Outdoor recreation in the Winter of a Pandemic

A pandemic has the ability to affect lives from many different perspectives. The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the way people live, learn, and interact with one another; and it will create new social patterns reaching across virtually all platforms. One of the unforeseen problems with a pandemic includes the adaption needed to partake in social and recreational activities. Using a Qualtrics online survey posted on a popular forum for outdoor recreationists, this research study looked to investigate the varying trends due to COVID-19 on the winter outdoor sports community. The results demonstrate that the pandemic affected how people recreate, including whether they obtained resort passes and where they recreated. Additionally, it seems that the impact COVID-19 had on outdoor recreation varied across different geographic regions. In conclusion, this research suggests that the pandemic has caused changes within the outdoor winter recreation community. Understanding these effects is important on both individual and macroscale levels. Indeed, the data supports that resorts and communities dependent on tourism may see a decrease in commerce. Further, as recreationists find new places to recreate, safety concerns may increase. The trends in the data allow for an increase in the understanding of how global crises, akin to the COVID-19 pandemic, affect outdoor recreation and tourism, as well as how such crises impact emergency personnel

Responses of two Sericoda Kirby, 1837 (Coleoptera: Carabidae) species to forest harvesting, wildfire, and burn severity

Forest fires are among the most important natural disturbances in the boreal region, but fire-initiated succession is increasingly often interrupted by salvage logging, i.e., post-fire removal of burned trees. Unfortunately, very little is known about the ecological effects of this practice. To address this knowledge gap and to examine other factors affecting the abundance of two fire-associated carabid species (Sericoda quadripuntata and S. bembidioides) we conducted three field studies based on pitfall trapping in recent burns in Alberta, Canada. The results suggest that the abundance of both species drastically decreased from the first to the third post-fire year and that fire severity was positively associated with abundance of both species. The combined effects of wildfire and forest harvesting were associated with higher catches of S. quadripunctata, but lower catches of S. bembidioides. We discuss these findings in the contexts of salvage logging and species ecology

Biodiversity of Pollinators and Predators: Surveying and Increasing Appreciation of the Bees, Ants and Wasps of Georgia Southern University

Proposed by Drs. Joshua Gibson and Kevin Loope, and Bonnie Cobb (student) Department of Biology. ($28,000.00

New SETI Sky Surveys for Radio Pulses

Berkeley conducts 7 SETI programs at IR, visible and radio wavelengths. Here we review two of the newest efforts, Astropulse and Fly's Eye. A variety of possible sources of microsecond to millisecond radio pulses have been suggested in the last several decades, among them such exotic events as evaporating primordial black holes, hyper-flares from neutron stars, emissions from cosmic strings or perhaps extraterrestrial civilizations, but to-date few searches have been conducted capable of detecting them. We are carrying out two searches in hopes of finding and characterizing these mu-s to ms time scale dispersed radio pulses. These two observing programs are orthogonal in search space; the Allen Telescope Array's (ATA) "Fly's Eye" experiment observes a 100 square degree field by pointing each 6m ATA antenna in a different direction; by contrast, the Astropulse sky survey at Arecibo is extremely sensitive but has 1/3,000 of the instantaneous sky coverage. Astropulse's multibeam data is transferred via the internet to the computers of millions of volunteers. These computers perform a coherent de-dispersion analysis faster than the fastest available supercomputers and allow us to resolve pulses as short as 400 ns. Overall, the Astropulse survey will be 30 times more sensitive than the best previous searches. Analysis of results from Astropulse is at a very early stage. The Fly's Eye was successfully installed at the ATA in December of 2007, and to-date approximately 450 hours of observation has been performed. We have detected three pulsars and six giant pulses from the Crab pulsar in our diagnostic pointing data. We have not yet detected any other convincing bursts of astronomical origin in our survey data. (Abridged)Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, Accepted to Acta Astronautica "Special Issue: Life Signatures

Genomic Prediction: Progress and Perspectives for Rice Improvement

Genomic prediction can be a powerful tool to achieve greater rates of genetic gain for quantitative traits if thoroughly integrated into a breeding strategy. In rice as in other crops, the interest in genomic prediction is very strong with a number of studies addressing multiple aspects of its use, ranging from the more conceptual to the more practical. In this chapter, we review the literature on rice (Oryza sativa) and summarize important considerations for the integration of genomic prediction in breeding programs. The irrigated breeding program at the International Rice Research Institute is used as a concrete example on which we provide data and R scripts to reproduce the analysis but also to highlight practical challenges regarding the use of predictions. The adage “To someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail” describes a common psychological pitfall that sometimes plagues the integration and application of new technologies to a discipline. We have designed this chapter to help rice breeders avoid that pitfall and appreciate the benefits and limitations of applying genomic prediction, as it is not always the best approach nor the first step to increasing the rate of genetic gain in every context

Effects of Thermal Process Parameters on Mechanical Interlayer Strength for Additively Manufactured Ultem 9085

The effects of the envelope temperature on the microstructure and mechanical strength of Ultem 9085 fused deposition modeling (FDM) components were studied. A customized build chamber was developed for a commercial 3D printer in order to control the envelope temperature during printing. Test specimens were printed in the vertical direction because their mechanical strength exhibited the greatest dependence on inter-layer adhesion and neck development. A delay was introduced between two layers in each specimen in order to create a weak region where the neck was not expected to fully develop. However, none of the specimens failed in this region. Mechanical testing revealed that neck growth was highly dependent on the envelope temperature, and the strength was shown to vary significantly (20%) based on the envelope temperature. The variability of the mechanical strength also decreased as the envelope temperature increased. Thermal imaging revealed that the cooling rate of the specimens was consistent regardless of the envelope temperature. Fracture analysis confirmed that higher envelope temperatures improved the amount of neck growth and inter-layer adhesion in the specimens. This study showed that increasing the envelope temperature created parts with higher strengths and improved consistencies

Status of the UC-Berkeley SETI Efforts

We summarize radio and optical SETI programs based at the University of California, Berkeley. The SEVENDIP optical pulse search looks for ns time scale pulses at visible wavelengths using an automated 30 inch telescope. The ongoing SERENDIP V.v sky survey searches for radio signals at the 300 meter Arecibo Observatory. The currently installed configuration supports 128 million channels over a 200 MHz bandwidth with ~1.6 Hz spectral resolution. SETI@home uses the desktop computers of volunteers to analyze over 160 TB of data at taken at Arecibo looking for two types of continuous wave signals and two types of pulsed signals. A version to be released this summer adds autocorrelation analysis to look for complex wave forms that have been repeated (and overlayed) after a short delay. SETI@home will soon be processing data of Kepler exoplanet systems collected at the GBT. The Astropulse project is the first SETI search for $\mu$s time scale dispersed pulses in the radio spectrum. We recently reobserved 114 sky locations where microsecond pulses were detected. This data is in process of being transferred to Berkeley for analysis.Comment: 8 pages, including 1 figure. Presented at SPIE Conf. 8152, San Diego, CA, Aug 25, 201