Automated sound broadcast systems have been used to address a variety of ecological questions, and show great potential as a management tool. Such systems need to be reliable because treatments are often applied in the absence of a human observer and system failure can cause methodological ambiguity. During the breeding...
The Mongolian Steppe is one of the largest remaining grassland ecosystems. Recent studies have reported widespread
decline of vegetation across the steppe and about 70% of this ecosystem is now considered degraded. Among
the scientific community there has been an active debate about whether the observed degradation is related to...
There were two viable theories of generation, preformation
and epigenesis, existing in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries. Due to their irreconcilable nature,
they were often at loggerheads during this time interval.
The status of these generation theories can be effectively
understood in terms of Thomas Kuhn's conception of preparadigm
science....
Tree-ring characteristics are commonly used to reconstruct climate variables, but divergence from the assumption of a single biophysical control may reduce the accuracy of these reconstructions. Here, we present data from bur oaks (Quercus macrocarpa Michx.) sampled within and beyond the current species bioclimatic envelope to identify the primary environmental...
A genecological approach was used to explore genetic variation in adaptive traits in Pseudoroegneria spicata, a key restoration grass, in the intermountain western United States. Common garden experiments were established at three contrasting sites with seedlings from two maternal parents from each of 114 populations along with five commercial releases...
Recent controversy over whether biodiversity reduces disease risk (dilution effect) has focused on the ecology of Lyme disease, a tick-borne zoonosis. A criticism of the dilution effect is that increasing host species richness might amplify disease risk, assuming that total host abundance, and therefore feeding opportunities for ticks, increase with...
This essay argues that changes in American energy infrastructure from carbon-based power plants to distributed, renewable energy networks precipitate changes in American literary regionalism. Examining recent regional fiction including Jay Tyrell’s Wind Army, Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Tamarisk Hunter,” and Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker, I argue that stories of climate-change...
For over 30 years, the Implicit Monte Carlo (IMC) method has been used to
solve challenging problems in thermal radiative transfer. These problems are typically optically thick and di ffusive, as a consequence of the high degree of "pseudo-scattering" introduced to model the absorption and reemission of photons from a...
We examine the 0–100 Ma paleoceanographic record retained in pelagic clay from the South Pacific Gyre (SPG) by analyzing 47 major, trace, and rare earth elements in bulk sediment in 206 samples from seven sites drilled during Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Expedition 329. We use multivariate statistical analyses (Q-mode factor analysis...