Supervisors' Perceptions of the Performance of Cooperative Education Employees Working in Federal Agencies

Through cooperative education programs, many public agencies employ college students part time or intermittently and groom them for future full-time employment The combination of winnowing and nurturing that occurs in these programs is believed to produce higher performing employees This study tests this hypothesis by comparing Federal supervisors' perceptions of the performance of co-op employees with those recruited from other sources Data come from the 1992 Merit Principles Survey, US Merit Systems Protection Board The results indicate that co-op employees perform at high levels, but they do not outperform other employees as a whole Next, we compare the performance ratings of Federal workers from seven other recruitment sources to see if any source is superior Some interesting findings emerge Of course, performance ratings are an incomplete indicator of an employee's value to the organization These ratings merely reflect supervisors' perceptions, and while high performance is important, agencies may wish to promote other goals in their recruitment and retention efforts such as workforce diversityYeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Refined forest land use classification with implications for United States national carbon accounting

The United States provides annual estimates of carbon sources and sinks as part of its National Green-house Gas Inventory (NGHGI). Within this effort, carbon stocks and fluxes are reported for six land use categories that are relevant to economic sectors and land use policy. The goal of this study is to develop methodologies that will allow the US to align with an internationally agreed upon forest land use definition which requires forest to be able to reach 5 m in height at maturity. Models to assess height potential are available for a majority of US forests except for woodland ecosystems. We develop a set of models to assess height potential in these systems. Our results suggest that ∼13.5 million ha of forests are unlikely to meet the international definition of forests due to environmental limitations to maximum attainable height. The incorporation of this height criteria in the NGHGI results in a carbon stock transfer of ∼848 Tg from the forest land use to woodland land use (a sub-category of grasslands) with minimal effect on sequestration rates. The development of a forest land use definition sensitive to climatic factors in this study enables a land use classification system that can be responsive to climate change effects on land uses themselves while being more consistent across a host of international and domestic carbon reporting efforts