As part of the international project entitled "African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis (AMMA)", NAMMA (NASA AMMA) aimed to gain a better understanding of the relationship between the African Easterly Waves (AEWs), the Sahara Air Layer (SAL), and tropical cyclogenesis. The NAMMA airborne field campaign was based out of the Cape Verde...
The Asian vinegar fly Drosophila suzukii (spotted wing Drosophila [SWD]) has emerged as a major invasive insect pest of small and stone fruits in both the Americas and Europe since the late 2000s. While research efforts have rapidly progressed in Asia, North America, and Europe over the past 5 years,...
Pursuit of the triple bottom line of economic, community and ecological sustainability has increased the complexity of fishery management; fisheries assessments require new types of data and analysis to guide science-based policy in addition to traditional biological information and modeling. We introduce the Fishery Performance Indicators (FPIs), a broadly applicable...
Based on regional-scale studies, aboveground production and litter decomposition are thought to positively covary, because they are driven by shared biotic and climatic factors. Until now we have been unable to test whether production and decomposition are generally coupled across climatically dissimilar regions, because we lacked replicated data collected within...
Studies of experimental grassland communities¹⁻⁷ have demonstrated
that plant diversity can stabilize productivity through species
asynchrony, in which decreases in the biomass of some species
are compensated for by increases in others[superscript 1,2]. However, it remains
unknown whether these findings are relevant to natural ecosystems,
especially those for which species...
Human alterations to nutrient cycles[superscript 1,2] and herbivore communities³⁻⁷
are affecting global biodiversity dramatically². Ecological theory predicts
these changes should be strongly counteractive: nutrient addition
drives plant species loss through intensified competition for
light, whereas herbivores prevent competitive exclusion by increasing
ground-level light, particularly in productive systems[superscript 8,9]. Here we...
In this thesis we construct compatible discretizations of Maxwell's equations. We use the term compatible to describe numerical methods for Maxwell's equations which obey many properties of vector Calculus in a discrete setting. Compatible discretizations preserve the exterior Calculus ensuring that the divergence of the curl and the curl of...