Migration of the Butterfly

This is an excerpt from a novella

Collection Change is Not a Hoax: Using Assessment to Promote Collection Sustainability

What do we mean by collection sustainability and how do we measure it? The presenters will discuss how their institution came to a shared understanding of collection sustainability, to develop key metrics for it, and to identify the qualitative and quantitative assessment data that shapes and measures it

Arctic Environmental Change across the Pliocene-Pleistocene Transition

Environmental change in the Arctic proceeds at an unprecedented rate. The Pliocene epoch (5-2.65 million years ago) represents an analog for future climate conditions, with pCO2 and continental configurations similar to present. Yet conditions in the Pliocene Arctic are poorly characterized because of sparse sampling. The records that do exist indicate periods of extreme warmth, as well as the first expansion of large ice-sheets in the Northern Hemisphere, took place from the end of the Pliocene into the early Pleistocene. Understanding these deposits and their implications for our future requires developing a sense of climatic evolution across the Plio-Pleistocene transition and especially during the intensification of Northern Hemisphere Glaciation (iNHG) ~2.7 million years ago. Here we reconstruct environmental change in the Arctic using a suite of organic geochemical proxies in a sedimentary archive recovered from Lake El\u27gygytgyn, Arctic Northeast Russia. We use the distribution of branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (brGDGTs) and the hydrogen isotopic composition (δD) of plant leaf-waxes (n-alkanes) to reconstruct relative temperature change across the interval spanning 2.8 to 2.4 million years ago. Our work demonstrates that, following the first major glaciation of the Northern Hemisphere, it took multiple glacial cycles for the Arctic to become synchronized with the climatic changes recorded in the deep ocean. This work has implications for understanding the role of sea-level, sea-ice, vegetation and carbon-cycle feedbacks in a changing Arctic

Modeling the Pleistocene History of the Greenland Ice Sheet

One of the most profound and immediate consequences of anthropogenic climate change is sea level rise, which in large part is driven by the melting of polar ice sheets. The Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) contains enough ice to raise global sea level by ~7 meters. Fluctuations of the GrIS in response to past climate change provide an opportunity to better understanding the stability of the ice sheet during periods of climatic change. In this thesis, we use numerical ice-sheet models to understand the causes and consequences of past fluctuations of the Greenland ice sheet. In Chapters 3 and 4, we examined the last deglaciation (21,000 years ago until present day). The last deglaciation is the most recent time when the ice sheet retreated significantly, shrinking from its advanced state during the Last Glacial Maximum to a minimum configuration slightly smaller than the present-day ice sheet. We evaluate simulations of the deglaciation against a database of observations in order to understand the causes and drivers of ice-sheet retreat around the margin of the ice sheet for different climate scenarios. In Chapter 3, we show how abrupt climate change and changes in seasonality affected different regions of the ice sheet by modulating the timing of deglaciation around the margin. In Chapter 4, we analyze the mass balance processes that drove retreat in each region in order to identify the most salient drivers of retreat for each major drainage of the GrIS. Chapters 3 and 4 are in preparation for publication. In Chapter 5, we studied the initiation of the ice sheet during the warm Pliocene. We show that early fluctuations of the ice sheet can lead to the development of a large proglacial lake, which has major implications for landscape evolution, abrupt climate change, and ice-sheet stability during the Pliocene and Pleistocene. These proglacial lakes have the potential to affect erosional processes, and we argue that they may be responsible for carving Petermann canyon, a geomorphological feature which has important implications for future ice-sheet stability. Chapter 5 has been submitted for publication. In Chapter 6, we used different proxy records from the high Arctic to examine GrIS stability over the last 800,000 years. We show that proxy records from Lake El’gygytgyn (Arctic Siberia) and IODP Site 982 (North Atlantic Ocean) lead to divergent ice sheet histories which are nevertheless consistent with recent sea-level targets and the observation of cosmogenic nuclides in the bedrock below central Greenland. This study demonstrates the potential for numerical ice-sheet models to be used to assist with the identification of locales where additional data constraints could have the largest impact on our understanding of the history of the ice sheet. Chapter 6 is in preparation for publication

An economic analysis of producing beef cattle in the dark-fired tobacco area of Tennessee

The specific objective is to show relative costs and returns from alternative cropping systems for selected situations on beef cattle farms in the dark-fired tobacco area of the Northern Highland Rim of Tennessee, including Cheatham, Dickson, Montgomery and Robertson counties. The scope of the study is confined to the cow-calf system of beef cattle production In this area. No attempt Is made to compare all farm alternatives, but merely to compare several decidedly different forage alternatives In beef cattle production

A Study to Determine Relations Between Maturity and Achievement of Under-Age Students

Individual differences is a subject that has been greatly emphasized by those studying human development in the last seventy-five years. There has been considerable discussion and research done on individual differences in education, too; however, little has been done about it. Instead of providing for individual differences, the trend in the last twenty-five years seems to be neglecting or ignoring it

Community Leaders\u27 Perceptions of Their Leadership Behaviors and Practices Used to Influence K-12 Public Education: A Q Methodology Study

This Q methodology study focused on the perspectives of diverse community leaders concerning how their perceptions of leadership behaviors and practices were used to influence K-12 public education. The leaders’ perspectives were identified, described, analyzed, and compared with others who shared similar views through the use of Q methodology. Through purposeful and snowball sampling, a diverse group of community leader participants first responded to an open-ended questionnaire, inviting them to provide the leadership behaviors and practices they use to influence K-12 public education. This process of concourse development resulted in a total of 263 statements. These statements were then systematically reduced to 42 statements to be used in the Q sample, or research instrument. The Q sample represented the broad perspectives of the opinion domain and specifically addressed the content of the research question: How do community leaders perceive that their leadership behaviors and practices are used to influence K-12 public education? In the second stage of this Q methodology study, 45 community leader participants sorted these 42 statements to best reflect how they believed they most influenced public education. Following each sort, participants provided a rationale for their ± 4 statements which were used to further inform the data interpretation. These 45 Q sorts were then correlated to one another, and these intercorrelations were factor analyzed. Four factors were then rotated and extracted for this study. These four factors were analyzed abductively through examining the holistic placement of statements within their respective factor arrays, the descriptive comments provided following the Q sorts, and the demographic characteristics of the participants who comprised each factor. As a result of this analysis, the four factors were named: (a) Voice the Story and the Needs of My Underserved Community, (b) Provide Resources, Advocacy, and Grassroots Mobility, (c) Learn About Educational Issues to Lobby and to Serve, and (d) Build Supportive and Personal Relationships with Key School Stakeholders to Stay Informed

Sacred or Secular? How Student Perceptions May Guide Library Space Design and Utilization

This program reports on a collaborative research study that examined student reactions to various library designs. Building on research into why some library spaces are preferred due to their sacred or inspirational nature, the presenters conducted a study utilizing interior and exterior images of both traditional and modern-looking library spaces. Students were asked to provide their reaction to the spaces, how often and for what purposes they would use such spaces, whether they believed that type of library space would advance the institutional mission, and whether they felt that space was of a sacred/spiritual or secular/non-spiritual nature. This research will be of interest to those using data to match student preferences to future library space renovation and construction. It may also be one tool used to describe how certain types of spaces demonstrate the value of libraries in advancing the institutional mission. It adds to our literature in that no similar research on sacred library spaces compared results between students at a public research university and a theological seminary. Finally, there will be interest in how the researchers developed the survey utilizing an image pool with the split-randomization technique and how that survey was administered at two institutions