Environmental Science and Engineering Framework for Combating Antimicrobial Resistance
Get PDFOn June 20, 2017, members of the environmental engineering and science (EES) community convened at the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP) Biennial Conference for a workshop on antimicrobial resistance. With over 80 registered participants, discussion groups focused on the following topics: risk assessment, monitoring, wastewater treatment, agricultural systems, and synergies. In this study, we summarize the consensus among the workshop participants regarding the role of the EES community in understanding and mitigating the spread of antibiotic resistance via environmental pathways. Environmental scientists and engineers offer a unique and interdisciplinary perspective and expertise needed for engaging with other disciplines such as medicine, agriculture, and public health to effectively address important knowledge gaps with respect to the linkages between human activities, impacts to the environment, and human health risks. Recommendations that propose priorities for research within the EES community, as well as areas where interdisciplinary perspectives are needed, are highlighted. In particular, risk modeling and assessment, monitoring, and mass balance modeling can aid in the identification of 'hot spots' for antibiotic resistance evolution and dissemination, and can help identify effective targets for mitigation. Such information will be essential for the development of an informed and effective policy aimed at preserving and protecting the efficacy of antibiotics for future generations
Effects of controlled atmosphere, edible coating, and 1-methylcyclopropene on improving storage quality of 'Bartlett' pears after long-term storage
Get PDFRecent trends towards greater fresh market use of 'Bartlett' pears has increased the need to extend its storage life to prolong the packing and marketing season in the United States Pacific Northwest region. Sixteen and 38%, respectively, of control fruit developed senescence disorders following 5 and 6 months of storage at -1.1 degrees C. Commercial standard controlled atmosphere (CA) conditions (O-2 at 1.5 kPa and CO2 < 1 kPa) or edible coating (Semperfresh (TM), SF) prevent the appearance of senescence disorders for 5 months, but 9% and 16% of fruit, respectively, developed senescence disorders after 6 months. The combination of CA+SF completely inhibited senescence disorders for 6 months. Treatment with CA and SF, alone or in combination, maintained high-storage quality and developed ripening capacity with characteristic melting texture during storage. Senescence disorders were inhibited for 6 months by 0.3 mu L l(-1) 1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP), alone or combination with CA or CA+SF. In part these pears developed ripening capacity after 6 months of storage. The combination of CA+SF+1-MCP maintained the highest storage quality with dark green colour and hard firmness, which might be associated and proportional with reductions in ethylene synthesis and respiration rate after long-term storage