Harrat Hutaymah is an alkali basalt volcanic field in north-central Saudi Arabia, at the eastern margin of a large Neogene continental, intraplate magmatic province. Lava flow, tephra and spatter cone compositions in the field include alkali olivine basalts and basanites. These compositions contrast with the predominantly tholeiitic, fissure-fed basalts found...
In late May of 2008, the NASA/JPL Phoenix spacecraft will touch down near its targeted landing site on Mars (68.2°N, 126.6°W). Entry, descent, and landing (EDL) occurs in the late afternoon (~1630 hours local solar time (LST)) during late northern spring (Ls ~ 78°). Using a mesoscale and a large-eddy...
Diet quality influences ungulate population dynamics but is difficult to measure at fine temporal or spatial resolution using field-intensive methods such as fecal nitrogen (FN). Increasingly, the remotely sensed vegetation index NDVI is used to represent potential ungulate diet quality, but NDVI's relationship with diet quality has yet to be...
Diet quality influences ungulate population dynamics but is difficult to measure at fine temporal or spatial resolution using field-intensive methods such as fecal nitrogen (FN). Increasingly, the remotely sensed vegetation index NDVI is used to represent potential ungulate diet quality, but NDVI's relationship with diet quality has yet to be...
Connectivity models using empirically-derived
landscape resistance maps can predict potential
linkages among fragmented animal and plant populations.
However, such models have rarely been used to
guide systematic decision-making, such as identifying
the most important habitat patches and dispersal corridors
to protect or restore in order to maximize regional
connectivity. Combining...
Limited approaches exist for studying population connectivity in widely dispersing marine benthic invertebrates. Genetic techniques can provide important insights toward identifying recruitment trajectories. Here, 10 microsatellite loci were used to examine connectivity among Oregon Dungeness crabs (Cancer magister, Dana, 1852) in the California Current System (CCS) (n = 801) as...
High seroprevalance for Brucella abortus among elk on Wyoming feedgrounds suggests that supplemental feeding may influence parasite transmission and disease dynamics by altering the rate at which elk contact infectious materials in their environment. We used proximity loggers and video cameras to estimate rates of elk-to-fetus contact (the primary source...
Through its role in the energy and water balances at the land surface, soil moisture is a key state variable in surface hydrology and land-atmosphere interactions. Point observations of soil moisture are easy to make using established methods such as time domain reflectometry and gravimetric sampling. However, monitoring large-scale variability...
The advent of high-throughput sequencing (HTS) methods has enabled direct approaches to quantitatively profile small RNA
populations. However, these methods have been limited by several factors, including representational artifacts and lack of
established statistical methods of analysis. Furthermore, massive HTS data sets present new problems related to data processing
and...
The Phoenix mission, launched on 4 August 2007, landed in the far northern
plains of Mars on 25 May 2008. In order to prepare for the landing events and the
90-sol mission, a significant amount of work has gone into characterizing the atmospheric
environment at this location on Mars for...