Superintendent Leadership and Student Achievement in Suburban High Schools: A Sequential Explanatory Mixed Methods Analysis

This research study explored the critical nature of the connection between student achievement and superintendent leadership. A great deal of scholarship has addressed either student achievement or leadership and previous evidence has suggested the impact of both parental education and racioethnicity on student achievement, but few studies have investigated the relationship between the superintendent\u27s leadership authority and the achievement of his or her students. The central research questions of this study are: 1) To what degree does parental education predict high school student achievement in suburban Chicagoland? 2) To what degree does racioethnicity predict high school student achievement in suburban Chicagoland? 3) When comparing districts with lower-achieving high school to districts with higher-achieving high school students, and taking into account factors of parental education and racioethnicity, how do Suburban Chicagoland superintendents differ in their use of the following five sources of authority for leadership as defined by Sergiovanni: (1) Bureaucratic Authority, (2) Psychological Authority, (3) Technical-Rational Authority, (4) Professional Authority, (5) Moral Authority? This study utilized a sequential explanatory mixed methodology. Participants included six superintendents from the 71 districts in suburban Chicago that include high schools. Three of these superintendents led districts where student achievement is exceeding projections and three led districts where student achievement is not meeting projections. Participation in the study was voluntary and included the completion of a Letter of Cooperation, a Letter of Consent, and a 60-minute interview with the researcher consisting of open-ended questions. The subsequent data collected from the superintendents\u27 interviews was triangulated with community-aligned student achievement data as well as Sergiovanni\u27s five sources of authority. This study concluded that community-aligned student achievement data predicted 93.6% of the variance in student achievement as measured by the ACT composite score. Additionally while superintendents used all of Sergiovanni\u27s sources of authority with different audiences, superintendents who used moral authority in decision-making that directly impacted the classroom had a positive and measureable impact on student achievement

Survival and Habitat of Pen-Raised Northern Bobwhites at Camp Robinson Wildlife Demonstration Area, Arkansas (Poster Abstract)

Post-release survival of pen-reared northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) is often extremely low. Although predation is usually assumed to cause low survival rates, very little detailed research has been conducted into cause-specific mortality of pen-reared bobwhites in natural settings. Further, little is known about habitat selection by pen-reared bobwhites, and the relationship between habitat and survival. We report results based on 110 radiomarked bobwhites out of 2500 banded and released at Camp Robinson Wildlife Demonstration Area in Arkansas. Birds were released at 125 sites in coveys of 20 birds per site. Release sites were ranked based on habitat quality. In addition, habitat analyses were conducted over each individual’s area of activity. In March 2001, when monitoring of birds ended, 6 birds remained alive. Mortality agents included avian predators (51%, n = 49), mammalian predators (36%, n = 35) and unknown predators (13%, n = 12). Other causes of mortality included radio collars (5%, n = 5) and apparent heat stress (3%, n = 3). Most mortality occurred within 1 month of release (66%, n = 73). Overall mean survival was 36.4 +- 4.3 days. We found no significant difference in length of survival among birds released at good, medium, or poor sites (P = 0.97). Regardless of release site, birds were located most often in shrub cover (50%, n = 388 locations) while the second most common habitat used was herbaceous cover (29%, n = 230 locations). During callback trapping in May 2001, we recaptured 14 bobwhites that were banded and released in August of 2000, and 6 wild birds, suggesting that pen-reared birds actually outnumbered wild birds

Disentangling trophic interactions inside a Caribbean marine reserve

Author Posting. © Ecological Society of America, 2010. This article is posted here by permission of Ecological Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Ecological Applications 20 (2010): 1979–1992, doi:10.1890/09-1217.1.Recent empirical studies have demonstrated that human activities such as fishing can strongly affect the natural capital and services provided by tropical seascapes. However, policies to mitigate anthropogenic impacts can also alter food web structure and interactions, regardless of whether the regulations are aimed at single or multiple species, with possible unexpected consequences for the ecosystems and their associated services. Complex community response to management interventions have been highlighted in the Caribbean, where, contrary to predictions from linear food chain models, a reduction in fishing intensity through the establishment of a marine reserve has led to greater biomass of herbivorous fish inside the reserve, despite an increased abundance of large predatory piscivores. This positive multi-trophic response, where both predators and prey benefit from protection, highlights the need to take an integrated approach that considers how numerous factors control species coexistence in both fished and unfished systems. In order to understand these complex relationships, we developed a general model to examine the trade-offs between fishing pressure and trophic control on reef fish communities, including an exploration of top-down and bottom-up effects. We then validated the general model predictions by parameterizing the model for a reef system in the Bahamas in order to tease apart the wide range of species responses to reserves in the Caribbean. Combining the development of general theory and site-specific models parameterized with field data reveals the underlying driving forces in these communities and enables us to make better predictions about possible population and community responses to different management schemes.This work was supported by funding from the Bahamas Biocomplexity Project (U.S. NSF Biocomplexity grant OCE-0119976) and U.S. EPA Science to Achieve Results (R832223)

Biomass estimation from simulated GEDI, ICESat-2 and NISAR across environmental gradients in Sonoma County, California

Estimates of the magnitude and distribution of aboveground carbon in Earth's forests remain uncertain, yet knowledge of forest carbon content at a global scale is critical for forest management in support of climate mitigation. In light of this knowledge gap, several upcoming spaceborne missions aim to map forest aboveground biomass, and many new biomass products are expected from these datasets. As these new missions host different technologies, each with relative strengths and weaknesses for biomass retrieval, as well as different spatial resolutions, consistently comparing or combining biomass estimates from these new datasets will be challenging. This paper presents a demonstration of an inter-comparison of biomass estimates from simulations of three NASA missions (GEDI, ICESat-2 and NISAR) over Sonoma county in California, USA. We use a high resolution, locally calibrated airborne lidar map as our reference dataset, and emphasize the importance of considering uncertainties in both reference maps and spaceborne estimates when conducting biomass product validation. GEDI and ICESat-2 were simulated from airborne lidar point clouds, while UAVSAR's L-band backscatter was used as a proxy for NISAR. To estimate biomass for the lidar missions we used GEDI's footprint-level biomass algorithms, and also adapted these for application to ICESat-2. For UAVSAR, we developed a locally trained biomass model, calibrated against the ALS reference map. Each mission simulation was evaluated in comparison to the local reference map at its native product resolution (25 m, 100 m transect, and 1 ha) yielding RMSEs of 57%, 75%, and 89% for GEDI, NISAR, and ICESat-2 respectively. RMSE values increased for GEDI's power beam during simulated daytime conditions (64%), coverage beam during nighttime conditions (72%), and coverage beam daytime conditions (87%). We also test the application of GEDI's biomass modeling framework for estimation of biomass from ICESat-2, and find that ICESat-2 yields reasonable biomass estimates, particularly in relatively short, open canopies. Results suggest that while all three missions will produce datasets useful for biomass mapping, tall, dense canopies such as those found in Sonoma County present the greatest challenges for all three missions, while steep slopes also prove challenging for single-date SAR-based biomass retrievals. Our methods provide guidance for the inter-comparison and validation of spaceborne biomass estimates through the use of airborne lidar reference maps, and could be repeated with on-orbit estimates in any area with high quality field plot and ALS data. These methods allow for regional interpretations and filtering of multi-mission biomass estimates toward improved wall-to-wall biomass maps through data fusion.</p

The Streptococcos suis sortases SrtB and SrtF are essential for disease in pigs.

The porcine pathogen Streptococcus suis colonizes the upper respiratory tracts of pigs, potentially causing septicaemia, meningitis and death, thus placing a severe burden on the agricultural industry worldwide. It is also a zoonotic pathogen that is known to cause systemic infections and meningitis in humans. Understanding how S. suis colonizes and interacts with its hosts is relevant for future strategies of drug and vaccine development. As with other Gram-positive bacteria, S. suis utilizes enzymes known as sortases to attach specific proteins bearing cell wall sorting signals to its surface, where they can play a role in host-pathogen interactions. The surface proteins of bacteria are often important in adhesion to and invasion of host cells. In this study, markerless in-frame deletion mutants of the housekeeping sortase srtA and the two pilus-associated sortases, srtB and srtF, were generated and their importance in S. suis infections was investigated. We found that all three of these sortases are essential to disease in pigs, concluding that their cognate-sorted proteins may also be useful in protecting pigs against infection

The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation: High-resolution laser ranging of the Earth’s forests and topography

Obtaining accurate and widespread measurements of the vertical structure of the Earths forests has been a longsought goal for the ecological community. Such observations are critical for accurately assessing the existing biomass of forests, and how changes in this biomass caused by human activities or variations in climate may impact atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Additionally, the three-dimensional structure of forests is a key component of habitat quality and biodiversity at local to regional scales. The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) was launched to the International Space Station in late 2018 to provide high-quality measurements of forest vertical structure in temperate and tropical forests between 51.6 N & S latitude. The GEDI instrument is a geodetic-class laser altimeter/waveform lidar comprised of 3 lasers that produce 8 transects of structural information. Over its two-year nominal lifetime GEDI is anticipated to provide over 10 billion waveforms at a footprint resolution of 25 m. These data will be used to derive a variety of footprint and gridded products, including canopy height, canopy foliar profiles, Leaf Area Index (LAI), sub-canopy topography and biomass. Additionally, data from GEDI are used to demonstrate the efficacy of its measurements for prognostic ecosystem modeling, habit and biodiversity studies, and for fusion using radar and other remote sensing instruments. GEDI science and technology are unique: no other space-based mission has been created that is specifically optimized for retrieving vegetation vertical structure. As such, GEDI promises to advance our understanding of the importance of canopy vertical variations within an ecological paradigm based on structure, composition and function

GEDI launches a new era of biomass inference from space

Accurate estimation of aboveground forest biomass stocks is required to assess the impacts of land use changes such as deforestation and subsequent regrowth on concentrations of atmospheric CO2. The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) is a lidar mission launched by NASA to the International Space Station in 2018. GEDI was specifically designed to retrieve vegetation structure within a novel, theoretical sampling design that explicitly quantifies biomass and its uncertainty across a variety of spatial scales. In this paper we provide the estimates of pan-tropical and temperate biomass derived from two years of GEDI observations. We present estimates of mean biomass densities at 1 km resolution, as well as estimates aggregated to the national level for every country GEDI observes, and at the sub-national level for the United States. For all estimates we provide the standard error of the mean biomass. These data serve as a baseline for current biomass stocks and their future changes, and the mission's integrated use of formal statistical inference points the way towards the possibility of a new generation of powerful monitoring tools from space

Home Range Use and Movement Patterns of Non-Native Feral Goats in a Tropical Island Montane Dry Landscape

Advances in wildlife telemetry and remote sensing technology facilitate studies of broad-scale movements of ungulates in relation to phenological shifts in vegetation. In tropical island dry landscapes, home range use and movements of non-native feral goats (Capra hircus) are largely unknown, yet this information is important to help guide the conservation and restoration of some of the world’s most critically endangered ecosystems. We hypothesized that feral goats would respond to resource pulses in vegetation by traveling to areas of recent green-up. To address this hypothesis, we fitted six male and seven female feral goats with Global Positioning System (GPS) collars equipped with an Argos satellite upload link to examine goat movements in relation to the plant phenology using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Movement patterns of 50% of males and 40% of females suggested conditional movement between non-overlapping home ranges throughout the year. A shift in NDVI values corresponded with movement between primary and secondary ranges of goats that exhibited long-distance movement, suggesting that vegetation phenology as captured by NDVI is a good indicator of the habitat and movement patterns of feral goats in tropical island dry landscapes. In the context of conservation and restoration of tropical island landscapes, the results of our study identify how non-native feral goats use resources across a broad landscape to sustain their populations and facilitate invasion of native plant communities

Aboveground biomass density models for NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) lidar mission

NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) is collecting spaceborne full waveform lidar data with a primary science goal of producing accurate estimates of forest aboveground biomass density (AGBD). This paper presents the development of the models used to create GEDI’s footprint-level (~25 m) AGBD (GEDI04_A) product, including a description of the datasets used and the procedure for final model selection. The data used to fit our models are from a compilation of globally distributed spatially and temporally coincident field and airborne lidar datasets, whereby we simulated GEDI-like waveforms from airborne lidar to build a calibration database. We used this database to expand the geographic extent of past waveform lidar studies, and divided the globe into four broad strata by Plant Functional Type (PFT) and six geographic regions. GEDI’s waveform-to-biomass models take the form of parametric Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) models with simulated Relative Height (RH) metrics as predictor variables. From an exhaustive set of candidate models, we selected the best input predictor variables, and data transformations for each geographic stratum in the GEDI domain to produce a set of comprehensive predictive footprint-level models. We found that model selection frequently favored combinations of RH metrics at the 98th, 90th, 50th, and 10th height above ground-level percentiles (RH98, RH90, RH50, and RH10, respectively), but that inclusion of lower RH metrics (e.g. RH10) did not markedly improve model performance. Second, forced inclusion of RH98 in all models was important and did not degrade model performance, and the best performing models were parsimonious, typically having only 1-3 predictors. Third, stratification by geographic domain (PFT, geographic region) improved model performance in comparison to global models without stratification. Fourth, for the vast majority of strata, the best performing models were fit using square root transformation of field AGBD and/or height metrics. There was considerable variability in model performance across geographic strata, and areas with sparse training data and/or high AGBD values had the poorest performance. These models are used to produce global predictions of AGBD, but will be improved in the future as more and better training data become available.Additional co-authors: Scott J. Goetz, Hao Tang, Michelle Hofton, Bryan Blair, Scott Luthcke, Lola Fatoyinbo, Alfonso Alonso, Hans-Erik Andersen, Paul Aplin, Timothy R. Baker, Nicolas Barbier, Jean Francois Bastin, Peter Biber, Pascal Boeckx, Jan Bogaert, Luigi Boschetti, Peter Brehm Boucher, Doreen S. Boyd, David F.R.P. Burslem, Sofia Calvo-Rodriguez, Jérôme Chave, Robin L. Chazdon, David B. Clark, Deborah A. Clark, Warren B. Cohen, David A. Coomes, Piermaria Corona, K.C. Cushman, Mark E.J. Cutler, James W. Dalling, Michele Dalponte, Jonathan Dash, Sergio de-Miguel, Songqiu Deng, Peter Woods Ellis, Barend Erasmus, Patrick A.Fekety, Alfredo Fernandez-Landa, Antonio Ferraz, Rico Fischer, Adrian G. Fisher, Antonio García-Abril, Terje Gobakken, Jorg M. Hacker, Marco Heurich, Ross A. Hill, Chris Hopkinson, Huabing Huang, Stephen P. Hubbell, Andrew T. Hudak, Andreas Huth, Benedikt Imbach, Masato Katoh, Elizabeth Kearsley, David Kenfack, Natascha Kljun, Nikolai Knapp, Kamil Král, Martin Krůček, Nicolas Labrière, Simon L. Lewis, Marcos Longo, Richard M. Lucas, Russell Main, Jose A. Manzanera, Rodolfo Vásquez Martínez, Renaud Mathieu, Herve Memiaghe, Victoria Meyer, Abel Monteagudo Mendoza, Alessandra Monerris, Paul Montesano, Felix Morsdorf, Erik Næsset, Laven Naidoo, Reuben Nilus, Michael O’Brien, David A. Orwig, Konstantinos Papathanassiou, Geoffrey Parker, Christopher Philipson, Oliver L. Phillips, Jan Pisek, John R. Poulsen, Hans Pretzsch, Christoph Rüdiger, Sassan Saatchi, Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa, Nuria Sanchez-Lopez, Robert Scholes, Carlos A. Silva, Marc Simard, Andrew Skidmore, Krzysztof Stereńczak, Mihai Tanase, Chiara Torresan, Ruben Valbuena, Hans Verbeeck, Tomas Vrska, Konrad Wessels, Joanne C. White, Eliakimu Zahabu, Carlo Zgragge