The State of the Upper Bay of Panama Wetlands: Ecological Significance, Environmental Policy, Urbanization, and Social Justice

I conducted this research while studying abroad with SIT Panama: Tropical Ecology, Marine Ecosystems, and Biodiversity Conservation. This is a multidisciplinary investigation of the Upper Bay of Panama wetlands, a 49,000 hectare region east of Panama City that features mangrove, intertidal mudflat, and grassland habitat internationally recognized as a stopover site for two million shorebirds every migration season. However, with economic pressure to increase urban development in the area, this land’s protected status under the Ramsar convention was suspended for a year in April 2012. By compiling scientific studies, news articles, photographs, and interviews with local conservationists and community members, this project describes the ecological, political, and social conditions surrounding this area today. I found that this ecosystem contains plentiful nutrients from both seasonal upwelling and mangrove detritus, supporting a thriving aquatic food chain, including major fisheries, but also experiences garbage, agrochemical, and heavy metal inputs from human activities. Because of reduced infiltration caused by new developments, plus ongoing construction, much of the eastern Panama City district of Juan Díaz is now regularly subject to flooding too severe for its current drainage system to control, for which I provided photographic evidence, and receives little compensation. By law, though, Panama’s government is obligated to protect these people’s right to live in a healthy environment. Strategies for ecosystem management should be planned for the long-term and include economic incentives, citizen involvement, and government support. There is also a need to promote education of wetlands ecosystem benefits and the repercussions of their removal

Secondary centres of economic activity in the East Midlands: final report

This report outlines the findings of a study of secondary centres of economic activity in the East Midlands. The study builds on previous work undertaken in the ‘GDP Growth in the East Midlands and Yorkshire and Humberside regions’ project by the Enterprise Research and Development Unit on behalf of emda and Yorkshire Forward

Gauge invariant formalism for second order perturbations of Schwarzschild spacetimes

The ``close limit,'' a method based on perturbations of Schwarzschild spacetime, has proved to be a very useful tool for finding approximate solutions to models of black hole collisions. Calculations carried out with second order perturbation theory have been shown to give the limits of applicability of the method without the need for comparison with numerical relativity results. Those second order calculations have been carried out in a fixed coordinate gauge, a method that entails conceptual and computational difficulties. Here we demonstrate a gauge invariant approach to such calculations. For a specific set of models (requiring head on collisions and quadrupole dominance of both the first and second order perturbations), we give a self contained gauge invariant formalism. Specifically, we give (i) wave equations and sources for first and second order gauge invariant wave functions; (ii) the prescription for finding Cauchy data for those equations from initial values of the first and second fundamental forms on an initial hypersurface; (iii) the formula for computing the gravitational wave power from the evolved first and second order wave functions.Comment: 18 pages, no figure

Frustrated double ionization in two-electron triatomic molecules

Using a semi-classical model, we investigate frustrated double ionization (FDI) in $\mathrm{D_3^+}$, a two-electron triatomic molecule, when driven by an intense, linearly polarized, near-infrared (800 nm) laser field. We compute the kinetic energy release of the nuclei and find a good agreement between experiment and our model. We explore the two pathways of FDI and show that, with increasing field strength, over-the-barrier ionization overtakes tunnel ionization as the underlying mechanism of FDI. Moreover, we compute the angular distribution of the ion fragments for FDI and identify a feature that can potentially be observed experimentally and is a signature of only one of the two pathways of FDI.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure