Species composition and classification of forest vegetation at the John T. Nickel Family Nature and Wildlife Preserve, Cherokee County, Oklahoma

The deciduous forests of Oklahoma are situated in a unique biogeographic position on the western fringe of the eastern deciduous forest. In this study, we describe the forest associations from a site in the Oklahoma Ozarks. Thirty-nine tree species were recorded from fifty plots. Tree species with the highest importance values were Pinus echinatus, Quercus marilandica, Q. velutina, Q. stellata, and Q. rubra. Based on interpretation of Nonmetric Multidimensional Scaling results, five forest vegetation associations were identified: Carya cordiformis -Q. stellata, P. echinata -Q. stellata, P. echinata -Q. velutina, Q. alba -Q. rubra, and Q. marilandica -Q. velutina

Vascular Flora of the Keystone Wildlife Management Area, Creek, Pawnee, and Osage Counties, Oklahoma

This paper reports the results of an inventory of the vascular plants at the Keystone Wildlife Management Area in northeastern Oklahoma. A total of 380 taxa of vascular plants in 254 genera and 79 families were collected. The most species were collected from the families Poaceae (58), Asteraceae (57), and Fabaceae (30). There were 160 annual and 220 perennial species. Fifty-six species of woody plants were present. A total of 59 exotic species were collected representing 15% of the flora. No species tracked by the Oklahoma Natural Heritage Inventory for rarity were found

A Floristic Inventory of the University of Oklahoma's Kessler Atmospheric and Ecological Field Station, McClain County, Oklahoma

This paper reports the results of a vascular plant inventory at the University of Oklahoma’s Kessler Atmospheric and Ecological Field Station in McClain County in the state of Oklahoma. A total of 388 taxa in 80 families were collected. Two hundred and fifty-seven genera, 361 species, and 27 infraspecific taxa were identified. The largest families were the Poaceae with 66 taxa and the Asteraceae with 55 taxa. Fifty-seven taxa were planted or non-native to the U.S. (14.7 % of the flora). Four taxa tracked by the Oklahoma Natural Heritage Inventory were found

Contributions to the Flora of Cimarron County and the Black Mesa Area

This paper reports the results of recent collection activities in Cimarron County, including the Black Mesa area, in the state of Oklahoma. A total of 331 taxa in 60 families were collected. Two-hundred and six genera, 279 species and 52 infraspecific taxa were identified. The largest families were the Poaceae with 72 taxa and the Asteraceae with 63. Thirty-six exotic taxa were collected (10.9 % of the flora), including two species new to Oklahoma: Scorzonera laciniata and Ranunculus testiculatus. Forty-six taxa tracked by the Oklahoma Natural Heritage Inventory were found

A review of the application of databases in freshwater fisheries management and the effect of water quality on the mean relative weight of largemouth bass, crappie, and channel catfish in Oklahoma lakes.

The subject of this thesis is the development and use of databases for use in fisheries management. The thesis consists of two chapters. The first is a literature review of fisheries databases and an overview of my work as a graduate research assistant with the Oklahoma Biological Survey and Oklahoma Fisheries Research Laboratory (OFRL) of the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation. The Standard Sampling Protocol (SSP) is at the core of both chapters. In chapter 1, I reviewed the fisheries database literature to aid in the development of the SSP Database and emphasize some of the issues that commonly occur with database development and application. This information guided me in the development of a relational database for the SSP data. The resulting database includes approximately 1.6 million records for 150 fish species in Oklahoma. The database schema consists of five tables: Abiotic, Biotic, SSP Species List, OBIS Taxonomy, and OWRB Lake Data. Chapter 2 employed the SSP database to determine if water quality parameters in 108 Oklahoma lakes influenced the relative weights of largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides), crappie (Pomoxis annularis and Pomoxis nigromaculatus), and channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus). Discriminant analysis of eight water quality parameters resulted in the classification of said lakes into six classes. Mean relative weights for largemouth bass, crappie, and catfish ranged from 89.84-99.17, 91.99-98.17, and 86.90-94.01 respectively. Salinity, which was the most important explanatory variable in lake classification, ranged from 0.04-0.63 ppt among the six classes. This information could prove useful to the fisheries managers of Oklahoma by reclassifying similar lakes regardless of management region, allowing for a different perspective on management practices

Linking the oceans to public health : current efforts and future directions

© 2008 Author et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License The definitive version was published in Environmental Health 7 (2008): S6, doi:10.1186/1476-069X-7-S2-S6.We review the major linkages between the oceans and public health, focusing on exposures and potential health effects due to anthropogenic and natural factors including: harmful algal blooms, microbes, and chemical pollutants in the oceans; consumption of seafood; and flooding events. We summarize briefly the current state of knowledge about public health effects and their economic consequences; and we discuss priorities for future research. We find that: • There are numerous connections between the oceans, human activities, and human health that result in both positive and negative exposures and health effects (risks and benefits); and the study of these connections comprises a new interdisciplinary area, "oceans and human health." • The state of present knowledge about the linkages between oceans and public health varies. Some risks, such as the acute health effects caused by toxins associated with shellfish poisoning and red tide, are relatively well understood. Other risks, such as those posed by chronic exposure to many anthropogenic chemicals, pathogens, and naturally occurring toxins in coastal waters, are less well quantified. Even where there is a good understanding of the mechanism for health effects, good epidemiological data are often lacking. Solid data on economic and social consequences of these linkages are also lacking in most cases. • The design of management measures to address these risks must take into account the complexities of human response to warnings and other guidance, and the economic tradeoffs among different risks and benefits. Future research in oceans and human health to address public health risks associated with marine pathogens and toxins, and with marine dimensions of global change, should include epidemiological, behavioral, and economic components to ensure that resulting management measures incorporate effective economic and risk/benefit tradeoffs.Funding was provided in part by the NSF-NIEHS Oceans Centers at Woods Hole, University of Hawaii, University of Miami, and University of Washington, and the NOAA Oceans and Human Health Initiative Centers of Excellent in Charleston, Seattle and Milwaukee, the National Center for Environmental Health (NCEH) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the WHOI Marine Policy Center. Grant numbers are: NIEHS P50 ES012742 and NSF OCE-043072 (HLKP, RJG, PH); NSF OCE 0432368 and NIEHS P50 ES12736 (LEF); NIEHS P50 ES012762 and NSF OCE-0434087 (EMF, AT, LRY); NSF OCE04-32479 and NIEHS P50 ES012740 (BAW

Lessening the hazards of Florida red tides: a common sense approach

© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Hoagland, P., Kirkpatrick, B., Jin, D., Kirkpatrick, G., Fleming, L. E., Ullmann, S. G., Beet, A., Hitchcock, G., Harrison, K. K., Li, Z. C., Garrison, B., Diaz, R. E., & Lovko, V. Lessening the hazards of Florida red tides: a common sense approach. Frontiers in Marine Science, 7, (2020): 538, doi:10.3389/fmars.2020.00538.In the Gulf of Mexico, especially along the southwest Florida coast, blooms of the dinoflagellate Karenia brevis are a coastal natural hazard. The organism produces a potent class of toxins, known as brevetoxins, which are released following cell lysis into ocean or estuarine waters or, upon aerosolization, into the atmosphere. When exposed to sufficient levels of brevetoxins, humans may suffer from respiratory, gastrointestinal, or neurological illnesses. The hazard has been exacerbated by the geometric growth of human populations, including both residents and tourists, along Florida’s southwest coast. Impacts to marine organisms or ecosystems also may occur, such as fish kills or deaths of protected mammals, turtles, or birds. Since the occurrence of a severe Karenia brevis bloom off the southwest Florida coast three-quarters of a century ago, there has been an ongoing debate about the best way for humans to mitigate the impacts of this hazard. Because of the importance of tourism to coastal Florida, there are incentives for businesses and governments alike to obfuscate descriptions of these blooms, leading to the social amplification of risk. We argue that policies to improve the public’s ability to understand the physical attributes of blooms, specifically risk communication policies, are to be preferred over physical, chemical, or biological controls. In particular, we argue that responses to this type of hazard must emphasize maintaining the continuity of programs of scientific research, environmental monitoring, public education, and notification. We propose a common-sense approach to risk communication, comprising a simplification of the public provision of existing sources of information to be made available on a mobile website.The research leading to these results was supported by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) under NSF Grant No. CNH 1009106. PH and DJ acknowledge the complementary support under NSF Grant No. PFI/BIC 1534054

Riparian area: Management handbook

The Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service periodically issues revisions to its publications. The most current edition is made available. For access to an earlier edition, if available for this title, please contact the Oklahoma State University Library Archives by email at [email protected] or by phone at 405-744-6311

EcoVeg: a new approach to vegetation description and classification

A vegetation classification approach is needed that can describe the diversity of terrestrial ecosystems and their transformations over large time frames, span the full range of spatial and geographic scales across the globe, and provide knowledge of reference conditions and current states of ecosystems required to make decisions about conservation and resource management. We summarize the scientific basis for EcoVeg, a physiognomic-floristic-ecological classification approach that applies to existing vegetation, both cultural (planted and dominated by human processes) and natural (spontaneously formed and dominated by nonhuman ecological processes). The classification is based on a set of vegetation criteria, including physiognomy (growth forms, structure) and floristics (compositional similarity and characteristic species combinations), in conjunction with ecological characteristics, including site factors, disturbance, bioclimate, and biogeography. For natural vegetation, the rationale for the upper levels (formation types) is based on the relation between global-scale vegetation patterns and macroclimate, hydrology, and substrate. The rationale for the middle levels is based on scaling from regional formations (divisions) to regional floristic-physiognomic types (macrogroup and group) that respond to meso-scale biogeographic, climatic, disturbance, and site factors. Finally, the lower levels (alliance and association) are defined by detailed floristic composition that responds to local to regional topo-edaphic and disturbance gradients. For cultural vegetation, the rationale is similar, but types are based on distinctive vegetation physiognomy and floristics that reflect human activities. The hierarchy provides a structure that organizes regional/continental vegetation patterns in the context of global patterns. A formal nomenclature is provided, along with a descriptive template that provides the differentiating criteria for each type at all levels of the hierarchy. Formation types have been described for the globe; divisions and macrogroups for North America, Latin America and Africa; groups, alliances and associations for the United States, parts of Canada, Latin America and, in partnership with other classifications that share these levels, many other parts of the globe

Mapping annual forest cover in sub-humid and semi-arid Regions through analysis of Landsat and PALSAR imagery

Accurately mapping the spatial distribution of forests in sub-humid to semi-arid regions over time is important for forest management but a challenging task. Relatively large uncertainties still exist in the spatial distribution of forests and forest changes in the sub-humid and semi-arid regions. Numerous publications have used either optical or synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing imagery, but the resultant forest cover maps often have large errors. In this study, we propose a pixel- and rule-based algorithm to identify and map annual forests from 2007 to 2010 in Oklahoma, USA, a transitional region with various climates and landscapes, using the integration of the L-band Advanced Land Observation Satellite (ALOS) PALSAR Fine Beam Dual Polarization (FBD) mosaic dataset and Landsat images. The overall accuracy and Kappa coefficient of the PALSAR/Landsat forest map were about 88.2% and 0.75 in 2010, with the user and producer accuracy about 93.4% and 75.7%, based on the 3270 random ground plots collected in 2012 and 2013. Compared with the forest products from Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), National Land Cover Database (NLCD), Oklahoma Ecological Systems Map (OKESM) and Oklahoma Forest Resource Assessment (OKFRA), the PALSAR/Landsat forest map showed great improvement. The area of the PALSAR/Landsat forest was about 40,149 km2 in 2010, which was close to the area from OKFRA (40,468 km2), but much larger than those from JAXA (32,403 km2) and NLCD (37,628 km2). We analyzed annual forest cover dynamics, and the results show extensive forest cover loss (2761 km2, 6.9% of the total forest area in 2010) and gain (3630 km2, 9.0%) in southeast and central Oklahoma, and the total area of forests increased by 684 km2 from 2007 to 2010. This study clearly demonstrates the potential of data fusion between PALSAR and Landsat images for mapping annual forest cover dynamics in sub-humid to semi-arid regions, and the resultant forest maps would be helpful to forest management.This study was supported in part by research grants from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture (2013-69002), the National Science Foundation (NSF) EPSCoR program (OIA-1301789), and the Department of the Interior, United States Geological Survey to AmericaView (G14AP00002).Ye