1,285 research outputs found
Common Raven Impacts on the Productivity of a Small Breeding Population of Snowy Plovers
Common ravens (ravens; Corvus corax), an adaptable, synanthropic generalist, have thrived coincident with increasing human landscape modifications and fragmentation, consequently affecting their prey, which are often sensitive native and protected species. Ravens are a conservation concern for the protected western snowy plover (plover; Charadrius nivosus nivosus), causing low nest and chick survival in some breeding areas along the Pacific coast of North America. We used a long-term dataset from a breeding snowy plover monitoring program in Point Reyes National Seashore (PRNS) to investigate potential impacts of ravens on snowy plover nest and fledging success. Between 2002 and 2020, ravens accounted for 33.7% of all plover nest failures and 40.8% of unexclosed plover nest failures. Raven activity varied by plover breeding site, with more ravens observed per survey hour at Kehoe Beach and the Abbotts Lagoon restoration area, sites that had lower fledge success than other breeding areas. Binomial generalized linear mixed models found that plover nest success was best explained by raven activity (negative relationship) and use of nest exclosures (positive relationship). Our model results on snowy plover fledge success were less apparent, resulting in difficult management planning for this vital rate when using exclosures. Furthermore, nest exclosures were effective in increasing long-term snowy plover nest success in an ecosystem inundated by high raven activity. Evidence from PRNS and other plover breeding sites along the Pacific coast point to long-term negative impacts from ravens
The Aemulus Project III: Emulation of the Galaxy Correlation Function
Using the N-body simulations of the AEMULUS Project, we construct an emulator
for the non-linear clustering of galaxies in real and redshift space. We
construct our model of galaxy bias using the halo occupation framework,
accounting for possible velocity bias. The model includes 15 parameters,
including both cosmological and galaxy bias parameters. We demonstrate that our
emulator achieves ~ 1% precision at the scales of interest, 0.1<r<10 h^{-1}
Mpc, and recovers the true cosmology when tested against independent
simulations. Our primary parameters of interest are related to the growth rate
of structure, f, and its degenerate combination fsigma_8. Using this emulator,
we show that the constraining power on these parameters monotonically increases
as smaller scales are included in the analysis, all the way down to 0.1 h^{-1}
Mpc. For a BOSS-like survey, the constraints on fsigma_8 from r<30 h^{-1} Mpc
scales alone are more than a factor of two tighter than those from the fiducial
BOSS analysis of redshift-space clustering using perturbation theory at larger
scales. The combination of real- and redshift-space clustering allows us to
break the degeneracy between f and sigma_8, yielding a 9% constraint on f alone
for a BOSS-like analysis. The current AEMULUS simulations limit this model to
surveys of massive galaxies. Future simulations will allow this framework to be
extended to all galaxy target types, including emission-line galaxies.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, 1 table; submitted to ApJ; the project webpage
is available at https://aemulusproject.github.io ; typo in Figure 7 and
caption updated, results unchange
The Aemulus Project I: Numerical Simulations for Precision Cosmology
The rapidly growing statistical precision of galaxy surveys has lead to a
need for ever-more precise predictions of the observables used to constrain
cosmological and galaxy formation models. The primary avenue through which such
predictions will be obtained is suites of numerical simulations. These
simulations must span the relevant model parameter spaces, be large enough to
obtain the precision demanded by upcoming data, and be thoroughly validated in
order to ensure accuracy. In this paper we present one such suite of
simulations, forming the basis for the AEMULUS Project, a collaboration devoted
to precision emulation of galaxy survey observables. We have run a set of 75
(1.05 h^-1 Gpc)^3 simulations with mass resolution and force softening of
3.51\times 10^10 (Omega_m / 0.3) ~ h^-1 M_sun and 20 ~ h^-1 kpc respectively in
47 different wCDM cosmologies spanning the range of parameter space allowed by
the combination of recent Cosmic Microwave Background, Baryon Acoustic
Oscillation and Type Ia Supernovae results. We present convergence tests of
several observables including spherical overdensity halo mass functions, galaxy
projected correlation functions, galaxy clustering in redshift space, and
matter and halo correlation functions and power spectra. We show that these
statistics are converged to 1% (2%) for halos with more than 500 (200)
particles respectively and scales of r>200 ~ h^-1 kpc in real space or k ~ 3 h
Mpc^-1 in harmonic space for z\le 1. We find that the dominant source of
uncertainty comes from varying the particle loading of the simulations. This
leads to large systematic errors for statistics using halos with fewer than 200
particles and scales smaller than k ~ 4 h^-1 Mpc. We provide the halo catalogs
and snapshots detailed in this work to the community at
https://AemulusProject.github.io.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures, 3 Tables Project website:
https://aemulusproject.github.io
The Aemulus Project II: Emulating the Halo Mass Function
Existing models for the dependence of the halo mass function on cosmological
parameters will become a limiting source of systematic uncertainty for cluster
cosmology in the near future. We present a halo mass function emulator and
demonstrate improved accuracy relative to state-of-the-art analytic models. In
this work, mass is defined using an overdensity criteria of 200 relative to the
mean background density. Our emulator is constructed from the AEMULUS
simulations, a suite of 40 N-body simulations with snapshots from z=3 to z=0.
These simulations cover the flat wCDM parameter space allowed by recent Cosmic
Microwave Background, Baryon Acoustic Oscillation and Type Ia Supernovae
results, varying the parameters w, Omega_m, Omega_b, sigma_8, N_{eff}, n_s, and
H_0. We validate our emulator using five realizations of seven different
cosmologies, for a total of 35 test simulations. These test simulations were
not used in constructing the emulator, and were run with fully independent
initial conditions. We use our test simulations to characterize the modeling
uncertainty of the emulator, and introduce a novel way of marginalizing over
the associated systematic uncertainty. We confirm non-universality in our halo
mass function emulator as a function of both cosmological parameters and
redshift. Our emulator achieves better than 1% precision over much of the
relevant parameter space, and we demonstrate that the systematic uncertainty in
our emulator will remain a negligible source of error for cluster abundance
studies through at least the LSST Year 1 data set.Comment: https://aemulusproject.github.io
A High Throughput Workflow Environment for Cosmological Simulations
The next generation of wide-area sky surveys offer the power to place
extremely precise constraints on cosmological parameters and to test the source
of cosmic acceleration. These observational programs will employ multiple
techniques based on a variety of statistical signatures of galaxies and
large-scale structure. These techniques have sources of systematic error that
need to be understood at the percent-level in order to fully leverage the power
of next-generation catalogs. Simulations of large-scale structure provide the
means to characterize these uncertainties. We are using XSEDE resources to
produce multiple synthetic sky surveys of galaxies and large-scale structure in
support of science analysis for the Dark Energy Survey. In order to scale up
our production to the level of fifty 10^10-particle simulations, we are working
to embed production control within the Apache Airavata workflow environment. We
explain our methods and report how the workflow has reduced production time by
40% compared to manual management.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. V2 corrects an error in figure
Cross-correlation Weak Lensing of SDSS galaxy Clusters II: Cluster Density Profiles and the Mass--Richness Relation
We interpret and model the statistical weak lensing measurements around
130,000 groups and clusters of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
presented by Sheldon et al. 2007 (Paper I). We present non-parametric
inversions of the 2D shear profiles to the mean 3D cluster density and mass
profiles in bins of both optical richness and cluster i-band luminosity. We
correct the inferred 3D profiles for systematic effects, including non-linear
shear and the fact that cluster halos are not all precisely centered on their
brightest galaxies. We also model the measured cluster shear profile as a sum
of contributions from the brightest central galaxy, the cluster dark matter
halo, and neighboring halos. We infer the relations between mean cluster virial
mass and optical richness and luminosity over two orders of magnitude in
cluster mass; the virial mass at fixed richness or luminosity is determined
with a precision of 13% including both statistical and systematic errors. We
also constrain the halo concentration parameter and halo bias as a function of
cluster mass; both are in good agreement with predictions of LCDM models. The
methods employed here will be applicable to deeper, wide-area optical surveys
that aim to constrain the nature of the dark energy, such as the Dark Energy
Survey, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and space-based surveys
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