Graptemys pseudogeographica

Number of Pages: 6Integrative BiologyGeological Science

Maryland Turtles

Since McCauley's 1945 publication, now out of print, on the "Turtles of Maryland," little has appeared on this interesting component of Maryland's vertebrate fauna. This work is thus an attempt to bring up to date the information that has accumulated during the interval. Each species has been treated in a similar vein regarding name, drawing, distribution, life history and biology. Additional information not usually found in texts or manuals has been added, especially that on folklore, uses and commercial value. Comments on environs, identification, species which should not be considered part of the turtle fauna, and the five known introduced species are included. A key to all the material and introduced species and subspecies is presented for the first time. The distribution maps have been made following the present limits of a species' known range. Dots were not used to illustrate ranges since so many species can and do move about readily. Those species whose ranges are expected to be larger than presently known are so indicated. These species and specimens thereof from the latter areas should be kept arid called to the attention of qualified personnel. All levels from the high school to scientist will find material of interest herein. (PDF contains 43 pages

Graptemys

Number of Pages: 3Integrative BiologyGeological Science

Amphibians and Reptiles of United States Department of Defense Installations

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) occupies approximately 10.1 million ha of land within the U.S. spanning most ecosystems contained therein. To date, no comprehensive agency-wide inventory of amphibian and reptile species has been compiled. We developed an amphibian and reptile species inventory for 415 DoD installations/sites and evaluated species diversity. The amphibian and reptile species confirmed present on DoD sites represent 66% of the total native species documented in the continental U.S. Snakes are the most widespread group found on DoD lands. Of the military services, Army sites have the greatest number of confirmed species, federally listed, state-listed, and At-risk species. There are 24 federally listed (threatened or endangered), 55 state- listed, and 70 At-risk species confirmed present on DoD sites. Thirty non-native and native transplant amphibian and reptile species/subspecies are also confirmed present on DoD sites. Lastly, we verified that approximately half of the military sites evaluated in this study have at least one venomous snake species confirmed present. Our study results assist directly with ongoing management and conservation of amphibian and reptile species on DoD lands and confirm military lands comprise a significant contribution to biodiversity conservation

Fast, Accurate Thin-Structure Obstacle Detection for Autonomous Mobile Robots

Safety is paramount for mobile robotic platforms such as self-driving cars and unmanned aerial vehicles. This work is devoted to a task that is indispensable for safety yet was largely overlooked in the past -- detecting obstacles that are of very thin structures, such as wires, cables and tree branches. This is a challenging problem, as thin objects can be problematic for active sensors such as lidar and sonar and even for stereo cameras. In this work, we propose to use video sequences for thin obstacle detection. We represent obstacles with edges in the video frames, and reconstruct them in 3D using efficient edge-based visual odometry techniques. We provide both a monocular camera solution and a stereo camera solution. The former incorporates Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data to solve scale ambiguity, while the latter enjoys a novel, purely vision-based solution. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed methods are fast and able to detect thin obstacles robustly and accurately under various conditions.Comment: Appeared at IEEE CVPR 2017 Workshop on Embedded Visio

Measuring information-transfer delays

In complex networks such as gene networks, traffic systems or brain circuits it is important to understand how long it takes for the different parts of the network to effectively influence one another. In the brain, for example, axonal delays between brain areas can amount to several tens of milliseconds, adding an intrinsic component to any timing-based processing of information. Inferring neural interaction delays is thus needed to interpret the information transfer revealed by any analysis of directed interactions across brain structures. However, a robust estimation of interaction delays from neural activity faces several challenges if modeling assumptions on interaction mechanisms are wrong or cannot be made. Here, we propose a robust estimator for neuronal interaction delays rooted in an information-theoretic framework, which allows a model-free exploration of interactions. In particular, we extend transfer entropy to account for delayed source-target interactions, while crucially retaining the conditioning on the embedded target state at the immediately previous time step. We prove that this particular extension is indeed guaranteed to identify interaction delays between two coupled systems and is the only relevant option in keeping with Wiener’s principle of causality. We demonstrate the performance of our approach in detecting interaction delays on finite data by numerical simulations of stochastic and deterministic processes, as well as on local field potential recordings. We also show the ability of the extended transfer entropy to detect the presence of multiple delays, as well as feedback loops. While evaluated on neuroscience data, we expect the estimator to be useful in other fields dealing with network dynamics

The Land Conservation Plan for Maine’s Piscataqua Region Watersheds

The Piscataqua River/Great Bay estuary is a shared coastal embayment that forms the southernmost boundary between the states of Maine and New Hampshire. This rich coastal bay provides critical ecological, economic, and social benefits to the southern Maine and coastal New Hampshire region. The Great Bay estuary is such an important coastal resource that it is officially recognized as a coastal area of national significance by both the federal National Estuary Program and the federal National Estuarine Research Reserve program. The Piscataqua River/Great Bay estuary is fed by many rivers in New Hampshire, and by the Salmon Falls River, Great Works River, and Spruce Creek water- sheds in Maine. Collectively, the land area that contributes water flow to this treasured bi-state estuarine system is referred to as the “Piscataqua Region.” Within Maine, this region includes portions or all of ten Maine communities: Acton, Berwick, Eliot, Kittery, Lebanon, North Berwick, Sanford, South Berwick, Wells, and York