Animal-borne telemetry: An integral component of the ocean observing toolkit

Animal telemetry is a powerful tool for observing marine animals and the physical environments that they inhabit, from coastal and continental shelf ecosystems to polar seas and open oceans. Satellite-linked biologgers and networks of acoustic receivers allow animals to be reliably monitored over scales of tens of meters to thousands of kilometers, giving insight into their habitat use, home range size, the phenology of migratory patterns and the biotic and abiotic factors that drive their distributions. Furthermore, physical environmental variables can be collected using animals as autonomous sampling platforms, increasing spatial and temporal coverage of global oceanographic observation systems. The use of animal telemetry, therefore, has the capacity to provide measures from a suite of essential ocean variables (EOVs) for improved monitoring of Earth's oceans. Here we outline the design features of animal telemetry systems, describe current applications and their benefits and challenges, and discuss future directions. We describe new analytical techniques that improve our ability to not only quantify animal movements but to also provide a powerful framework for comparative studies across taxa. We discuss the application of animal telemetry and its capacity to collect biotic and abiotic data, how the data collected can be incorporated into ocean observing systems, and the role these data can play in improved ocean management

Measurements of the change of neutronic performance of a hydrogen moderator at Manuel Lujan Neutron Scattering Center due to conversion from ortho- to para-hydrogen state

The ortho/para-hydrogen ratio is a key parameter for the neutronic performance of a liquid hydrogen moderator. In order to get a better understanding of the influence that the ortho/para-hydrogen ratio has on the performance of such a moderator, we measured the neutronic performance of the partially coupled liquid-hydrogen moderator at the LANSCE Manuel Lujan Jr. Neutron Scattering Center, Los Alamos, USA, as a function of time after condensation. This was done by measuring the energy spectra and pulse shapes (neutron emission time distributions) of this moderator. It was found that the neutronic characteristic of the moderator changes with the elapsed time after condensation, and that the changes were so significant that for any scattering experiment made on such a moderator, the effect should be carefully evaluated

Moderators at LENS: Performance and Development Research

AbstractThe Target/Moderator/Reflector (TMR) system at the Low Energy Neutron Source has a flexible design in order to accommodate research into the performance of neutron moderators in general and small-scale accelerator-driven neutron sources in particular. Since producing its first cold neutron beam in April of 2005, the LENS TMR has undergone a number of design changes, and has been used to investigate a number of novel moderator ideas. In this paper we summarize the impact of some of these design changes on moderator performance as well as some recent results from a novel inhomogeneous moderator design that combines traditional moderating material (polyethylene) with single crystals of silicon