Advancing Monitoring Infrastructure for Oregon’s Native Freshwater Turtles with Citizen Science Platforms

Monitoring is a core component of conservation plans as well as an opportunity for local stakeholders to contribute. Our objective was to advance monitoring infrastructure for the protection of native, threatened freshwater turtles in the Pacific Northwest through the creation of a citizen science application. This was done by researching previous designs of citizen science projects over the past ten years and improving the platform based on recommendations by practitioners. Current platforms can be improved by better crediting the work of citizen scientists, improving communication between scientists and users, building in flexibility for scientists, and accommodating for disabilities through ergonomic design. This set the framework to design and build a new multi-platform monitoring application. The final product is a mobile and web application that embodies these concepts and is ready for user-testing in the summer, providing scientists with critical data to help monitor multiple species of conservation concern, while engaging the public in this important task

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements