The Mortenson Ranch: Cattle and Trees at Home on the Range. A Restoration Guidebook

Early agriculture on western rangeland met with little success and resulted in serious consequences including soil erosion, loss of native woodlands and wildlife, and economic ruin. The Mortenson family in Stanley County, South Dakota, has been engaged in restoring degraded rangeland on their ranch for more than 50 years. Their primary goal has been to return the land to its condition prior to white settlement while maintaining a profitable cattle ranching operation. In recent years the ranch has served as a model of successful ranching based on a conservation ethic. This guidebook summarizes the restoration techniques and grazing regime used by the Mortensons and offers suggestions for applying these ideas to other locations. It is not intended to be a step-by-step cookbook, an all-complete reference, or a set of hard and fast rules. It is meant to provide an example of land management practices based on sound ecological principles. The quotes throughout these pages are Clarence Mortenson\u27s. Since 1941, he has observed the changes taking place on the property described here. Sons Todd, Jeff, and Curt are now involved; Todd manages the land and the cattle operation. The ranch lost extensive bottomland forest to Oahe Reservoir on the nearby Missouri River in the 1950s. [Page 1

Patent: Dual Function Proteins for Treating Metabolic Disorders

The present invention relates to new proteins comprising fibroblast growth factor 2 1 (FGF21 ) and other metabolic regulators known to improve metabolic profiles in subjects to whom they are administered

Physics case for an LHCb Upgrade II - Opportunities in flavour physics, and beyond, in the HL-LHC era

The LHCb Upgrade II will fully exploit the flavour-physics opportunities of the HL-LHC, and study additional physics topics that take advantage of the forward acceptance of the LHCb spectrometer. The LHCb Upgrade I will begin operation in 2020. Consolidation will occur, and modest enhancements of the Upgrade I detector will be installed, in Long Shutdown 3 of the LHC (2025) and these are discussed here. The main Upgrade II detector will be installed in long shutdown 4 of the LHC (2030) and will build on the strengths of the current LHCb experiment and the Upgrade I. It will operate at a luminosity up to 2×1034 cm−2s−1, ten times that of the Upgrade I detector. New detector components will improve the intrinsic performance of the experiment in certain key areas. An Expression Of Interest proposing Upgrade II was submitted in February 2017. The physics case for the Upgrade II is presented here in more depth. CP-violating phases will be measured with precisions unattainable at any other envisaged facility. The experiment will probe b → sl+l−and b → dl+l− transitions in both muon and electron decays in modes not accessible at Upgrade I. Minimal flavour violation will be tested with a precision measurement of the ratio of B(B0 → μ+μ−)/B(Bs → μ+μ−). Probing charm CP violation at the 10−5 level may result in its long sought discovery. Major advances in hadron spectroscopy will be possible, which will be powerful probes of low energy QCD. Upgrade II potentially will have the highest sensitivity of all the LHC experiments on the Higgs to charm-quark couplings. Generically, the new physics mass scale probed, for fixed couplings, will almost double compared with the pre-HL-LHC era; this extended reach for flavour physics is similar to that which would be achieved by the HE-LHC proposal for the energy frontier

LHCb upgrade software and computing : technical design report

This document reports the Research and Development activities that are carried out in the software and computing domains in view of the upgrade of the LHCb experiment. The implementation of a full software trigger implies major changes in the core software framework, in the event data model, and in the reconstruction algorithms. The increase of the data volumes for both real and simulated datasets requires a corresponding scaling of the distributed computing infrastructure. An implementation plan in both domains is presented, together with a risk assessment analysis

Measurement of the B0s→μ+μ− Branching Fraction and Effective Lifetime and Search for B0→μ+μ− Decays

See paper for full list of authors - All figures and tables, along with any supplementary material and additional information, are available at https://lhcbproject.web.cern.ch/lhcbproject/Publications/LHCbProjectPublic/LHCb-PAPER-2017-001.html - Submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett.International audienceA search for the rare decays B0s→μ+μ− and B0→μ+μ− is performed at the LHCb experiment using data collected in pp collisions corresponding to a total integrated luminosity of 4.4 fb−1. An excess of B0s→μ+μ− decays is observed with a significance of 7.8 standard deviations, representing the first observation of this decay in a single experiment. The branching fraction is measured to be B(B0s→μ+μ−)=(3.0±0.6+0.3−0.2)×10−9, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second systematic. The first measurement of the B0s→μ+μ− effective lifetime, τ(B0s→μ+μ−)=2.04±0.44±0.05 ps, is reported. No significant excess of B0→μ+μ− decays is found and a 95 % confidence level upper limit, B(B0→μ+μ−)<3.4×10−10, is determined. All results are in agreement with the Standard Model expectations

Publisher Correction: Sex-dimorphic genetic effects and novel loci for fasting glucose and insulin variability.

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21276-3</jats:p

The Platte as a Wooded River: A Response to Currier and Davis

This dialogue in Great Plains Research (GPR) is most welcome. It increases visibility of the historic status and significance of woodlands in the Platte River. In our article, we bring together the bulk of the information available on pre-settlement woodlands of the Platte River. We submitted to GPR because of its geographic focus and to invite peer-review of our work. Our paper is the most comprehensive treatment of the subject available. Despite protestations to the contrary by Currier and Davis, we remain convinced that the evidence presented supports the wooded river concept. We purposely chose the word wooded rather than forested, incorrectly attributed to us by Currier and Davis (2000). Wooded was chosen to represent the naturally more open-grown nature of the woody plant communities along the Platte River, in contrast to more closed forest communities with higher tree densities and overlapping canopies that occur in more humid regions such as the eastern US. The more open communities of the Platte River in pre-settlement times-with scattered trees on outermost banks plus heavy timber on the large islands and willow thickets sprinkled with trees on small islands-clearly qualify as woodland in plant community parlance, even if interspersed with grassland on the higher, large islands

The Pre-settlement Platte: Wooded or Prairie River?

The pre-settlement Platte River is commonly described as a mostly unwooded prairie river, comprised of water, sand, and wet grassland. However, primary historical accounts do not support this prairie river concept. Instead, the early accounts and quantitative information from the General Land Office survey indicate that, prior to settlement by European immigrants, the Platte was a wooded river traversing a prairie landscape. Woodland was reported as dense on innumerable islands in the channel, but scattered along on the outer banks. This woodland was cleared during exploration and early settlement. Thus, the openness of the post-settlement river observed early in the 1900s was an artifact of deforestation rather than of the result of natural processes. Since the 1930s, however, reforestation and channel narrowing have occurred in response to reduced stream flow and less demand for timber. The new woodland harbors high biodiversity, while occupying some areas formerly available to certain aquatic avifauna. This historical synthesis should help to reformulate restoration targets for the Platte River ecosystem

Restoring the Pre-Settlement Landscape In Stanley County, South Dakota

Settlement of the western United States resulted in clearing and degradation of many wooded areas. The loss of biodiversity and erosion of soil which followed produced a landscape which is still being restored. The first section of the paper reviews the settlement history of western South Dakota, describing the ecological effects of rapid population growth upon the landscape. The second part focuses on a smaller area, that of a family\u27s ranch, which has undergone land management changes and woodland restoration since 1950. Studies which document an increase in woody species diversity and abundance, the population structure of trees, and the area occupied by woody vegetation are summarized. Sampling included measurements of woody vegetation in the field and of riparian and scarp woodland cover from 1956 and 1991 aerial photography