The Greening of Faith: God, the Environment, and the Good Life (20th Anniversary Edition)

The recent release of Pope Francis’s much-discussed encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, has reinforced environmental issues as also moral and spiritual issues. This anthology, twenty years ahead of the encyclical but very much in line with its agenda, offers essays by fifteen philosophers, theologians, and environmentalists who argue for a response to ecology that recognizes the tools of science but includes a more spiritual approach—one with a more humanistic, holistic view based on inherent reverence toward the natural world. Writers whose orientations range from Buddhism to evangelical Christianity to Catholicism to Native American beliefs explore ways to achieve this paradigm shift and suggest that “the environment is not only a spiritual issue, but the spiritual issue of our time.”https://scholars.unh.edu/unh_press/1003/thumbnail.jp

Connecting algebra to geometry: A transition summer camp for at-risk students

The authors share how they designed curriculum for a summer algebra camp, for eighth graders in a district serving high proportions of Latino students. They discuss the impact the algebra camp had on students’ confidence in mathematics and mathematical ability

Ursinus College Bulletin Vol. 17, No. 9, June 15, 1901

A digitized copy of the June 15, 1901 Ursinus College Bulletin.https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/ucbulletin/1190/thumbnail.jp

Gravid Tetragnathid Spiders Show an Increased Functional Response

Spiders in the genus Tetragnatha feed on emerging aquatic insects, including mosquitoes and midges, but there is little known about the foraging behavior of these spiders. We hypothesized that female spiders actively developing egg sacs would increase food consumption to provide more energy to produce and provision their eggs. We tested this hypothesis by measuring foraging rates of Tetragnatha spiders kept in jars and provisioned with different levels of midges. We then tested for a difference in the functional response of spiders that did or did not lay egg sacs in their jars. Egg-laying and non-egg-laying spiders showed significantly different functional responses, indicating that Tetragnatha spiders can change their behavior or web structure to increase their foraging rate, presumably to accommodate increased energy demand for reproduction

Eighty years of food-web response to interannual variation in discharge recorded in river diatom frustules from an ocean sediment core.

Little is known about the importance of food-web processes as controls of river primary production due to the paucity of both long-term studies and of depositional environments which would allow retrospective fossil analysis. To investigate how freshwater algal production in the Eel River, northern California, varied over eight decades, we quantified siliceous shells (frustules) of freshwater diatoms from a well-dated undisturbed sediment core in a nearshore marine environment. Abundances of freshwater diatom frustules exported to Eel Canyon sediment from 1988 to 2001 were positively correlated with annual biomass of Cladophora surveyed over these years in upper portions of the Eel basin. Over 28 years of contemporary field research, peak algal biomass was generally higher in summers following bankfull, bed-scouring winter floods. Field surveys and experiments suggested that bed-mobilizing floods scour away overwintering grazers, releasing algae from spring and early summer grazing. During wet years, growth conditions for algae could also be enhanced by increased nutrient loading from the watershed, or by sustained summer base flows. Total annual rainfall and frustule densities in laminae over a longer 83-year record were weakly and negatively correlated, however, suggesting that positive effects of floods on annual algal production were primarily mediated by "top-down" (consumer release) rather than "bottom-up" (growth promoting) controls

Ichthyological Bulletin of the J.L.B. Smith Institute of Ichthyology; No. 45

Fifteen species of the labrid fish genus Halichoeres occur in the western Indian Ocean (west of the southern tip of India): hortulanus (centiquadrus of many authors), scapularis, (ziczac is a synonym), marginatus (lamarii, ianthinus and virescens are synonyms), dussumieri (nigrescens of many authors; javanicus, dubius and dianthus are synonyms), pardaleocephalus (first western Indian Ocean record), hoevenii (vrolikii is a synonym), nebulosus (previously confused with margaritaceus which does not occur in the Indian Ocean), zeylonicus (bimaculatus of most authors is a synonym), lapillus, and six new species (stigmaticus, pelicieri, cosmetus, iridis, trispilus, and leucoxanthus). H. stigmaticus from the Persian Gulf is distinctive in having 28 lateral-line scales, 6 or 7 suborbital pores, and a U-shaped black mark on side above pectoral fin tips in males; H. pelicieri from Mauritius is a close relative of H. zeylonicus, differing chiefly in the colour of males (pelicieri with a broad blackish zone in dorsal fin and no large black spot on upper side); H. cosmetus, wide-ranging in the western Indian Ocean and a close relative of H. ornatissimus of the Pacific and Cocos-Keeling Islands, is alternately striped with bluish gray to green and salmon pink or yellow; H. iridis, also a species of the western Indian Ocean, has a dark brown body except for a red band along the back and an orange-yellow head with green bands; H. trispilus, known only from Mauritius and the Maldives, is pale pink with a diagonal row of three dark brown spots on upper caudal base and usually three black dots on back; H. leucoxanthus, known only from the Maldives, southwest Thailand and Java, is yellow dorsally and abruptly white on ventral half of body with a dark spot behind the eye, a black spot on upper caudal base, and three others in the dorsal fin.Rhodes University Libraries (Digitisation

DIRECT ESTIMATION OF ABOVEGROUND FOREST PRODUCTIVITY THROUGH HYPERSPECTRAL REMOTE SENSING OF CANOPY NITROGEN

The concentration of nitrogen in foliage has been related to rates of net photosynthesis across a wide range of plant species and functional groups and thus represents a simple and biologically meaningful link between terrestrial cycles of carbon and nitrogen. Although foliar N is used by ecosystem models to predict rates of leaf‐level photosynthesis, it has rarely been examined as a direct scalar to stand‐level carbon gain. Establishment of such relationships would greatly simplify the nature of forest C and N linkages, enhancing our ability to derive estimates of forest productivity at landscape to regional scales. Here, we report on a highly predictive relationship between whole‐canopy nitrogen concentration and aboveground forest productivity in diverse forested stands of varying age and species composition across the 360 000‐ha White Mountain National Forest, New Hampshire, USA. We also demonstrate that hyperspectral remote sensing can be used to estimate foliar N concentration, and hence forest production across a large number of contiguous images. Together these data suggest that canopy‐level N concentration is an important correlate of productivity in these forested systems, and that imaging spectrometry of canopy N can provide direct estimates of forest productivity across large landscapes

High spectral resolution remote sensing of canopy chemistry

Near infrared laboratory spectra have been used for many years to determine nitrogen and lignin concentrations in plant materials. In recent years, similar high spectral resolution visible and infrared data have been available via airborne remote sensing instruments. Using data from NASA's Airborne visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) we attempt to identify spectral regions correlated with foliar chemistry at the canopy level in temperate forests