Modeling and Forecasting the Influence of Current and Future Climate on Eastern North American Spruce-Fir (Picea-Abies) Forests

The spruce-fir (Picea-Abies) forest type of the Acadian Region is at risk of disappearing from the United States and parts of Canada due to climate change and associated impacts. Managing for the ecosystem services provided by this forest type requires accurate forecasting of forest metrics across this broad international region in the face of the expected redistribution of tree species. This analysis linked species specific data with climate and topographic variables using the nonparametric random forest algorithm, to generate models that accurately predicted changes in species distribution due to climate change. A comprehensive dataset, consisting of 10,493,619 observations from twenty-two agencies, including historical inventories, assured accurate assignation of species distribution at a finer resolution (1 km2) than previous analyses. Different dependent variables were utilized, including presence/absence, a likelihood value, abundance variables (i.e. basal area, stem density, and importance value), and predicted maximum stand density index (SDImax), in order to inspect the difference in results in regards to their conservation management utility, as well as the effects of inherent species life history traits on outcomes. Using linear quantile mixed models, predictions of SDImax were estimated for spruce or fir-dominated plots across the Acadian Region. Model performance was strong and estimates of SDImax from these models were similar to previous regional studies. The establishment of an individual constant slope of self-thinning for plots dominated by each spruce or fir species reinforces previous research that Reineke’s slope is not universal for all species, and that the differences in slope are telling of different species’ life history patterns. Individual plot estimates of SDImax, achieved through a varying intercept, allowed for the assessment of each stand’s potential and limitations in regards to the impact that climate, nutrient availability, site quality, and other factors might have on SDI. A high association with environmental variables was exhibited for all dependent variables. Area under receiver operator curve values for presence/absence models averaged 0.99 ± 0.01 (mean ± SD) well above the accepted standard for excellent model performance. The addition of historical tree data revealed supplementary suitable habitat along the southern edge of species’ ranges, due to marginal dynamics potentially overlooked by approaches relying solely on current inventories. The likelihood models provided an adequate surrogate to abundance models, reflecting gradients of suitable habitat. The SDImax variables performed the best of the continuous variables inspected in regards to climate associations, likely because of the selection of spruce or fir-dominated plots and the ability to capture core ranges. Black spruce (Picea mariana (Miller) B.S.P.) responded the best to abundance modeling, due to this species’ uniform range. White spruce (Picea glauca (Moench) Voss) consistently performed the worst among all species for each model, due to this species’ wide distribution at low abundances. Presence/absence models assist in understanding the full range of climatically suitable habitats, abundance values provide the ability to prioritize suitable habitat based upon higher abundance, and SDImax models can be utilized for the construction of Density Management Diagrams and the active management of future landscapes based on size-density relationships

The Power of Charisma: Investigating the Neglected Citizen–Politician Linkage in Hugo Chávez's Venezuela

Charisma has long been considered a powerful tool for leaders worldwide to rise to greatness. Yet we have given less attention to the way in which charismatic leaders develop deep, unmediated emotional bonds with their followers. I propose a compact theory that explains how charismatic attachments form, overwhelm alternative linkage types, and facilitate the development of powerful and potentially enduring political movements. To illustrate the theory, I turn to Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian movement in Venezuela. Firstly, the analysis of a 2007 survey from the Latin American Public Opinion Project demonstrates the disproportionate influence of charisma on citizens’ attachments to Bolivarianism relative to competing factors. Next, six original focus groups conducted with Bolivarian followers in 2016 illustrate the mechanisms underlying the followers’ surprisingly resilient loyalty, not only to the leader but also to his overarching movement. The results suggest that affective political attachments can help sustain charismatic movements after their founders disappear

Foraging for a foothold: Causes and consequences of dietary variation in a threatened avian pollinator

Foraging is a central theme in ecology and underlies some of the most fundamental interactions among species. While diet has long been treated as uniform within species, a paradigm shift is now taking place as ecologists recognize that individuals vary. However, questions remain about why this intraspecific variation exists and what consequences it may have for individuals, populations, and ecosystems. This information may be particularly important for species that are threatened due to food limitation, as dietary variation could be used to inform conservation efforts. In this thesis, I used the hihi (Notiomystis cincta), a threatened New Zealand passerine, as a case study to explore the causes and consequences of dietary variation and possible implications for conservation. Because observing threatened species is often difficult in the wild, I first developed methodology to obtain more reliable dietary estimates from limited foraging observations. Using these improved metrics, I found that individual hihi specialize within the broader species diet. Generalists survived better than specialists, suggesting that dietary specialization may have consequences for fitness. I next explored whether an array of intrinsic and extrinsic factors could explain dietary variation. Results suggested a weak correlation between diet and sociality, so I then conducted an experiment to test how directly altering the social environment affects diet. Using two scheduled conservation translocations, I found that individual hihi shifted towards more generalist diets when they were moved from a highly competitive source site to a less competitive release site. This suggests hihi share the same inherent dietary preferences but must specialize to avoid competition in dense populations. Furthermore, individuals that were more generalist before the translocation were more likely to be seen five months later, but only if they remained at the source site; at translocated sites, generalists tended to be less likely to be seen than specialists. These results suggest that selectively translocating specialists may improve translocation success without jeopardizing the source population. Finally, I investigated how foraging behavior can shape the environment. Hihi are pollinators of several threatened native plant species, so conservation of hihi could promote ecosystem recovery as well as species recovery. However, little is known about how effectively hihi translocations restore lost pollination function and whether individuals vary in their pollination abilities. Through a multi-site pollinator exclusion experiment, I found that ecosystems may be able to partially adapt to the loss of hihi. Nevertheless, hihi bring unique benefits to pollination by improving seed quality. There was also some evidence that individual hihi vary in their efficiency as pollinators. Together, my findings demonstrate that foraging is inextricably linked to the environment: the ecosystem shapes individual variation, which, in turn, shapes ecological functions. A better understanding of dietary variation may also have important implications for threatened species and ecosystems, informing the design of conservation interventions.Gates Cambridge Trus

Enhancing dietary specialization metrics in observational studies of wild animal populations

Studies of intraspecific dietary variation can greatly enrich our view of a species' niche and role in the ecosystem, particularly when species with broad diets are found to be composed of generalist and specialist individuals. However, the current framework for quantifying dietary specialization leaves certain standards unformalized and is susceptible to overestimating specialization when there are few repeated observations per individual, as is often the case in observational studies of wild populations. Here, we use the hihi (Notiomystis cincta), a threatened New Zealand passerine, as a case study for demonstrating how existing statistical tools can be applied to strengthen the dietary specialization framework. First, we assess whether the reliability of common dietary measures can be improved through Bayesian adjustments and by using rarefaction to compare uncertainty levels of metrics calculated from different sample sizes. As diet links closely to environmental factors, we also demonstrate how adding phenological data and habitat assessments to standard protocols can help validate our dietary measures as evidence for resource selection rather than random foraging. Finally, in light of our finding that diet predicts survival in hihi, we discuss the utility of dietary specialization for elucidating broader behavioral syndromes.Peer reviewe

The Viability of Pop-Up Thrift Shops in Increasing Revenues for Goodwill Industries of Akron

The Honors Project in Business Administration course at The University of Akron (UA) College of Business (CoB), conducted September 2021 through May 2022, involved partnership with the local nonprofit Goodwill Industries of Akron (GIA) at the direction of Interim Dean of the CoB, Dr. Susan Hanlon. The purpose of this capstone project was to generate ideas and recommendations to GIA for a new, sustainable business unit, the revenue of which would cover the annual $250,000 operating cost of a new transportation support initiative to overcome GIA’s clients’ barriers to employment. During the secondary research phase of this project undertaken from September 2021 through December 2021, three options for a new business unit were explored: a childcare center business unit; a vocational services and training business unit; and a curated pop-up shop business unit. Ultimately, the latter-most option was chosen as the focus for primary research, as GIA already has high brand recognition for resale goods in the eyes of consumers and operational experience in clothing and accessory sales that they could capitalize on to target a key demographic willing to spend additional monies (found to be called the “creativist” thrift shopper) to sustain a profitable business unit. In this publication, authors Morgan Andrews, Casey Bachowski, Caitlin Croston, Zach Dunphy, and Weston Latham (“Contributor Consultants”) discuss the primary research process which led to arriving at the recommendation that GIA implement a Pop-Up Thrift Shop business unit to increase revenues

Evaluating the success of functional restoration after reintroduction of a lost avian pollinator

Conservation translocation is a common method for species recovery, for which one increasingly frequent objective is restoring lost ecological functions to promote ecosystem recovery. However, few conservation translocation programs explicitly state or monitor function as an objective, limiting the ability to test assumptions, learn from past efforts, and improve management. We evaluated whether translocations of hihi (Notiomystis cincta), a threatened New Zealand passerine, achieved their implicit objective of restoring lost pollination function. Through a pollinator-exclusion experiment, we quantified, with log response ratios (lnR), the effects of birds on fruit set and seed quality in hangehange (Geniostoma ligustrifolium), a native flowering shrub. We isolated the contributions of hihi by making comparisons across sites with and without hihi. Birds improved fruit set more at sites without hihi (lnR = 1.27) than sites with hihi (lnR = 0.50), suggesting other avian pollinators compensated for and even exceeded hihi contributions to fruit set. Although birds improved seed germination only at hihi sites (lnR = 0.22-0.41), plants at sites without hihi had germination rates similar to hihi sites because they produced 26% more filled seeds, regardless of pollination condition. Therefore, although our results showed hihi improved seed quality, they also highlighted the complexity of ecological functions. When an important species is lost, ecosystems may be able to achieve similar function through different means. Our results underscore the importance of stating and monitoring the ecological benefits of conservation translocations when functional restoration is a motivation to ensure these programs are achieving their objectives.Peer reviewe

Do Dogs Prefer Helpers in an Infant-Based Social Evaluation Task?

Social evaluative abilities emerge in human infancy, highlighting their importance in shaping our species' early understanding of the social world. Remarkably, infants show social evaluation in relatively abstract contexts: for instance, preferring a wooden shape that helps another shape in a puppet show over a shape that hinders another character (Hamlin et al., 2007). Here we ask whether these abstract social evaluative abilities are shared with other species. Domestic dogs provide an ideal animal species in which to address this question because this species cooperates extensively with conspecifics and humans and may thus benefit from a more general ability to socially evaluate prospective partners. We tested dogs on a social evaluation puppet show task originally used with human infants. Subjects watched a helpful shape aid an agent in achieving its goal and a hinderer shape prevent an agent from achieving its goal. We examined (1) whether dogs showed a preference for the helpful or hinderer shape, (2) whether dogs exhibited longer exploration of the helpful or hinderer shape, and (3) whether dogs were more likely to engage with their handlers during the helper or hinderer events. In contrast to human infants, dogs showed no preference for either the helper or the hinderer, nor were they more likely to engage with their handlers during helper or hinderer events. Dogs did spend more time exploring the hindering shape, perhaps indicating that they were puzzled by the agent's unhelpful behavior. However, this preference was moderated by a preference for one of the two shapes, regardless of role. These findings suggest that, relative to infants, dogs show weak or absent social evaluative abilities when presented with abstract events and point to constraints on dogs' abilities to evaluate others' behavior

Exploration of the polymorphic solid-state landscape of an amide-linked organic cage using computation and automation

Organic cages can possess complex, functionalised internal cavities that make them promising candidates for synthetic enzyme mimics. Conformationally flexible but chemically robust structures are needed for adaptable guest binding and catalysis, but these rapidly exchanging systems are difficult to resolve in solution. Here, we use inexpensive calculations and high-throughput crystallisation experiments to identify accessible cage conformations for a recently reported organic cage by ‘locking’ them in the solid state. The conformers identified exhibit a range of distances between the carboxylic acid groups in the internal cavity, suggesting adaptability towards binding a wide array of target guest molecules. The complexity of the observed crystal structures goes beyond what is possible with state-of-the-art crystal structure prediction

Integrating facility-based surveillance with healthcare utilization surveys to estimate enteric fever incidence: Methods and challenges

Cohort studies and facility-based sentinel surveillance are common approaches to characterizing infectious disease burden, but present trade-offs; cohort studies are resource-intensive and may alter disease natural history, while sentinel surveillance underestimates incidence in the population. Hybrid surveillance, whereby facility-based surveillance is paired with a community-based healthcare utilization assessment, represents an alternative approach to generating population-based disease incidence estimates with moderate resource investments. Here, we discuss this method in the context of the Surveillance for Enteric Fever in Asia Project (SEAP) study. We describe how data are collected and utilized to adjust enteric fever incidence for blood culture sensitivity, facility-based enrollment, and healthcare seeking, incorporating uncertainty in these parameters in the uncertainty around incidence estimates. We illustrate how selection of surveillance sites and their coverage may influence precision and bias, and we identify approaches in the study design and analysis to minimize and control for these biases. Rigorously designed hybrid surveillance systems can be an efficient approach to generating population-based incidence estimates for infectious diseases

EMMS: Increasing Hope and Transforming Lives Through Improved Access to Electrical Power

Developing countries often face a challenge involving energy conservation. Energy Monitoring and Management Systems (EMMS) was tasked to make an energy meter in order to provide a practical way of controlling energy consumption and create a tool for teaching energy conservation. This meter should be able to measure energy usage over a period of time and prevent further energy usage after a specified amount has been consumed. In this poster, the team will explain what they have been doing in recent semesters to work towards their goal of testing and preparing this meter for implementation in Zimbabwe this summer, as well as how they have been improving the user experience through website implementation. Funding for this work provided by The Collaboratory for Strategic Partnerships and Applied Research.https://mosaic.messiah.edu/engr2022/1005/thumbnail.jp