Evaluating the Effectiveness of Public Television as a Method for Watershed Education

We describe a program that evolved from Cooperative Extension educators\u27 concern about declining attendance at face-to-face workshops on environmental issues. As a result, we developed an education program comprising six television programs; a radio series; Web-based materials; and information supplied to libraries. We randomly selected individuals to complete a written survey assessing their environmental knowledge and commitment pre- and post-broadcast. Our analyses indicate that watching the television programs did not predict significant changes in environmental knowledge or commitment. Our study findings do not strongly support the effectiveness of using local public television as an environmental education tool

Cornell Cooperative Extension Gains Efficiencies and Increases Capacity with a Central Database

Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) has developed a central database system that replaces many manual processes and streamlines many other administrative procedures. The history of the Central Database Project is provided, and major accomplishments are described. These improvements have increased CCE\u27s ability to comply with state and Federal regulations and with human resources policies. Daily operations are improved with easier access to data and analysis and administrative overhead is controlled, allowing staff to focus on program development and delivery. Finally, the improved technological capacity should increase technological credibility

Cornell Cooperative Extension Gains Efficiencies and Increases Capacity with a Central Database

Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) has developed a central database system that replaces many manual processes and streamlines many other administrative procedures. The history of the Central Database Project is provided, and major accomplishments are described. These improvements have increased CCE\u27s ability to comply with state and Federal regulations and with human resources policies. Daily operations are improved with easier access to data and analysis and administrative overhead is controlled, allowing staff to focus on program development and delivery. Finally, the improved technological capacity should increase technological credibility

Relative Impacts of Adult Movement, Larval Dispersal and Harvester Movement on the Effectiveness of Reserve Networks

Movement of individuals is a critical factor determining the effectiveness of reserve networks. Marine reserves have historically been used for the management of species that are sedentary as adults, and, therefore, larval dispersal has been a major focus of marine-reserve research. The push to use marine reserves for managing pelagic and demersal species poses significant questions regarding their utility for highly-mobile species. Here, a simple conceptual metapopulation model is developed to provide a rigorous comparison of the functioning of reserve networks for populations with different admixtures of larval dispersal and adult movement in a home range. We find that adult movement produces significantly lower persistence than larval dispersal, all other factors being equal. Furthermore, redistribution of harvest effort previously in reserves to remaining fished areas (‘fishery squeeze’) and fishing along reserve borders (‘fishing-the-line’) considerably reduce persistence and harvests for populations mobile as adults, while they only marginally changes results for populations with dispersing larvae. Our results also indicate that adult home-range movement and larval dispersal are not simply additive processes, but rather that populations possessing both modes of movement have lower persistence than equivalent populations having the same amount of ‘total movement’ (sum of larval and adult movement spatial scales) in either larval dispersal or adult movement alone