North Campus Open Space Restoration Project Annual Monitoring Report: Year 2 (2019)

Born out of a vision shared by the local community, students, faculty, researchers and state and federal agencies, the North Campus Open Space (NCOS) restoration project is recreating more than 40 acres of estuarine and palustrine wetlands that historically comprised the upper portion of Devereux Slough that was filled in the mid-1960s to create the Ocean Meadows golf course. Led by the UC Santa Barbara Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration (CCBER) in collaboration with other UCSB departments, faculty, student and local community groups, contractors and government agencies, the project is also restoring more than 60 acres of upland habitats that include native grassland, coastal sage scrub, riparian, oak chaparral woodland, vernal pools and patches of annual wildflowers in clay and sandy soils. In addition to wetland and upland habitat restoration, the goals of the NCOS project include flood reduction, support for threatened and endangered species, public access and the provision of educational opportunities. Ancillary benefits of the project include carbon sequestration, preservation of local genotypes, and protection of adjacent ecological values and infrastructure through a design that integrates sea level rise considerations.Currently in its third year of implementation, the main planting phase of the project is approximately 90% complete, and the focus is now turning towards maintenance, continued monitoring, new research projects, and supplemental planting to add diversity, including special status species such as the Ventura marsh milk-vetch (Astragalus pycnostachys var. lanosissimus). This report describes the methods and results of monitoring for the first two years of the project, from vegetation and wildlife to wetland geomorphology, hydrology and water quality, carbon sequestration studies, community use and a detailed record of restoration efforts by type of worker, task and site location. This work documents the progress of the project and supports longer-term research and monitoring programs. Results from the second year of monitoring show substantial progress towards the project’s restoration goals, with many being met or exceeded

Life Cycle Costs for Alaska Bridges

INE/AUTC 15.0

Calibration of the finite element model of a twelve-span prestressed concrete bridge using ambient vibration data

Peer reviewedPreprin

Ships Observing Marine Climate: a catalogue of the VOS participating in the VSOP-NA

Our present knowledge of the marine climate, as represented by data sets such as COADS (Woodruff et al., 1987), is based on meteorological observations from the Voluntary Observing Ships (VOS). Because the VOS are merchant ships, rather than specially designed meteorological platforms, errors and biases exist in the data. However there is little information readily available to the climatologist either on the nature of the VOS fleet or on the observing practises which are used. This report, describing the forty-six ships that participated in the Voluntary Observing Ships' Special Observing Project - North Atlantic (VSOP-NA), therefore serves two purposes:(i) it provides a reference document to aid analysis of the VSOP-NA data set,(ii) it gives a detailed description of a subset of the VOS, which will be of value in the interpretation of marine climate data sets.This report is in two parts, Part 1 is an overall summary of the ship characteristics, Part 2 is a ship by ship description. The next section will briefly describe the VSOP-NA project, followed by a summary of the characteristics of the VSOP-NA ships (Section 3). Since these ships were specially selected (Section 2.2), the degree to which they are representative of the whole VOS fleet will be carefully considered. The meteorological instrumentation used by the VOS varies depending on which meteorological agency recruited the ships. That used on the chosen VSOP-NA ships is typical of VOS recruited by the countries bordering the North Atlantic, and will be described in Section 4. Section 5 is a summary of Part 1 of the report.Part 2 presents the VSOP-NA ship catalogue. This includes, for each ship, diagrams of the layout (indicating in particular the exposure of the sensors), a summary of the geographical positions at which observations were obtained, and details of the instrumentation used.<br/

Still minding the gap? Reflecting on transitions between concepts of information in varied domains

This conceptual paper, a contribution to the tenth anniversary special issue of information, gives a cross-disciplinary review of general and unified theories of information. A selective literature review is used to update a 2013 article on bridging the gaps between conceptions of information in different domains, including material from the physical and biological sciences, from the humanities and social sciences including library and information science, and from philosophy. A variety of approaches and theories are reviewed, including those of Brenner, Brier, Burgin and Wu, Capurro, Cárdenas-García and Ireland, Hidalgo, Hofkirchner, Kolchinsky and Wolpert, Floridi, Mingers and Standing, Popper, and Stonier. The gaps between disciplinary views of information remain, although there has been progress, and increasing interest, in bridging them. The solution is likely to be either a general theory of sufficient flexibility to cope with multiple meanings of information, or multiple and distinct theories for different domains, but with a complementary nature, and ideally boundary spanning concepts

On systematic approaches for interpreted information transfer of inspection data from bridge models to structural analysis

In conjunction with the improved methods of monitoring damage and degradation processes, the interest in reliability assessment of reinforced concrete bridges is increasing in recent years. Automated imagebased inspections of the structural surface provide valuable data to extract quantitative information about deteriorations, such as crack patterns. However, the knowledge gain results from processing this information in a structural context, i.e. relating the damage artifacts to building components. This way, transformation to structural analysis is enabled. This approach sets two further requirements: availability of structural bridge information and a standardized storage for interoperability with subsequent analysis tools. Since the involved large datasets are only efficiently processed in an automated manner, the implementation of the complete workflow from damage and building data to structural analysis is targeted in this work. First, domain concepts are derived from the back-end tasks: structural analysis, damage modeling, and life-cycle assessment. The common interoperability format, the Industry Foundation Class (IFC), and processes in these domains are further assessed. The need for usercontrolled interpretation steps is identified and the developed prototype thus allows interaction at subsequent model stages. The latter has the advantage that interpretation steps can be individually separated into either a structural analysis or a damage information model or a combination of both. This approach to damage information processing from the perspective of structural analysis is then validated in different case studies

Comparison of different capillary bridge models for application in the discrete element method

Weakly wetted granular material is the subject of many studies. Several formulations were proposed to calculate the capillary forces between wet particles. In this paper some of such models have been implemented in a DEM-framework, and simulation results were compared to experimental measurements. Also, the influence of capillary model type on macro parameters like local shear viscosity and cohesive parameters of sheared material have been investigated through the simulation of spherical beads using a DEM-model of a split-bottom shear-cell. It was concluded that the water content, simulated with the help of capillary bridge models, changes the macro-properties of the simulated granular material. Different capillary bridge models do not influence the macroscopic results visibly

Performance evaluation of NASA/KSC CAD/CAE graphics local area network

This study had as an objective the performance evaluation of the existing CAD/CAE graphics network at NASA/KSC. This evaluation will also aid in projecting planned expansions, such as the Space Station project on the existing CAD/CAE network. The objectives were achieved by collecting packet traffic on the various integrated sub-networks. This included items, such as total number of packets on the various subnetworks, source/destination of packets, percent utilization of network capacity, peak traffic rates, and packet size distribution. The NASA/KSC LAN was stressed to determine the useable bandwidth of the Ethernet network and an average design station workload was used to project the increased traffic on the existing network and the planned T1 link. This performance evaluation of the network will aid the NASA/KSC network managers in planning for the integration of future workload requirements into the existing network