Avifauna and urban encroachment in time and space

AIM: Urban expansion significantly alters fringe environments often with unde-sirable impacts on biodiversity. Consequently, there is a need to define clearconservation objectives for areas subject to urban encroachment. Urban fringe development is a highly dynamic process, both spatially and temporally, but few studies are equipped to examine its temporal effects on biota. We aimed to explore the impacts of urban encroachment on avifauna through space and time.LOCATION: The Australian Capital Territory, Australia. METHODS: We used records from an extensive 14-year monitoring programme undertaken in temperate woodland. We fitted hierarchical generalized linear models to assess individual species responses to the distance from monitoring sites to the urban boundary, and the temporal rate of change in this distance through time. We used factorial analysis on mixed data to examine trait group responses to these predictors.RESULTS: Our results indicated that the occurrence of approximately half of the study region’s avifauna is strongly linked to the proximity of their habitat to the urban fringe, but that the impact of urban fringe development on the occurrence of some species changed through time. We identified several species of conservation concern that respond negatively to large annual increases in urban fringe development, irrespective of its proximity to suitable habitat. Species responses to urban proximity were linked to life history traits, with small,migratory, woodland-dependent species that rely on mid- and upper-canopy structures, clearly disadvantaged by urban environments.MAIN CONCLUSIONS: Our findings demonstrate the breadth of species responses to urban encroachment over much larger distances than is typically investigated in urban ecological studies. We identify guilds vulnerable to the impacts of urban fringe development and therefore in need of ecologically sensitive urban design. We argue that future urban expansion towards important fringe habitats will need to be planned strategically through space and time.This research received funding support from Conservation Planning and Research, Environment and Sustainable Devel-opment Directorate ACT Government and the Fenner Schoolof Environment and Society. DBL, PG and KI were sup-ported by the National Environmental Research Program. ADM was supported by an ARC Future Fellowship (FT100100358)

Pregnancy Outcomes in Women With a History of Previable, Preterm Prelabor Rupture of Membranes:

To characterize subsequent pregnancy outcomes among women with a history of previable, preterm prelabor rupture of membranes (PROM) and assess factors associated with recurrent preterm birth

Attitudes and perceptions about ecological resources and hazards of people living around the Savannah River Site

Although considerable attention is devoted to environmental monitoring and assessment with respect to both pollutants and the status of particular plant or animal populations, less attention is devoted to assessing people\u27s attitudes about the relative importance of ecological resources. In this paper we examine the attitudes and perceptions about ecological resources of people living around the Department of Energy\u27s Savannah River Site (SRS), in South Carolina. Our overall hypothesis is that people who are directly affected by the possible outcomes and consequences of a particular hazard (i.e., those people employed at SRS) will undervalue the risks and overvalue the potential benefits from future land uses that favour continued site activity, compared to people who live near but are not employed at SRS. We interviewed 286 people attending the Aiken Trials horse show on 14 March 1997. There were few gender differences, although men hunted and fished more than women, women ranked three environmental concerns as more severe than did men, and women were more concerned about the effect of SRS on property values. Maintenance of SRS as a National Environmental Research Park ranked first as a future land use; nuclear production ranked second, followed by hunting and hiking. Only residential development ranked very low as a future land use. There were many differences as a function of employment history at SRS: (1) people who work at SRS think that the federal government should spend funds to clean up all nuclear facilities, and they think less money should be spent on other environmental problems than did non-employees, (2) people who work at SRS ranked continued current uses of SRS higher than did people who never worked at SRS, and (3) people who work at SRS are less concerned about the storage of nuclear material or accidents at the site than are people who never worked at the site

Attitudes and perceptions about ecological resources and hazards of people living around the Savannah River Site

Although considerable attention is devoted to environmental monitoring and assessment with respect to both pollutants and the status of particular plant or animal populations, less attention is devoted to assessing people\u27s attitudes about the relative importance of ecological resources. In this paper we examine the attitudes and perceptions about ecological resources of people living around the Department of Energy\u27s Savannah River Site (SRS), in South Carolina. Our overall hypothesis is that people who are directly affected by the possible outcomes and consequences of a particular hazard (i.e., those people employed at SRS) will undervalue the risks and overvalue the potential benefits from future land uses that favour continued site activity, compared to people who live near but are not employed at SRS. We interviewed 286 people attending the Aiken Trials horse show on 14 March 1997. There were few gender differences, although men hunted and fished more than women, women ranked three environmental concerns as more severe than did men, and women were more concerned about the effect of SRS on property values. Maintenance of SRS as a National Environmental Research Park ranked first as a future land use; nuclear production ranked second, followed by hunting and hiking. Only residential development ranked very low as a future land use. There were many differences as a function of employment history at SRS: (1) people who work at SRS think that the federal government should spend funds to clean up all nuclear facilities, and they think less money should be spent on other environmental problems than did non-employees, (2) people who work at SRS ranked continued current uses of SRS higher than did people who never worked at SRS, and (3) people who work at SRS are less concerned about the storage of nuclear material or accidents at the site than are people who never worked at the site

Three Dimensional Distorted Black Holes

We present three-dimensional, {\it non-axisymmetric} distorted black hole initial data which generalizes the axisymmetric, distorted, non-rotating [Bernstein93a] and rotating [Brandt94a] single black hole data developed by Bernstein, Brandt, and Seidel. These initial data should be useful for studying the dynamics of fully 3D, distorted black holes, such as those created by the spiraling coalescence of two black holes. We describe the mathematical construction of several families of such data sets, and show how to construct numerical solutions. We survey quantities associated with the numerically constructed solutions, such as ADM masses, apparent horizons, measurements of the horizon distortion, and the maximum possible radiation loss ($MRL$).Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in Classical and Quantum Gravit

Finding Apparent Horizons in Dynamic 3D Numerical Spacetimes

We have developed a general method for finding apparent horizons in 3D numerical relativity. Instead of solving for the partial differential equation describing the location of the apparent horizons, we expand the closed 2D surfaces in terms of symmetric trace--free tensors and solve for the expansion coefficients using a minimization procedure. Our method is applied to a number of different spacetimes, including numerically constructed spacetimes containing highly distorted axisymmetric black holes in spherical coordinates, and 3D rotating, and colliding black holes in Cartesian coordinates.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures, LaTex, to appear in Phys. Rev. D. Minor changes mad

Harmonic analysis of iterated function systems with overlap

In this paper we extend previous work on IFSs without overlap. Our method involves systems of operators generalizing the more familiar Cuntz relations from operator algebra theory, and from subband filter operators in signal processing.Comment: 37 page