Comparative Studies in Rangeland Management: Examining the Foundational Assessments Relationship to the Greater Sage-Grouse Habitat Assessment Framework and Assessment of Predicted Cattle Distributions Using GPS Collars in Rich County, Utah

The greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) is being used as an umbrella species to manage for 350 plant and animal species that also depend on rangeland communities. Sage-grouse habitat assessments have been carried out using multiple methods. Standard sage-grouse methods described by Connelly et al 2003, include line intercept (LI) and Daubenmire frames (DF) measuring canopy cover. These methods were adopted broadly among sage-grouse biologist and used to develop habitat objectives for greater sage-grouse. Federal land management agencies now use the Habitat Assessment Framework (HAF). Specifically, HAF employs line-point intercept (LPI), to assess foliar cover in sage-grouse habitat. While there is evidence that the different methods are not entirely compatible in their specifics plant cover estimates, researchers who helped develop the methods used by land management agencies suggest that when determining the suitability of habitat, outcomes would be similar. To date there has been no effort to reconcile the outcomes of standard sage-grouse methods and HAF methods in the context of the sage-grouse habitat objectives framework. Of the 74 sites sampled 19 fell within the range of implication and demanded the outcomes of standard sage grouse biologist and HAF methods be reconciled. Over all 19 sites secondarily sampled 67% showed agreement in outcomes. More specifically the sites produced the same outcome 83% of sites sampled for shrub species and 60% of sites sampled for herbaceous species. The primary commercial use of rangelands in the U.S. is livestock grazing. An economical and consistent means of predicting and visualizing cattle distributions in rangelands could help inform managers to make grazing decisions. Open Range Consulting has developed the Piosphere tool that uses abiotic GIS data to quantify and predict cattle distributions. The intent of this study is to evaluate the Piosphere tool using observed global positioning system (GPS) cow collar data. The GPS collar data was combined with the same set of abiotic GIS data that informs the Piosphere tool and was used to build a resource selection function (RSF) independently of the Piosphere tool. This RSF controls for the telemetry bias associated with collar data and produces a landscape scale analysis that was used to evaluate the Piosphere tool’s predicted distribution. Validation was performed in two ways. Firstly, calculating the proportion of cow collar locations captured within the predicted distribution of the Piosphere tool and secondly a comparison of pixel values for each landscape scale analysis across the whole study area. 96% of collar location fell within the predicted distribution of the Piosphere tool. Regressing each of the landscape analyses produced and R2 of 0.64

BLINC: Designing Bicycle Path Protection for Accessible Transportation Networks

The City of Rochester is defined by both poverty and renewed development in its center city. Often overlooked, access to transportation systems plays an important role in the prevalence of poverty. Accessing areas of Rochester that offer higher paying jobs, better schools, and a greater variety of services is directly related to car ownership, a luxury that Rochester’s poorest cannot afford. This transportation inequality is considered a contributing factor to Rochester’s poverty rate. In addition, the discontinuous urban fabric of downtown Rochester is designed for automobile, not pedestrian or bicycle traffic. Safe and continuous pedestrian and cycling pathways are often absent, though Rochester contains major employment districts, academic institutions, cultural and entertainment venues, public spaces, and basic amenities. Wide streets, city-bisecting highways, and large areas of surface parking contribute to continued use of automobiles, restricting efforts to develop Rochester into a sustainable, accessible, human-scale, and lively city. Bicycle transportation offers a viable alternative to automobile ownership and bus transportation, filling in the gap between accessibility and efficiency in Rochester’s transportation network. However, ridership deterrents such as the risk of inclement weather and lack of cycling-specific infrastructure must be addressed. A bicycle lane canopy is a potential solution for fulfilling these goals. Projects in London and Berlin have shown that investment in cycling infrastructure is effective at promoting cycling as a mode of transportation. Tensile fabric architecture and textile projects in Boston, Detroit, Denver, and New Zealand have shown that tensile structures are able to define urban spaces in expressive ways. In order to encourage bicycling as a mode of transportation by protecting cyclists and pedestrians from weather events and automobile traffic, a canopy structure was proposed. This Bicycle Lane Intelligent Network Canopy (BLINC) consists of a connected series of individual tensile fabric structures that interact to create an urban network of bike lane coverings. Potential tensile fabrics, designs and routes were analyzed to meet the needs of the tensile fabric structure; a PTFE triangular tee structure was determined to best fulfill the design intent. A BLINC route network was proposed along several existing roadways that provide access to the urban fabric of employment, education, amenity, and recreational opportunities in the city. It is designed to provide efficient, convenient, and continuous cyclist access to the core and extents of Rochester, while enhancing the sense of place that the urban framework provides. By encouraging cycling as a mode of transportation, the tensile fabric BLINC structure and proposed BLINC route network also improve community health, increase cyclist safety, lower greenhouse gas emissions, promote the local economy, and contribute to Rochester’s innovation in urban renewal

Growth parameters of \u27Golden Delicious\u27 apple trees (Malus x domestica Borkh)

High yield and high quality of tree fruit result from appropriate orchard design and management practices. This requires an accurate knowledge of vegetative growth, branching, and flowering processes of fruit trees. Tree development knowledge is the fundamental information necessary to build functional-structural tree models, which have various applications in agriculture. To build such models, information is needed on the distributions of growth parameters, not merely means as are often reported. The objective of this study was to quantitatively analyze shoot development and examine the correlations between fruit quality and light distribution in apple trees. This study was conducted in 2014, on \u27Golden Delicious\u27/G.16 apple trees grown at the Purdue Meigs Research Farm. Measurements of shoot development were taken to determine the shoot growth rates, the frequency of leaf and stem length distribution, as well as the branching characteristics of two-year-old branches. The light distribution in tree canopies was measured and fruit quality was analyzed to determine correlations between them. Results showed a heterologous growth pattern of different types of shoots in trees. Vegetative spurs had the largest leaves, reaching a length of 90 mm, while flowering spurs had the smallest ones, which were about 40 mm. Most vegetative spurs and bourse shoots were less than 5 cm in length. For terminal shoots, however, the lengths were evenly distributed between 5 and 16 cm. The highest branching frequency was found in the middle section of two-year-old shoots, while more reproductive laterals were found in the distal portion as opposed to the basal or middle portions of shoots. Light intensity was a good predictor of soluble solid concentration and skin background color, but was poorly correlated with individual fruit weight, firmness and starch pattern index. The data collected in this study are being incorporated into a model of apple tree growth in collaboration with colleagues in the Department of Computer Graphics Technology at Purdue University

A numerical method for fluid-structure interactions of slender rods in turbulent flow

This thesis presents a numerical method for the simulation of fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems on high-performance computers. The proposed method is specifically tailored to interactions between Newtonian fluids and a large number of slender viscoelastic structures, the latter being modeled as Cosserat rods. From a numerical point of view, such kind of FSI requires special techniques to reach numerical stability. When using a partitioned fluid-structure coupling approach this is usually achieved by an iterative procedure, which drastically increases the computational effort. In the present work, an alternative coupling approach is developed based on an immersed boundary method (IBM). It is unconditionally stable and exempt from any global iteration between the fluid part and the structure part. The proposed FSI solver is employed to simulate the flow over a dense layer of vegetation elements, usually designated as canopy flow. The abstracted canopy model used in the simulation consists of 800 strip-shaped blades, which is the largest canopy-resolving simulation of this type done so far. To gain a deeper understanding of the physics of aquatic canopy flows the simulation data obtained are analyzed, e.g., concerning the existence and shape of coherent structures

ALMA Observations of Io Going into and Coming out of Eclipse

We present 1-mm observations constructed from ALMA [Atacama Large (sub)Millimeter Array] data of SO₂, SO and KCl when Io went from sunlight into eclipse (20 March 2018), and vice versa (2 and 11 September 2018). There is clear evidence of volcanic plumes on 20 March and 2 September. The plumes distort the line profiles, causing high-velocity (≳500 m/s) wings, and red/blue-shifted shoulders in the line profiles. During eclipse ingress, the SO₂ flux density dropped exponentially, and the atmosphere reformed in a linear fashion when re-emerging in sunlight, with a "post-eclipse brightening" after ∼10 minutes. While both the in-eclipse decrease and in-sunlight increase in SO was more gradual than for SO₂, the fact that SO decreased at all is evidence that self-reactions at the surface are important and fast, and that in-sunlight photolysis of SO₂ is the dominant source of SO. Disk-integrated SO₂ in-sunlight flux densities are ∼2--3 times higher than in-eclipse, indicative of a roughly 30--50% contribution from volcanic sources to the atmosphere. Typical column densities and temperatures are N ≈ (1.5±0.3)×10¹⁶ cm⁻² and T ≈ 220−320 K both in-sunlight and in-eclipse, while the fractional coverage of the gas is 2--3 times lower in-eclipse than in-sunlight. The low level SO₂ emissions present during eclipse may be sourced by stealth volcanism or be evidence of a layer of non-condensible gases preventing complete collapse of the SO₂ atmosphere. The melt in magma chambers at different volcanoes must differ in composition to explain the absence of SO and SO₂, but simultaneous presence of KCl over Ulgen Patera