Living Shorelines & Resilience in Southern California: A Summary of a Series of Workshops held as part of The Resilient Coastlines Project of Greater San Diego

In 2016, a series of workshops were held to discuss living shorelines in SouthernCalifornia. The workshops specifically focused on the unique benefits, challenges andopportunities for implementing living shorelines in the region, and the nexus betweennature-based solutions and ongoing local adaptation planning. Approximately 140participants partook in these dialogues, and some of the key themes that emergedinclude: Letting nature do the work for you Designing for the future Integrating nature into shoreline management projects Project goals distinguishing living shorelines Engineering and urban living shorelines Space constraints along urban coastlines Permitting pathways to support demonstration projects Living shorelines and phased sea level rise planning Designing with watersheds and sediment management in mind Exploring emerging commercial opportunities Public access and project success Planning for living shorelines alongside the community Sharing monitoring and best practices to ensure future success Citizen science and socio-ecological monitoringThe workshops provided the first ever opportunity for Southern California stakeholdersto outline what is unique about designing living shorelines in the context of SouthernCalifornia shorelines for state and federal entities

LONGEVITY OF WOODHOUSE\u27S TOAD IN COLORADO

Little is known about the longevity of amphibians in nature. Records from captive specimens have demonstrated life spans of 10 to 20 yr for a number of anuran species, including 36 yr for Bufo bufo (Duellman WE, Trueb L. 1986. Biology of Amphibians. New York: McGraw-Hill. 670 p). Here, we report on a male Woodhouse\u27s toad (Bufo woodhousii) which appeared in 1978, and has apparently remained since, in a basement window well of a brick home in an unincorporated western suburb of Denver, Colorado (T3S, R69W, 530). In the intervening years no other toads have been observed in any of the other window wells around the house and no distinctive differences in size and appearance of this toad have occurred, which makes it unlikely that multiple animals over time could have been assumed to be a single individual. This individual has now been observed continuously during the warmer months for 19 yr. Although we cannot know its age when it first dropped into the window well, it is likely that this individual exceeds 20 yr of age. The site in which this toad trapped itself is well protected or removed from most potential predator species and offers reliable food sources (insects, spiders, earthworms), factors which undoubtedly provide optimal circumstances for maximal longevity. The window well structure is in a small garden along the east face of the home. A 1.5 m wooden fence to the south protects it from the sun, while a nearby faucet provides moisture from early spring through mid-fall

How social movement unionism helped shape the 2006 immigrant rights marches in L.A.

Labor scholars have long advocated social movement unionism as a strategy to revitalize the American labor movement, but how is social movement unionism practiced? Cassandra Engeman exams union participation in the 2006 Los Angeles immigrant rights marches as a case of social movement unionism. She finds that unions allied with large community organizations, preferred reform goals, and advocated tactics perceived as effective. Such strategic decisions were informed by organizational considerations regarding member representation and the long-term capacity for mobilization

Common Ravens Conditioned to a Nutritious Seasonal Aquatic Food Source in Rocky Mountain National Park

Common Ravens (Corvus corax) are among the most intelligent of birds with extraordinary problem-solving capabilities (Heinrich 1995, Heinrich and Bugnyar 2005). Their intelligence, behavioral flexibility, and omnivorous diet allow ravens to adapt to many conditions and innovatively learn foraging behaviors, especially in context with human landscape changes and food sources (e.g., Ficken 1977, Andersson 1989, Heinrich 1995, Lefebvre et al. 1997). Ravens can also identify interconnections between stimuli and potential unseen food resources. For example, a controlled experiment in Wyoming found that Common Ravens learned to fly toward gunshots, but only in forested areas where the auditory stimuli would be most beneficial for locating carcasses or gut piles; they did not respond to other loud sounds like airhorns or slamming car doors (White 2005). In another study, ravens learned to follow researchers who were setting up artificial nests so they could immediately raid them (Vander Haegen et al. 2002)

Alternatives to Fisher\u27s Exact Test for Analyzing 2 X 2 Tables with Small Cell Sizes

Rice (1988a) presents an interesting test for analyzing 2 X 2 contingency tables in the smaller sample size situations. His motivation was to provide an alternative to Fisher\u27s exact test and his rationale was based on the application of a prior distribution to the probability of a success, 0, under the null hypothesis. We would like to briefly comment on these aspects of his paper and also discuss another alternative that was proposed a number of years ago

Evaluating and validating abundance monitoring methods in the absence of populations of known size: review and application to a passive tracking index

Rarely is it possible to obtain absolute numbers in free-ranging populations and although various direct and indirect methods are used to estimate abundance, few are validated against populations of known size. In this paper, we apply grounding, calibration and verification methods, used to validate mathematical models, to methods of estimating relative abundance. To illustrate how this might be done, we consider and evaluate the widely applied passive tracking index (PTI) methodology. Using published data, we examine the rationality of PTI methodology, how conceptually animal activity and abundance are related and how alternative methods are subject to similar biases or produce similar abundance estimates and trends.We then attune the method against populations representing a range of densities likely to be encountered in the field. Finally, we compare PTI trends against a prediction that adjacent populations of the same species will have similar abundance values and trends in activity. We show that while PTI abundance estimates are subject to environmental and behavioural stochasticity peculiar to each species, the PTI method and associated variance estimate showed high probability of detection, high precision of abundance values and, generally, low variability between surveys, and suggest that the PTI method applied using this procedure and for these species provides a sensitive and credible index of abundance. This same or similar validation approach can and should be applied to alternative relative abundance methods in order to demonstrate their credibility and justify their use